Alexandra Orlando, an alum of the Games Institute and a former Editor in Chief for First Person Scholar, maintains a YouTube channel for academically-oriented games criticism. When she's not working on video essays, she works as freelance writer.
Orlando's research interests include narratology, gender and esports. A chapter she co-authored with Gerald Voorhees about neoliberal masculinities in play in Counter Strike: Go Esports was recently published in the book "Masculinities in Play":
Masculinities in Play is a significant addition to the field of games studies making headway with both practical and theoretical approaches to many contemporary critical issues. The collection has writing from some of the best current and emerging scholars in the field so it is a must read!
- Alexandra Orlando
The videos Orlando publishes on her YouTube channel makes games scholarship accessible to non-expert and non-academic audiences while pushing the boundaries of what we expect for game studies. She examines gender in twitch streaming, the intersection between film theory and game cinematics, and East Asian game studies. She also posts scholarly criticisms of films, animation, and even kpop.
Her game-specific videos have looked at Kpop and eSports, sex games, Canadian Horror games, and the historical context of Hentai games. Orlando's most viewed video is entitled "Dissecting Sex Games on Newgrounds". The video received close to 5,000 views: