Draft:Stephanie Boluk

Stephanie Boluk is an American media scholar and Associate Professor at University of California, Davis whose work centers around the humanities and media to create new forms of digital and traditional literary works. She has contributed works ranging from plagues, economics, and electronic literature to create a diverse range of interests and aspects of study. Boluk is most known for her work with metagaming and her work with Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3.

Background
Boluk received her Ph.D. in English (Film and Media Studies) from the University of Florida in 2011. In 1998, she received her D.E.C. in Health Sciences in the International Baccalaureate Program from Champlain College. Boluk then got her Bachelor of Arts in English and Western Society and Culture from Concordia University in 2002. Then she reviewed her Master of Arts in English from McGill University two years later in 2004.

Career
Boluk previously taught as an Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute in the Humanities and Media Studies department in 2013. Currently, she works as an Associate Professor at UC Davis in the English and Cinema and Digital Media department. Since working at UC Davis, Boluk has published many books, papers, and games while teaching game centered classes and electronic literature and lecturing on the economic and ludic aspects of games.

She has had many opportunities to work with Patrick LeMieux during collaborations, producing many papers and a book. Boluk has worked on cultural projects, game culture and literature projects, and historical papers to demonstrate connections between these genres. Her work focuses on exploring recent economic aspects of labor and leisure as she lectured at the ATLAS Colloquium at the University of Colorado on October 24, 3023.

Selected awards
Boluk was shortlisted for the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature for her book Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames in 2018.

Works
Boluk focuses on games, media studies, and electronic literature. She has published articles in journals such as Digital Humanities Quarterly, ROMChip, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and Extrapolation. A fuller list of works appears in ELMCIP.

Boluk has edited collections, including Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture edited by Stephanie Boluk and Lenz Wylle (2011), McFarland Books as well as the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3 (2016), launched at Rutgers University reviewed at the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture.

She also wrote Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames with Patrick LeMieux (2017), University of Minnesota Press, a digital and paper book that looks at videogames and how they function while including software inside the book. In his review, Riccardo Fassone explained that this work is both a book and a series of games that can be downloaded and played to demonstrate the theories in the text. The book is published on University of Minnesota Press where viewers can annotate and explore the work. Conversations can be started or notes could be taken while reading and can be shared with thousands of other readers, making it an open-access format book. The book follows how people interact with videogames as an experience between 'playing videogames and their nonhuman operators.' Each chapter contains its own original software that enhances the experience and a specialized topic, meaning that media is built into the work itself. The work was also reviewed in German in Media Rep.

Games
Boluk and LeMieux have written several games together as demonstrations for the Metagaming work  Other games include 99 Exercises in Play (with 99 ways to play World 1-1 from Nintendo's Super Marios Brothers) and were cast members on Every Game in This City.
 * Triforce (2018) is a short game to locate pieces of the Triforce ship. CJ Andriessen's review in Destructoid explains that this game applies areas from the Legend of Zelda to different 3D surfaces. Heather Alexandra, in Kotaku reviews notes further that this game "completely changes how space and depth work in The Legend of Zelda"
 * Footnotes (2018) Heather Alexandra explained that this game involves wandering around to collect footnotes and excerpts from Metagaming. Boluk lectured on this game at Stanford Humanities Center January 14, 2019.
 * What Should We Do With Our Games? is a metagaming manifesto created for Manifesto Jam (February 8 -13, 2018)

Podcasts

 * Every Game In This City - Podcast where ten game designers work together playing escape rooms and exploring the city Kula Lumpur. The podcast airs through the Idle Thumbs network.

External sources

 * jstor find
 * Access to podcast
 * Link to interactive Metagaming

Category: Electronic literature writers