DrBen Egliston

I'm an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Discipline of Media and Communications. I research and write about the political economy of digital media and technology.

I currently work across two Australian Research Council-funded projects. First, I lead a research project about the impacts of new business models in the videogame industry (funded by an Australian Research Council DECRA). This project assesses the implications of service-based monetisation for how games are designed, consumed, and regulated. Second, with colleagues from the University of Sydney, I am a Chief Investigator on an ARC Discovery Project about the ethical and social impacts of mixed reality and embodied computing.

I'm also a co-founder of Ludolio, a videogame distribution platform developed at the University of Sydney that makes commercial video games accessible to universities and schools. Ludolio is informed by research from my ARC DECRA fellowship on game monetisation — particularly insight into how platform economics shape production practices in ways that constrain developer autonomy and harm users — and a desire amongst game developers for more ethical distribution and monetisation infrastructure.

I'm the (co)author of four books: Fantasies of Virtual Reality: Untangling Fiction, Fact, and Threat (MIT Press), Cryptogaming: Blockchain and the Financialization of Videogames (Palgrave Macmillan), Governing Social Virtual Reality (Palgrave Macmillan), and The Limits of Immersion: Disability and Virtual Reality (Bristol University Press). My two current book projects are Games and Play in Financial Times (University of California Press) and Immersive Media Studies (Polity).

My academic work has been published in journals such as New Media & Society, Big Data & Society, and Information, Communication & Society. Beyond my academic work, I'm a frequent commentator on the political economy of digital culture for major media outlets, with recent pieces published in WIRED and ABC News, among others.