VUW Game Studies Lab
The VUW Game Studies Lab is a network of scholars at Te Herenga Waka who analyse games and their place in society and culture. As a field, Game Studies includes methodologies mostly emerging from humanities and the social sciences that aim to explore how games work as a form of media, how they impart and create information or culture, how they represent the world around us and are in turn represented in it, and how they impact society and everyone in it.
The goal of the lab is to foster an interdisciplinary community of scholars from across the faculties and schools of VUW who work in areas of Game Studies or who are interested in thinking more deeply about games and their place in society and history, and to connect that community with others in Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider world. If you are a scholar or postgrad who works in this area and would like to join us, email Dr Hamish Cameron (hamish.r.cameron@vuw.ac.nz).
Who are we?
Hamish works on how modern analogue and digital games use and represent the ancient Mediterranean world of the Greeks and Romans. He has published on using Dungeons and Dragons and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey in the classroom, on representations of Roman society in The Forgotten City, on the use of Classical myth in Hades, and on his own design work at the intersection of analogue games and ancient history. His forthcoming work explores the Roman army in Assassin’s Creed Origins, space and geography in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, ludic receptions of ancient monsters, the representation of ancient religion in strategy video games, and the combination of Roman history and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos in TRPGs.
Associate Professor
School of Design Innovation
Zach is the author of the illuminated novel Bats of the Republic (Doubleday, 2015), which The Washington Post called “a glorious demonstration of what old-fashioned paper can still do.” He founded Featherproof Books, publishing over 30 genre-bending books. He’s designed many more, including Riddance by Shelley Jackson (Patchwork Girl). He teaches narrative design to writing and game students as part of the Visual Narrative Lab. His game studio, Interactive Tragedy LTD, released his first game, Sub-Verge, with a companion novella, in 2025. He is currently working on KUU, a companion book and video game which combine traditional print design and creative writing with new approaches in interactive fiction and visual narrative. A book chapter on his process appears in The Experimental Book Object: Materiality, Media, Design (Routledge Digital Literary Studies, 2023).
Senior Lecturer
School of Design Innovation
Dylan is the author of several graphic novels and comic book series, including Hicksville, Sam Zabel & the Magic Pen, Incomplete Works, Pickle, and Atlas. He also lectures on visual and ludic narrative media at the School of Design Innovation. Dylan has been researching (and playing) tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) for many years and is particularly interested in how they open up new ways of thinking about narrative. He is currently working on a PhD in Creative Writing focused on TTRPGs and recently published the first issue of Secret Door: a Fantasy Role-Playing Zine, which includes essays, comics, and games.
Professor
School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations
Associate Professor in Software Engineering
School of Engineering and Computer Science
I find it fascinating to explore how technology and artificial intelligence can be used to improve teaching and learning not only in computer science or at the university level but broadly and often in unusual settings. My research is often interdisciplinary and socio-technical, yet involves improving technological systems and methods to work better with humans. A significant part of my research centres around game-based learning and how to incorporate games into teaching and learning. I have for instance developed games to facilitate computation thinking for Māori tamariki in immersion schools.
Lecturer in Digital Foundations
School of Design Innovation
PhD Candidate, Teaching Fellow
School of Design Innovation
Emily Morris (she/they) is a queer game designer, academic, writer, teaching fellow, tutor, and full-time PhD candidate. Her current research focuses on how queer players use queer play strategies to transform Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, as well as their personal identity and relationships with other players. Past research has included investigating queer TTRPG design, and how designers can use queer mechanics and design to create inherently queer games. Her academic interests are ultimately interdisciplinary, highlighting queer theory, feminist studies, (tabletop role-playing) game design, play, visual narratives, fan studies, crip theory, and transformative works, alongside design studies more broadly. Her latest game, Interwoven, was self-published in 2025 by Splice of Life Games. She also runs the academic blog Queer TTRPG Studies.
Lecturer in Media and Communication
School of Arts and Media
Programme Lead
School of Design Innovation
Heli is a costume designer specialized in digital characters, with 15 years’ experience dressing physical and digital bodies on stage, screen and VR, including costume design for the award-winning video game Control and the multi-player online game Pax Dei. Her thesis Video Games and Costume Art – digitalizing analogue methods of costume design was awarded three acknowledgements for pioneering Master’s research at Aalto University in 2018. She currently leads the Fashion Design Technology programme at Victoria University of Wellington, which prepares the next generation of costume and fashion designers to work across both physical and digital industries, including the emerging field of costume design for video games. She advocates for involving costume designers in game development, where their knowledge of materials, construction, and character analysis can bring added depth and production value.
Head of School
School of Engineering and Computer Science
I am first and foremost a gamer! I never lost my childhood passion for games inspired by my older brother. We made historical, fantasy and sci-fi wargames and roleplaying games throughout our childhood to pass the time. As an adult I am active in designing games, mostly for my own and gaming groups interest. I was co-author of Skirmish Sangin and supplements, and did some work on lists for Piquet Archon, but my love is narrative TTRPG games. I can still remember being blown away when my brother ran a game of Basic D&D for me in 1978. Nowadays the shared story driven experience triumphs over chart and tables based gaming. My educational research as an academic involves game-based learning and gamification, and I share supervision of several PhD students currently developing games in health, engineering & computer science, and ethics education.