Hong Nguyen-Sears

RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Videogames, popular culture, fan studies, queer studies; Canadian literature, WWI, memory studies

CURRENT RESEARCH:
My research focuses on the embodied engagement of players with role-playing videogames, with particular attention to romantic visual novels and dating sims. I study the queer potential of both these games’ design and the opportunities for players to represent themselves in the design of a player character.

CONFERENCES:
– 2020 Popular Culture Association National Conference (Philadelphia, PA; CANCELLED)
– “Who Speaks for You?: Narrative Progress and the Immersive Potential of Player-Character Dialogue”
– 2020 Canadian Game Studies Association Annual Conference (London, ON; CANCELLED)
– “Self-Representation and Self-Insertion: Identity Performance in Three Visual Novels”
– 2019 Popular Culture Association National Conference (Washington, DC; April 17-20, 2019)
– “Self-Representation and Self-Insertion: Identity Performance in Three Visual Novels”
– (De)Composing Death: An Interdisciplinary Conference Presented by the Dalhousie Association of Graduate Students in English (Halifax, NS; August 10-12, 2018)
– “Personal and Impersonal Sacrifice in BioWare’s Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Inquisition: A Comparative reading of the Fatalistic Choices of Virmire and ‘Here Lies the Abyss’”
– 43rd Annual Conference of the British Association for Canadian Studies – A Century Later: Memory, Remembrance and Change (London, UK; April 19-21, 2018)
– “Vimy to Vimy: Contrasting Remembrance in Pierre Berton’s Vimy and Tim Cook’s Vimy: The Battle and the Legend”
– Bow River Graduate History Conference: History of Borderlands, Borderlands of History (Calgary, AB; April 13-14, 2018)
– “Vimy to Vimy: Contrasting Remembrance in Pierre Berton’s Vimy and Tim Cook’s Vimy: The Battle and the Legend”
– Free Exchange Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference: Re/Collections (Calgary, AB; March 9-11, 2018)
– “Vimy to Vimy: Contrasting Remembrance in Pierre Berton’s Vimy and Tim Cook’s Vimy: The Battle and the Legend”
– University of Alberta Modern Languages and Cultural Studies Graduate Student Conference: Transcending Connections (Edmonton, AB; February 15-16, 2018)
– “Empathy vs. Projection in the Fatalistic Choices of BioWare’s Mass Effect and Dragon Age Inquisition: A Comparative Reading of Virmire and ‘Here Lies the Abyss’”