My name is Matthew Aguilar-Champeau, and I am a researcher, writer, occasional video editor and photographer, and sometimes archivist currently completing my dissertation at the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities. As the first in my family to attend college, then the first to attend graduate school, my work reflects an attention to detail that creates a fuller, livelier scholarship— one that takes into account various methodologies and data sources.

My primary research area is in the world of competitive gaming, particularly the Fighting Game Community, and is of continuing fascination to me. While I grew up playing fighting games, I didn’t come into contact with the wider community until I started my preliminary research for my dissertation in 2014. Before that, I was a fighting game competitor in a mostly online arena— getting top 1000 in Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 (Amaterasu—> Akuma—> Ryu), ‘Killer’ rank in Killer Instinct, and just generally being a nuisance with my El Fuerte in Street Fighter IV. But when I found the locally organized fighting game community, I found a new home, a home that I wanted others to know about through my research.