Author: Shane Snyder

Shane Snyder’s research interests concern queerness, gender dynamics, racism, nationalism, and masculinity in the video games industry, American culture, and online video gamer communities. He currently uses digital ethnographic methods to aggregate and analyze social media content. His current book project, titled Dictating the Terms: GamerGate, Democracy, and (In)Equality on Reddit, tracks a politically far-right movement’s utilization of the Reddit interface to discredit feminist, anti-racist, and trans-inclusive interventions in the video games industry and American culture. He is also currently working on a collaborative project that scrapes and codes qualitative Twitch chatlog data to investigate shifting audience reactions to games about trauma and loss. His scholarship has been published in The Journal of Popular Culture, The Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and The Social Science Journal. Shane has taught courses at Georgia Tech such as “Possibility Spaces and Rhetoric in Video Games,” and “Identity, Resistance, and Social Change in Video Games.”

With ChatGPT, We’re Missing an Opportunity to Rethink Grading

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  By Shane Snyder ChatGPT, the Political Situation, and the Classroom ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) trained to respond convincingly to language inputs, has dominated headlines since December 2022. Stories and editorials come replete with catchy headlines, some of them designed to elicit fear, like Time Magazine’s unscrupulous use of… Continue reading

Why So Toxic? Teaching Feminist Ethnographic Methods in the Composition Classroom

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By Shane Snyder Introduction: A Glaring Omission  Two months into my Fall 2020 composition course, “Possibility Spaces and Rhetoric in Video Games,” I realized something was wrong. Within sixteen weeks, I had scheduled only one lesson on the LGBTQ+ video game narratives Gone Home and Dys4ia, two discussions about predatory corporate capitalism and environmental destruction in The McDonald’s Videogame, and one week on violence and nationalism in Undertale. Most… Continue reading