NICE TO MEET YOU!
NICE TO MEET YOU! 
About Me
Dr. Persephone Blue Berge (“PB,” they/she) is a media scholar, award-winning game designer, teacher, and self-described ludoarsonist 
. We found them buried beneath an altar to the frog god, covered in dice and death metal albums. An Assistant Professor of Experimental Game Design in the Media and Technology Studies program at The University of Alberta, she researches trans play 
, tabletop roleplaying games 
, toxic technocultures 
, and the so-called “unplayable.” Their ongoing research projects explore the social application Discord and emergent/speculative play (including fantasy consoles, speedrunning, and anti-game design). Her work broadly asks: How can we live in the unlivable and play in the unplayable?
Her published research can be found in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Games & Culture, Game Studies, and New Media & Society as well as in the proceedings at ICIDS, ACM Hypertext, DiGRA, and elsewhere. She is also the director and cofounder of the Discord Academic Research Community, a cofounder of Tabletop Research in Practice, and is establishing the CRYPT LAB at the University of Alberta.
And this isn’t even her final form—just wait until she collects the remaining chaos emeralds!
RESEARCH
Trans Play
Social Media
Tabletop RPGs
EDUCATION
-
Ph.D. Texts and Technology (In-Progress)
Dissertation: “Unplayable Games”
University of Central Florida - M.F.A. Creative Writing (Fiction), 2020 University of Alabama
- M.A. Composition, Rhetoric, and English Studies, 2019 University of Alabama
- B.A. English (Creative Writing), 2016 University of Washington
- A.A. in Integrated Studies / Programming Foundations, 2014 Cascadia Community College
PUBLICATIONS 📄
Journal Article Publications
PS Berge. (2023). The Table and the Tomb: Positioning Trans Power and Play Amid Fantasy Realism in Dungeons & Dragons. Games & Culture 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120231204145
PS Berge & Rebecca K. Britt. (2021). Dance With Me, Claude: Creators, Catalyzers, and Canonizers in the Fire Emblem: Three Houses Slash-Ship Fandom, Game Studies. 21(4). http://gamestudies.org/2104/articles/berge_britt
PS Berge* & Daniel G. Heslep* (2021). Mapping Discord’s darkside: Distributed hate networks on Disboard. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211062548
*Daniel G. Heslep and PS Berge contributed equally to this research.
Conference Proceedings Publications
PS Berge. (2021). “LET ALL PARTAKE IN THE SUFFERING”: MÖRK BORG As a Visual-Material Toolkit for Fan Remix. In Proceedings of the 2022 DiGRA International Conference: Bringing Worlds Together. DiGRA 2022, Krakow, Poland. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/DiGRA_2022_paper_2231.pdf
PS Berge. (2021). Monster Power. Rebel Heart. Gay Sword. Queer Structures and Narrative Possibility in PbtA Tabletop Roleplaying Games. In A. Mitchell & M. Vosmeer (Eds.), Interactive Storytelling (pp. 179–192). Springer International Publishing. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92300-6_16*
*Read for free at: https://rdcu.be/cCC1v
PS Berge. (August, 2021). Rotten and Possessed: Control and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice as Models of Outmersive Game Design. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 35–44. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3465336.3475094
Accepted Manuscripts in Process
PS Berge & Madison Schmalzer. (Forthcoming). Un-Moving Play and the End of Time: TASBot, Arbitrary Code Execution, and Trans Possibilities in Triforce%. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. (Manuscript accepted with minor revisions).
David Kocik, PS Berge, Camille Butera, Celeste Oon, & Michael Senters. (Forthcoming March 2024). “Imagine a Place”: Power and Intimacy in Fandoms on Discord. In Maria Alberto, Effie Sapuridis, and Leslie Willard (Eds.) Transformative Works and Cultures 42 “Fandoms and Platforms.” (In press).
Maria Alberto, PS Berge, Brandon Blackburn, Adrianna Burton, & Hibby Thach. Stars & Wishes: A Collaborative Disaster Queer Autoethnography of Playing Thirsty Sword Lesbians. (Forthcoming 2024). In S. Hedge (Ed.) Essays on Indie Tabletop Roleplaying Games. McFarland Publishing. (Book chapter conditionally accepted for publication in forthcoming collection).
Talks &
Presentations
Teaching Highlights
Accomplishments:
- Winner of the Carolyn P. Handa Teaching Award, University of Alabama
- Winner of the Outstanding Teaching by a Masters Student Award, University of Alabama
- Extensive curriculum development experience, including online and in-person course series.
~See For Yourself~
TEAMUps!
Director and Cofounder, The Discord Academic Research Community
“The Discord Academic Research Community is an inclusive and supportive network for anyone researching Discord and Discord-related communities, platforms, or cultures.”
- Recruited and coordinated an international team of moderators.
- Built a Discord server with active resources, safety features, custom bots, and community activities for over 500 members.
- Built and maintained a community website and blog.
- Maintained a public, open-source, tutorialized scraper and analysis toolkit for Discord researchers.
Cofounder of Tabletop Research in Practice (TRiP), 2022-Present
Community Management Consultant, Game in Lab, 2022-Present
Digital Culture Research Group, active member, University of Central Florida, 2020-Present
Contributor, Universal Reddit Scraper (URS) on GitHub, October 2020
Carolyn P. Handa Undergraduate Scholarship Award Committee, Spring 2020
CCCC’s Council for Play and Game Studies, active member and panelist, 2019-2020
Digital Literacy / Technical Mentor, University of Alabama, 2019-2020
Digital Pedagogy Community of Practice, active member, University of Alabama, 2019-2020
Creative writing online instructor training and development, Spring-Summer 2020
Creative writing online curriculum development, University of Alabama, Spring 2019-2020
ePortfolio Assessment Group, University of Alabama, 2019, 2020
ePortfolio Pilot Group, University of Alabama, 2018-2020
Peer Reviewer, Various Journals and Conferences
New Media & Society (2022), Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture Special Issue (2022), CHI Play (2023), Press Start (2021-Present), Transformative Works & Culture (2023-Present)
CHECK OUT MY ITCH PAGE!
XYZZY AND 2021 SPRING THING INTERACTIVE FICTION FESTIVAL AWARD-WINNING GAME
You are a secret agent. It’s the end of the world. You are cursed. You came here to rescue your partner, but the mission has taken a turn for the weird. Parody spy thriller. Best played on a computer or tablet. Watch where you’re pointing that knife, my dear.
Nominated for three audience awards:
Best Multimedia, Most Innovative, Best Humor
HOVEL OF MISERIES
Tabletop Roleplaying Supplement for MÖRK BORG.
MÖRK BORG is a game about losing everything. It helps to have something to lose! This supplement has “rules,” hooks, encounters, and characters for fort-based survival. It’s best for high-level near-doom campaigns (after the fourth misery or so). Low on crunch, & with more flavor and misfortune than a wheel of boar cheese.
Included in the forthcoming FÖLK-LORE jam compilation.
MINIGAMES
CODEX SADISTICA: A HEAVY-METAL MINIGAME
Published 2021 as part of the Interactive Fiction Competition.
Your band has come to play at the greatest metal venue around: the Blood Furnace’s INFURNAL STAGE. There is only one problem: the act before you is—*shudder*—playing glam metal! And worse yet, they’ve gone way over the alotted time for their set! This is terrible. This is unacceptable! You must do something. Wielding the power of the ancient codex of metal, you must track down your fellow bandmates and reclaim the Infurnal Stage!
Received charmingly mixed reviews for its high-octane flavor and shameless lack of polish!
the ice: a tragic roleplaying game
Published 2023 in collaboration with adriiadventures.
A tragic roleplaying game about surviving an arctic hellscape over the course of seven scenes. Whether your characters are strangers or long-time companions, the ice requires you to stretch your imaginations into a place of desperation. Will you work together, or fall apart?
Songs for Giants
Published 2022 as part of the Console-ing Passions Feminist Media Conference Arcade
SONGS FOR GIANTS is a short, interactive essay built in Twine, Bitsy, and Glitch that offers reflections and prompts on lyric games—a genre of analog games that, as Torner (2020) writes, are more “incitements” than playable systems. This essay weaves together personal anecdotes, myth, minigames, and scholarship to paint an opaque portrait of the analog microgame scene.
PUNy PUNchable PUNk!
Published 2021 as Part of the Babalon’s Hangover 2 zine.
One-page monster for MÖRK BORG. Miserable wretch who thinks he’s funny. Cast out from the courts of Anthelia and Sigfúm alike. Will try to sell his array of “magic weapons” to the PCs at 3x their value. If every PC doesn’t buy a weapon, he becomes irate and can only be defeated by rival punnery!
MEDIA & PRESS!
