Profile picture of Maxwell Foxman

Maxwell Foxman

Assistant Professor
mfoxman@uoregon.edu
Phone: 541-346-3615
Office: 149 Franklin Bldg.
City: Eugene, Portland

Biography

Maxwell Foxman is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies/Game Studies at the University of Oregon at the School of Journalism and Communication. His primary research focus is on how play manifests in non-game contexts—including social media, politics and journalistic institutions. His work consistently explores the way media makers frame games and play in their activities and professional lives. 
 
Foxman began his academic career by studying the world of gamification, especially in the realms of political campaigns and digital apps. This initial work expanded to analyses of the influence of games and play in commerce and industry. His dissertation research and a forthcoming monograph investigate how play and the business complex of games impact early adopters of immersive technology like Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Additionally, he is co-authoring an examination into the mainstreaming of game journalism. He is also investigating the effect of games in cultural production (through game engines like Unity) and a variety of other arenas, such as collegiate esports. His work has appeared in numerous journals including New Media and Society, Social Media + Society, First Monday, Computational Culture, and Games and Culture.
 
Foxman received his PhD from Columbia University in Communications, and also holds Masters degrees from Columbia University and New York University. He received his bachelor's degree from Columbia University. 
 
Outside academia, Foxman has worked as a consultant for several think tanks, including SuperData, Data & Society, Thunder 11 and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. He also founded an independent study program and taught at the Rockland Country Day School in Congers, NY.
 

Education

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, New York, NY

Ph.D. Communications 2018.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, New York, NY

M.Phil. Communications 2015.

 

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, New York, NY

M.A. Media, Culture and Communication 2012.

 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, New York, NY

B.A. American Studies, Music, Creative Writing, 2007.

 

Publications

Pimentel, D., Foxman, M., Davis, D. Z., & Markowitz, D. M. (2021). Virtually real, but not quite there: Social and economic barriers to meeting Virtual Reality’s true potential for mental health. Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 2, 2.


Foxman, M. (2020). Punctuated Play: Revealing the Roots of Gamification. Acta Ludologica, 3(2), 54–71.


Foxman, M., Leith, A. P., Beyea, D., Klebig, B., Chen, V. H. H., & Ratan, R. (2020). Virtual Reality Genres: Comparing Preferences in Immersive Experiences and Games. Extended Abstracts of the 2020 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, 237–241. https://doi.org/10.1145/3383668.3419881 


Ferrer-Conill, R., Foxman, M., Jones, J., Sihvonen, T., & Siitonen, M. (2020). Playful approaches to news engagement. Convergence. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856520923964

 

Foxman, M. (2019), United We Stand: Platforms, Tools and Innovation with the Unity Game Engine. Social Media + Society. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305119880177

 

Nieborg, D. B., & Foxman, M. (2018) “Mainstreaming Misogyny: The beginning of the end and the end of the beginning in Gamergate coverage.” In Jacqueline Ryan Vickery, Tracy Everbach (Eds.), Mediating Misogyny: Gender, Technology, and Harassment. (pp. 111–130). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-72917-6_6

 

Foxman, M. (2017). The playful newsroom: Iterating and reiterating the news and its publics. First Monday, 22(1). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7260 

 
 
For a full list go to http://maxwellfoxman.info/cv/