💖 NICE TO MEET YOU! 💖

Just your second-favorite out making trouble.
Just a out making trouble.

About Me

PS Berge (they/she) is a media scholar, award-winning game designer, teacher, and self-described ludoarsonist 🔥. We found them buried beneath an altar to the frog god, covered in dice and death metal albums. A doctoral candidate in the Texts and Technology PhD program at the University of Central Florida, she researches trans play 🌈🎮, tabletop roleplaying games 🎲, toxic technocultures 💀, and the so-called “unplayable.” Their dissertation, which they expect to defend in Summer 2024, explores the question: How can we live in the unlivable and play in the unplayable?

Her published research can be found in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Games & Culture, Game Studies, and New Media & Society as well as in the proceedings at ICIDS, ACM HypertextDiGRA, and elsewhere. She is also the director and cofounder of the Discord Academic Research Community and cofounder of Tabletop Research in Practice.

And this isn’t even her final form—just wait until she collects the remaining chaos emeralds!

RESEARCH

Trans Play

Social Media

Tabletop RPGs

EDUCATION

PUBLICATIONS 📄

Journal Article Publications

PS Berge. (2023). The Table and the Tomb: Positioning Trans Power and Play Amid Fantasy Realism in Dungeons & DragonsGames & Culture 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120231204145

PS Berge. (2023). #AnswerUsYoutube: Predatory Influencers and Cross-Platform Insulation. *Feminist Media Studies*, 0(0), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2023.2231655
 
Rebecca K. Britt & PS Berge. (2023). Megathreads and ‘waifu wars’: A structural content analysis of r/persona5 as a community of practice, Participations Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 19(1).
 

PS Berge & Rebecca K. Britt. (2021). Dance With Me, Claude: Creators, Catalyzers, and Canonizers in the Fire Emblem: Three Houses Slash-Ship Fandom, Game Studies. 21(4). http://gamestudies.org/2104/articles/berge_britt

PS Berge* & Daniel G. Heslep* (2021). Mapping Discord’s darkside: Distributed hate networks on Disboard. New Media & Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211062548

*Daniel G. Heslep and PS Berge contributed equally to this research.

Conference Proceedings Publications

PS Berge, Daniel Cox, Jack Murray, & Anastasia Salter. (2022). Adventures in TwineSpace: An Augmented Reality Story Format for Twine. In Interactive Storytelling (pp. 499-512). ICIDS 2022. Santa Cruz, California. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22298-6_32
 

PS Berge. (2021). “LET ALL PARTAKE IN THE SUFFERING”: MÖRK BORG As a Visual-Material Toolkit for Fan Remix. In Proceedings of the 2022 DiGRA International Conference: Bringing Worlds Together. DiGRA 2022, Krakow, Poland. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/DiGRA_2022_paper_2231.pdf

PS Berge. (2021). Monster Power. Rebel Heart. Gay Sword. Queer Structures and Narrative Possibility in PbtA Tabletop Roleplaying Games. In A. Mitchell & M. Vosmeer (Eds.), Interactive Storytelling (pp. 179–192). Springer International Publishing. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92300-6_16*
*Read for free at: https://rdcu.be/cCC1v

PS Berge. (August, 2021). Rotten and Possessed: Control and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice as Models of Outmersive Game Design. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 35–44. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3465336.3475094

Accepted Manuscripts in Process

PS Berge & Madison Schmalzer. (Forthcoming). Un-Moving Play and the End of Time: TASBot, Arbitrary Code Execution, and Trans Possibilities in Triforce%. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. (Manuscript accepted with minor revisions).

David Kocik, PS Berge, Camille Butera, Celeste Oon, & Michael Senters. (Forthcoming March 2024). “Imagine a Place”: Power and Intimacy in Fandoms on Discord. In Maria Alberto, Effie Sapuridis, and Leslie Willard (Eds.) Transformative Works and Cultures 42 “Fandoms and Platforms.” (In press).

Maria Alberto, PS Berge, Brandon Blackburn, Adrianna Burton, & Hibby Thach. Stars & Wishes: A Collaborative Disaster Queer Autoethnography of Playing Thirsty Sword Lesbians. (Forthcoming 2024). In S. Hedge (Ed.) Essays on Indie Tabletop Roleplaying Games. McFarland Publishing. (Book chapter conditionally accepted for publication in forthcoming collection).

Talks &
Presentations 🌟

Teaching Highlights

Accomplishments:

~See For Yourself~

TEAMUps!

Featured Role

Director and Cofounder, The Discord Academic Research Community

“The Discord Academic Research Community is an inclusive and supportive network for anyone researching Discord and Discord-related communities, platforms, or cultures.”
  • Recruited and coordinated an international team of moderators.
  • Built a Discord server with active resources, safety features, custom bots, and community activities for over 500 members.
  • Built and maintained a community website and blog.
  • Maintained a public, open-source, tutorialized scraper and analysis toolkit for Discord researchers.
Academic Roles

Cofounder of Tabletop Research in Practice (TRiP), 2022-Present

Community Management Consultant, Game in Lab, 2022-Present

Digital Culture Research Group, active member, University of Central Florida, 2020-Present

Contributor, Universal Reddit Scraper (URS) on GitHub, October 2020

Carolyn P. Handa Undergraduate Scholarship Award Committee, Spring 2020

CCCC’s Council for Play and Game Studies, active member and panelist, 2019-2020

Digital Literacy / Technical Mentor, University of Alabama, 2019-2020

Digital Pedagogy Community of Practice, active member, University of Alabama, 2019-2020

Creative writing online instructor training and development, Spring-Summer 2020

Creative writing online curriculum development, University of Alabama, Spring 2019-2020

ePortfolio Assessment Group, University of Alabama, 2019, 2020

ePortfolio Pilot Group, University of Alabama, 2018-2020

Peer Reviewer, Various Journals and Conferences

New Media & Society (2022), Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture Special Issue (2022), CHI Play (2023), Press Start (2021-Present), Transformative Works & Culture (2023-Present)

CHECK OUT MY ITCH PAGE!

FISH & DAGGER

XYZZY AND 2021 SPRING THING INTERACTIVE FICTION FESTIVAL AWARD-WINNING GAME

You are a secret agent. It’s the end of the world. You are cursed. You came here to rescue your partner, but the mission has taken a turn for the weird. Parody spy thriller. Best played on a computer or tablet. Watch where you’re pointing that knife, my dear.

Nominated for three audience awards:
Best Multimedia, Most Innovative, Best Humor

HOVEL OF MISERIES

Tabletop Roleplaying Supplement for MÖRK BORG.

MÖRK BORG is a game about losing everything. It helps to have something to lose! This supplement has “rules,” hooks, encounters, and characters for fort-based survival. It’s best for high-level near-doom campaigns (after the fourth misery or so). Low on crunch, & with more flavor and misfortune than a wheel of boar cheese. 

Included in the forthcoming FÖLK-LORE jam compilation.

MINIGAMES

CODEX SADISTICA: A HEAVY-METAL MINIGAME

Published 2021 as part of the Interactive Fiction Competition. 

Your band has come to play at the greatest metal venue around: the Blood Furnace’s INFURNAL STAGE. There is only one problem: the act before you is—*shudder*—playing glam metal! And worse yet, they’ve gone way over the alotted time for their set! This is terrible. This is unacceptable! You must do something. Wielding the power of the ancient codex of metal, you must track down your fellow bandmates and reclaim the Infurnal Stage!

Received charmingly mixed reviews for its high-octane flavor and shameless lack of polish! 

the ice: a tragic roleplaying game

Published  2023 in collaboration with adriiadventures.

A tragic roleplaying game about surviving an arctic hellscape over the course of seven scenes. Whether your characters are strangers or long-time companions, the ice requires you to stretch your imaginations into a place of desperation. Will you work together, or fall apart?

Songs for Giants

Published 2022 as part of the Console-ing Passions Feminist Media Conference Arcade

SONGS FOR GIANTS is a short, interactive essay built in Twine, Bitsy, and Glitch that offers reflections and prompts on lyric games—a genre of analog games that, as Torner (2020) writes, are more “incitements” than playable systems. This essay weaves together personal anecdotes, myth, minigames, and scholarship to paint an opaque portrait of the analog microgame scene.

PUNy PUNchable PUNk!

Published 2021 as Part of the Babalon’s Hangover 2 zine.

One-page monster for MÖRK BORG. Miserable wretch who thinks he’s funny. Cast out from the courts of Anthelia and Sigfúm alike. Will try to sell his array of “magic weapons” to the PCs at 3x their value. If every PC doesn’t buy a weapon, he becomes irate and can only be defeated by rival punnery!

MEDIA & PRESS!

Interviewed as subject expert for documentary by PBS Frontline.
Featured in spotlight on Nicholson School of Media website.
Interviewed as subject expert and quoted by journalists at The Washington Post.
Interviewed on voice chat harassment and gender by Kotaku magazine.