I’m Mark Sample, professor and founding chair of the Film, Media, and Digital Studies department at Davidson College, a liberal arts college located just north of Charlotte, North Carolina. I’m also on the board of directors of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation.
My teaching and research focus on digital culture, computational creativity, and interactive media. You can find my current CV online.
My work uses the procedural rhetoric of video games and computation more generally to sardonically comment on the slag heap that is 21st century America. My latest project, A Million Random Acts (2025), is ripped from today’s headlines. Another, No Time to Discourse (2025), is ripped from tomorrow’s headlines. Then there’s my RPG character generator 10 Lost Boys. My workplace horror game about content moderation. The pandemic-themed Infinite Catalog of Crushed Dreams. And Babyface, my southern gothic take on 2020.
A few years ago I co-authored 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, a collaboratively written exploration of creative computing and the Commodore 64, published by MIT Press.
Between 2010 and 2014 I was a regular contributor to ProfHacker, a feature at the Chronicle for Higher Education that focuses on pedagogy and scholarly productivity. From 2010 to 2012 I wrote for Play the Past, a collaboratively edited scholarly blog that explores the intersection of cultural heritage and games.
These days I spend most of my time teaching, advising students, writing, coding and creating neticism—criticism of the net, on the net. You can find many of my interactive projects on Itch, or you can follow me on Mastodon as @samplereality and the same on Bluesky.
If you’re really curious, you can read the ancient Breakfast Edition of About Mark.