Melanie Swalwell is a Sydney based cultural and media theorist, currently teaching at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her research is broadly concerned with intersections between the senses, technology and affect, concerns which shape her work on computer gaming.

Her doctoral research included a study of a large multiplayer gaming group, the members of which get together to play over a purpose built Local Area Network. An essay on lanning which theorises gamers’ entry into virtual environments is forthcoming in The Games Reader, edited by Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Davin Heckman. Currently, Melanie is editing (together with Jason Wilson) a collection of essays which attend to the significance of the particular aesthetic pleasures and engagements of gameplay.

Other work includes a focus on experimentation with the games form, including the work of independent game developers and artists working with games, and a concern with the current regime of classification/censorship of games, particularly the way in which gaming is conceived in terms of impactful aesthetics, as in the Office of Film and Literature Classifications recent (2001) Review of the Classification Guidelines for Films and Computer Games