Angus or Dr. Random is taking on the subproject Aesthetics of the project. If you ask him to name three random things he likes, he will answer with: “Animals, archaeology and piña coladas and getting caught in the rain, but the latter two only when I am in the Caribbean.” This is where he does his fieldwork, but the broader interests of Dr. Random revolve around how material culture functions as a sort of connective tissue that holds human social networks together. This interest has taken him and his studies far from the shores of the Caribbean Sea: from the Beowulf poem, to Çatalhöyük and online gaming.
Dr. Random’s gaming platform of choice (PC or PS) changes depending on whether his laptop’s hardware is up to date or not. Like his research, his gaming tastes are also best defined as eclectic (although he did get quite hooked on Destiny last year). He loves Kickstarter and similar crowd-platforms and will often divert some of his “lunch money” to a board or video game project.

Keerthi Sridharan (they/them) is a PhD candidate in the Playful Time Machines project, supervised by Prof. dr. Sybille Lammes and Dr. Angus Mol. Their research is centered around games and play as spaces that facilitate and complicate processes of identification, identity construction, and relationality. Previous work has examined emotional play in TTRPGs, perspective in player-character interaction, and language as a playful resource in conversational interaction. By examining individual experiences of video games through a multi-modal, interdisciplinary approach, they hope to gain insight into how personal and collective understandings of the past can be (re)shaped through play. They are a sociolinguist by trade, a gamer by choice, and curator of an ever-growing list of indie TTRPGs that they’ll get around to playing at some point. Their spare time is spent stress-baking, making music, and drafting Twine games.

Hello! My name is Corine Gerritsen and I am responsible for the subproject ‘Mechanics’ in the project of Playful Time machines.  I got both my BA degree in history and my RMA in Ancient Studies at Utrecht University. I partly focused on Seleucid coinage, but even more entertaining to me were the first few emperors of the Roman Empire. What really got my attention, however, was studying them in the digital realm of video games (when I was young, my very first city-builder was Civ City Rome after all, which you should give a go by the way). This way I got hooked on video game research which I happily fill my days with.