About Me

I live in Westwood, MA and I work as a Resercher/Audio Director at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, where we research games, both digital and otherwise. My research is primarily focused on sports videogames and sports videogame players.

I graduated in 2003 from Haverford College, a Quaker school just outside of Philadelphia, where I studied Religion (and baseball). After college I taught English and History at George School, a Quaker co-educational boarding school in Bucks County, PA.

My interest in audio engineering and sound design started formally as an intern at recording studios in Philadelphia during college, though I suspect being raised on a healthy diet of Loony Tunes, Disney Movies, and James Bond films may have had an effect. I love sound effects and sound design and love the work of Ben Burtt, Treg Brown, as well as older radio drama sound effects teams.

After teaching, I was a member of the first Production Audio program at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts of Boston University. I met many great audio engineers while there, learned a lot, and developed some great contacts that got me started in the industry.

My professional audio career began when I started working as a freelance audio engineer and sound designer on various short films, educational television specials and live sporting events.

My “break” came in the form of the “hit” Adult Swim animated series Assy McGee, featuring a storyline that centered on a backward-walking, ass-mouth talking, torso-less cop. That series was developed at Clambake Animation and aired on Cartoon Network very early in the morning.

I have always been fascinated by video games, and came of age with the medium. My first console was a Nintendo Entertainment System, which I spent months saving up for (way to go mom and dad), and was elated to bring home at the tender age of 8. I grew as the technology did, and I soon came to respect games for the power of interactivity, and I found myself longing for an industry wide maturation.

After working in television, I began a stint at Blue Fang Games, working on their Wii title, World of Zoo. I honed my experience as a game sound designer and learned much about the development and programming side of the operation.

From their I catapulted to GAMBIT, where my dreams are literally coming true daily. I can wax poetic about games, and sit at tables discussing zombies in an academic context with a suprising frequency. I also get to create music and sounds for the various projects being worked on at the lab, as well as mentoring other budding sound design students. I get to work on writing and work on being creative, and I get to work with some brilliant people in the field of game studies and game game design in all disciplines. Lately my research has been in studying sports video game playing communities, looking for overlap with general sports fandom, including co-developing large-scale survey of sports videogame players that is the first in the field.