Hi.
I'm Jon. I don't like autobiography, so written introductions are... not fun. But here we go anyway:
I was sucked into RPGs at the age of about five when my local library dumped off all its Fighting Fantasy gamebooks for cheap, but didn't start playing them with other people until my teens. The story goes Warhammer Fantasy Role Play > Call of Cthulhu > Vampire: the Both Of Them, with a simmering side order of Iron Kingdoms (d20 and proprietary) and a second course of indie and OSR titles (my fave is probably Backswords and Bucklers).
I'm doing a PhD on "interrogating death in role-playing games." It's on hold at the moment, because of life, but it's an exercise in media archaeology: a walk through the evolution of RPGs as a mode of play, using How Games Treat Death as a yardstick. The chapters are: death, difficulty and the adversarial model; death as transition between spaces and storylines; games interrogating game death. I've also presented on games and the Gothic tradition (a lot of Warhammer and Vampire in those talks, as well as World of Warcraft), and have a chapter on Vampire: the Masquerade in the Palgrave Handbook of the Gothic that might actually be out next year.
I've been trying to make my own games, on and off, for years. The proprietary fantasy one failed because my co-author cared about explaining how dragons could fly and I didn't; the OSR one failed because I realised I didn't actually want to play D&D; but then I started mucking around making shorter story-prompt games and those seem pretty good so far. My first game with the San Jenaro Co-Op and my first solo game are both out VERY SOON and when I came onto itch to set up the publisher account I remembered the forum was a thing. So. Er. Better late than never, sorry I only came in when I had something to sell. I doubt it's quite the done thing, but I really don't like introducing myself. I mean, look at all that. Three paragraphs? Who do I think I am?