Volkan Eke is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. Eke seeks to understand and learn from the vocational ethos of game development in the US and Japan, at a time of volatile cultural controversies.  

His dissertation entitled “Even the odds without gods: An anthropology of game design and morality” draws from ethnographic fieldwork conducted remotely at multiple sites from literary works in comics and games, to the deep history of play in Japanese shinto and Buddhist temples. Eke’s research involves evocations of spiritual and technical forms of morality in the grinding work of game development, wrapped in continued cultural and economic controversies.