Ryan C. Wright

I am a writer, media scholar, and video game narrative designer. My research and design practice center on how games have historically been taken up in post World-War American science as technologies for measuring, modeling, and mediating cognitive ability. My dissertation on what I'm calling "Dementia Worlds" is about how dementia has been imagined from within since the late 1950's, with a particular interest on how a recent boom of contemporary "indie" video games have drawn on films and "empathy building" training tools for memory care workers. The project offers a disability informed theory of technology that considers such interactive representations as tools for speculative imagining that simultaneously expand, distort, and humble the empathetic imagination.

I co-founded and work as a narrative designer for Autoscopia Interactive, an independent video game studio. We recently released a game I wrote and co-designed titled "As Long As You're Here," a family drama seen through the eyes of a woman with Alzheimer's disease.

I am also copyeditor and web master for the journal gamestudies.org.