Jordan M. Castillo

Research Interests

• Electronic Literature
• Environmental Humanities
• Procedural Rhetoric
• Game Studies
• Critical Making
• Digital Pedagogy
• AI & Creative Labor

My research explores how indie and experimental video games deploy procedural rhetoric to engage with climate fatalism and environmental grief. I'm especially interested in how constraint-based tools like Twine and Bitsy enable new forms of ecopoetic expression, and what happens when games refuse the logic of optimization.

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Articles

1. "Against Optimization: Procedural Slowness and the Refusal of Efficiency in Indie Ecopoetic Games." Electronic Book Review, vol. 31, 2025.
2. "Making the Unplayable: Failure States as Environmental Rhetoric in Climate Crisis Simulations." (with Priya Nkemdirim) Convergence, 2024.
3. "Bitsy Ecologies: Constraint, Care, and the Miniature World." Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 2, 2023.

Book Chapter

1. "Grief Grids and Loss Mechanics: Approaching Bereavement through Experimental Game Form." In Feeling Digital: Affect, Computation, and Electronic Literature, ed. Sofia Reyes & Timothy Park. MIT Press, forthcoming 2026.

Reviews & Short-Form

1. Review of Duskers. Electronic Literature Organization Reviews, 2024.
2. "Teaching Twine as Critical Making: A Studio Syllabus." Kairos (Praxis section), vol. 28, no. 1, 2023.

Conference Presentations

• "Refusing Feedback Loops: Player Agency and Systemic Climate Doom." MLA Annual Convention, New Orleans, LA, Jan 2025.
• "AI and the Ecopoetic Game: Generative Tools in Environmental Interactive Narrative." ELO Conference, Reykjavik, Iceland, Jul 2024.
• "Annotating the Unwinnable: Paratextual Strategies in Climate Games." Digital Humanities 2024, Arlington, VA, Aug 2024.
• "Distant Coding Approaches to Game Text Corpora." Workshop with John T. Murray & Anastasia Salter, MLA 2025.
• "Hypertext Grief in Twine: Mapping Nonlinear Mourning." ADHO, Amsterdam, 2023.
• "Critical Making with Bitsy: Low-Stakes Poetics for the Literature Classroom." Computers and Writing, Davis, CA, 2022.

Teaching

Digital Projects & Skills

Technical Skills

• Python
• JavaScript
• Twine / Harlowe
• Bitsy
• Unity
• QGIS
• Gephi
• Voyant Tools
• R (tidyverse)

Awards & Fellowships

• Dissertation Completion Fellowship, UCF College of Arts & Humanities, 2025–2026
• Student Award, Electronic Literature Organization, 2024
• Graduate Dean's Fellowship, UCF, 2020–2022
• NEH Summer Institute Participant, "Advancing DH Pedagogy," 2023
• Graduate Research Award, UT Austin, 2019

Service & Outreach

• Graduate Representative, Texts & Technology Program Committee, UCF (2023–Present)
• Co-organizer, UCF Digital Humanities and AI Workshop Series (2024)
• Peer Reviewer, Electronic Book Review; Digital Humanities Quarterly
• Session Chair, ELO Conference 2024
• Graduate Mentor, UCF DH Mentorship Program (2022–Present)
• Webmaster, Electronic Literature Organization (2023–Present)

Education