I’m grateful to Midway Journal for publishing my poem, “Exclusion Zone,” in their recent issue. The poem responds to Russiaâs war against…
đźđź Well, itâs been an incredible inaugural season for Cuyahoga Community College’s esports team! 54 NJCAA Esports matches across seven…
Dr. Mike Piero presented an academic paper, “‘No Longer a Servant, No Less than a God’: Elegiac Praise in Cult…
Cuyahoga Community College names Mike Piero Head Coach of their new esports team, Triceratops Esports. Under Piero’s leadership, Tri-C’s esports…
Dr. Mike Piero, Professor of English at Cuyahoga Community College, and TabletopEDU founder and instructional designer, Garrett Munro, have received…
Pleased to share that my short story, “The Pearl,” just appeared in a print short fiction anthology, What Comes to…
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 âtimespace,â is an effective interpretive lens through which to understand the cultural and ideological significance of video games. Using âslow readingsâ 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 chronotopesâof the bonfire, the abject, the archipelago, the fart as pharmakon, madness, and coupled loveâtoward 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)Â 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 âdragonborn,â a calling that merges political, social, and religious narratives in the game toward the playerâs 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 gameâs 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 popularâand by extension, the video game medium itselfâreinscribes the familiar in ostensibly unfamiliar ways.






