Ross Chiasson

RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Video games, American literature, ruins, popular genre fiction

CURRENT RESEARCH:
My dissertation investigates ruins in video games as virtual places where cultural experiences are spatialized and temporalized as sites of play. Play in this context is best understood as pleasure rather than fun since video game pleasure involves a variety of emotional affects that include, but are not limited to, fun, frustration, anxiety, and grief. When players of video games play in the ruins and navigate both the virtual environment and the actual interface that enables this, they are participating in an entanglement of “actual and virtual bodies and worlds.” Where Brendan Keogh asks in Play of Bodies (2018) how players become entangled, I ask: if they are entangled, then what happens to those players when what they are entangled in is ruin.

CONFERENCES:
– “Rapture Awaits You: Economic Ruins, Premediating Landscapes, and Cultural Anxiety in BioShock.” Canadian Game Studies Association Conference, Online Conference, Edmonton, AB. 30 May – 4 June 2021.
– “Rapture Awaits You: Economic Ruins, Symbolic Landscapes, and Cultural Anxiety.” uOttawa Grad Conference, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON. 28 February 2020.
– “Uncover It or Eliminate It: Heuristic Silence, Sunken Ruins, and BioShock.” Canadian Association of American Studies, McGill University, Montreal, QC. 26 October 2019.
– “Divide and Concur: Seriality, Anti-Capitalism, and Tom Clancy’s The Division.” Carleton University Department of English Grad Conference, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON. 26 April 2019.
– “A Slice of the Sublime: How Ritualistic Murder Becomes Morally Ambiguous Through Aesthetic Representation in Dexter.” Canadian Pop Culture Association, Niagara Falls, ON. 6 May 2017.

PUBLICATIONS:
Chiasson, Ross. “Immersion Through Ruins: Entanglement, Pleasure, and Struggle in Celeste.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, vol. 29, no. 2, 2023, pp. 363-380.