Up by Up-Left
A page to house and contain the writings of Ryan Zhao, writer of The Fundamentals of Video Game Literacy. Critical and academic work pertaining to video games with particular interest paid towards proceduralism, humor, virtual embodiment, and arts history and theory.
About Ryan
Ryan has worked in the video games industry for more than ten years, at both Nintendo and Xbox, in research and marketing roles, supporting Nintendo's third-party releases in era transitioning from Wii U to Switch platforms and the brand identity and content integrations of Xbox's Game Pass platform, respectively.
Ryan has been a member of the Cane and Rinse podcast (and associated podcasts Sound of Play and Play;Write) since 2013, practicing games criticism grounded in history and context with a thorough and studious approach.
Ryan has spent many years interested in games academia, studying subjects such as procedural emergence, projective embodiment, and the parallel tasks of sense-making and meaning-making, culmination in the publication of The Fundamentals of Video Game Literacy through Routledge's CRC Press in 2025. His continuing academic work is focused on procedural comedy as it pertains to the non-semiotic aspects of game design and gameplay.