On February 21, 2025, Dr. Mike Piero will lead a humanities workshop for high school students interested in Cuyahoga Community…
Mike Piero’s flash fiction story, “Latibule,” was a Finalist in Midway Journal’s 2024 Flash Fiction Contest and was published in…
The European Journal of American Culture published Dr. Mike Piero’s “A Far Cry from Greatness: Christian Fundamentalism, Liberty Porn, and…
Dr. Mike Piero, Professor of English at Cuyahoga Community College, alongside other faculty from around the world, was acknowledged in…
Screenshot Dr. Mike Piero published a book chapter, “Leveling Up Honors Education: Video Game Analysis in the Honors Classroom,” in Advancing…
Two poems from Mike Piero’s working book of poetry, Midwest Secrets, appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of The Sandy…
Recent Books:
Video Game Chronotopes and Social Justice: Playing on the Threshold, Palgrave Macmillan, Games in Context Series, 2022
Available at:
Palgrave Macmillan
Amazon
Video Game Chronotopes and Social Justice examines how the chronotope, which literally means “timespace,” is an effective interpretive lens through which to understand the cultural and ideological significance of video games. Using ‘slow readings’ attuned to deconstruction along the lines of post-structuralist theory, gender studies, queer studies, continental philosophy, and critical theory, Mike Piero exposes the often-overlooked misogyny, heteronormativity, racism, and patriarchal structures present in many Triple-A video games through their arrangement of timespace itself. Beyond understanding time and space as separate mechanics and dimensions, Piero reunites time and space through the analysis of six chronotopes―of the bonfire, the abject, the archipelago, the fart as pharmakon, madness, and coupled love―toward a poetic meaning making that is at the heart of play itself, all in affirmation of life, equity, and justice.
Just Released: Being Dragonborn: Critical Essays on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, McFarland, 2021, co-edited with Marc A. Ouellette.
Available for purchase at:
McFarland & Company
Amazon
Being Dragonborn: Critical Essays on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (forthcoming from McFarland Press) takes the massive video game hit, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, as its site of multidisciplinary, scholarly interrogation. This epic fantasy role playing game hails its player as “dragonborn,” a calling that merges political, social, and religious narratives in the game toward the player’s assumption of the dragonborn identity position: savior of Skyrim. Our collection identifies and explores these positions within the cultural ecology of the game. The outstanding authors featured in this collection unpack Skyrim as a topological space that encodes and extends cultural ideologies in the game’s design, gameplay experience, modding tradition, and online game forums. In other words, the dragonborn player is interpellated into a series of ideological roles that mirror the gendered, racially inscribed, neoliberal, and colonialist attitudes and subject positions proffered to players in their out-of-game-existence. For a game like Skyrim that goes to great lengths to construct a fantasy world that is detailed and immersive, the hidden ideologies encoded into the game are important to understanding how a game this popular—and by extension, the video game medium itself—reinscribes the familiar in ostensibly unfamiliar ways.