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Mike Piero

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Recent News:

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Uncategorized

Mike Piero Named Head Coach of Triceratops Esports, Cuyahoga Community College

Cuyahoga Community College names Mike Piero Head Coach of their new esports team, Triceratops Esports. Under Piero’s leadership, Tri-C’s esports…

December 1, 2025Read More
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Game Studies, Grants, Teaching, Uncategorized

Awarded Faculty Innovation Grant for MLA Tabletop RPG Project

Dr. Mike Piero, Professor of English at Cuyahoga Community College, and TabletopEDU founder and instructional designer, Garrett Munro, have received…

November 28, 2025Read More
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Book Chapter, Books, Publication - Fiction

“The Pearl” Published in Short Fiction Anthology, What Comes to Light, Edited by JP Relph

Pleased to share that my short story, “The Pearl,” just appeared in a print short fiction anthology, What Comes to…

September 28, 2025Read More
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Awards

Nominated for 2025 Monarch Queer Literary Award

No better way to start a Monday than with one’s fiction being nominated for a queer literary award! So very…

September 15, 2025Read More
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Publication - Book Review

New Book Review Published in Rain Tax

Mike Piero’s latest book review–of M. C. Benner Dixon’s debut novel, The Height of Land (Orison Books, 2025)–was just published…

September 12, 2025Read More
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Teaching

Mike Piero Appointed VP of AAUP Chapter

I’m honored to be stepping into a new role at Cuyahoga Community College by serving as Westshore Campus Vice President…

August 17, 2025Read More

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.

Video Game Chronotopes and Social Justice
Book Cover with an Evil Looking Dragon on it

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.

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