Contributors
Jessica Aldred is an independent scholar, writer, and media producer. Her work on cinema and digital games has been published in Animation, An Interdisciplinary Journal; Games and Culture; The Oxford Handbook for Sound and Image in Digital Media; and The Globe and Mail. Jessica is the co-editor (with Felan Parker) of Beyond the Sea: Navigating Bioshock.
Jeremy Barnes received his BA in English in 2015 from Dickinson College, where he also completed a thesis on the morality of violence in military shooter video games. He is especially interested in the relationship between video game narrative and gameplay and is concerned about his own relationship with DJ Hero.
Kelly Bergstrom is an assistant professor of communication at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her research examines drop-out and disengagement from digital cultures, with a focus on digital games. She is co-editor of Internet Spaceships are Serious Business: An EVE Online Reader. Previously she was a postdoctoral fellow at York University’s Institute for Research on Digital Learning and a MITACS postdoctoral researcher at Big Viking Games.
Ian Bogost is the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in media studies and a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and a founding partner at Persuasive Games. His latest book is Play Anything.
Shira Chess is an assistant professor of entertainment and media studies at the University of Georgia. Her work on women and video games has been published in several journals and most recently in her book Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity.
Mia Consalvo is a professor of communication studies and Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design at Concordia University. She has most recently published the book Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Context, about Japan’s influence on the video game industry and game culture. She is also the co-author of Players and their Pets, co-editor of Sports Videogames, and author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames.
Steven Conway is course director of the games and interactivity degrees at Swinburne University of Technology. His research interests focus on the philosophy and aesthetics of play, games, and sport. Steven has published broadly on these topics in journals such as Sport, Ethics and Philosophy; the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds; and Eludamos. Steven is also co-author of the first book on policy and digital games, Video Game Policy: Production, Distribution and Consumption.
Sebastian Deterding is a designer and researcher working on playful, gameful, and motivational design for human flourishing. He is a reader at the Digital Creativity Labs at the University of York in the UK, and founder of the design agency coding conduct. He is the organizer of the Gamification Research Network, and co-editor of The Gameful World, a book about the ludification of culture. He lives online at http://codingconduct.cc.
Jennifer deWinter is an associate professor of rhetoric and director of the Interactive Media and Game Development program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She has written about Japanese computer games, game policy, and games and technical communication. She is the co-editor of the Influential Game Designer series for which she wrote Shigeru Miyamoto.
Michael Fleisch is a managing member of Dpict, a member of The Value Web, a designer, a filmmaker, and a writer. He provides graphic facilitation and collaboration design services to clients all over the world, including the World Economic Forum and the Global Environment Facility, and has increasingly focused on supporting a movement to safeguard the Global Commons. In 2010, he founded Chase Public in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has co-authored several papers on video games and remains a cultural contributor to Hilobrow.com. Mike is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and wishes his wife and three sons could travel with him.
Tracy Fullerton is a game designer and professor at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts where she directs the Game Innovation Lab, a research center for games and play. She is also the author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games.
Harrison Gish is a doctoral candidate in UCLA’s Cinema and Media Studies program. His work appears in eLudamos, Mediascape, the Encyclopedia of Video Games, and CineAction. He is a member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Video Game Studies Scholarly Interest Group, of which he was the co-chair from 2014 to 2017.
Dan Golding is a lecturer in media and communications at Swinburne University and an award-winning writer with more than 200 journalistic publications. He co-wrote Game Changers, made the soundtrack to Push Me Pull You, and from 2014 to 2017 was director of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival, Australia’s oldest independent games event.
Christopher Hanson is an associate professor in the English Department at Syracuse University, where he teaches courses in game studies, digital media, television, and film. His book Game Time: Understanding Temporality in Video Games was published in 2018, and he is currently working on a book about video game designer Roberta Williams. His work has appeared in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Quarterly, The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, and LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon.
Nina B. Huntemann is the senior director of academics and research at edX. Prior to joining edX, Nina was an associate professor of media studies at Suffolk University. She is the co-editor of the anthologies Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games and Gaming Globally: Production, Play and Place.
Katherine Isbister is a full professor in the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Department of Computational Media, where she is the director of the Center for Games and Playable Media. Her research focuses on designing games and other interactive experiences that heighten social and emotional connections, toward innovating design theory and technological practice. Isbister’s most recent book is How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. Her research has been covered in Wired, Scientific American, and many other venues. She was a recipient of MIT Technology Review’s Young Innovator Award, as well as a Humboldt Foundation Experienced Researcher fellowship.
Derek Johnson is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Transgenerational Media Industries: Adults, Children, and the Reproduction of Culture and Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries, the editor of From Networks to Netflix: A Guide to Changing Channels, and co-editor of Point of Sale: Analyzing Media Retail, A Companion to Media Authorship, and Making Media Work: Cultures of Management in the Entertainment Industries.
Jesper Juul has been working with video game research since the late 1990s. He is an associate professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts—School of Design. His publications include Half-Real, A Casual Revolution, and The Art of Failure. He is also a co-editor of the Playful Thinking Series. He maintains the blog The Ludologist on “video games and other important things” at www.jesperjuul.net.
Carly A. Kocurek is an associate professor of digital humanities and media studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She is the author of two books, Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade and Brenda Laurel: Pioneering Games for Girls.
Peter Krapp is a professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also a member of the Department of Informatics and helped found a Computer Game Science degree. He is the author of Deja Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory and of Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture, as well as an editor of the Handbook Language-Culture-Communication and Medium Cool.
Henry Lowood is the curator for the History of Science & Technology and the Film & Media Collections at Stanford University. He is the co-editor (with Raiford Guins) of the book series Game Histories and of a collection of essays in the series, Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon.
Ken S. McAllister is a professor of Public and Applied Humanities and associate dean of research and program innovation for the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona. A co-founder and co-director of the Learning Games Initiative, McAllister is the author or co-author of numerous books and articles on topics ranging from game preservation to critical technology studies.
Tanner Mirrlees is an associate professor in the Communication and Digital Media Studies Program at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. He is author of Hearts and Mines: The US Empire’s Culture Industry and Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization, and is co-editor of The Television Reader.
Souvik Mukherjee is assistant professor of English at Presidency University, Kolkata, India. He is the author of Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books and Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back.
Soraya Murray is an interdisciplinary visual studies scholar, with particular interest in cultural studies, art, film, and video games. Murray is an associate professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space.
James Newman is a professor of digital media at Bath Spa University. He is the author of numerous books on videogames and gaming cultures including Videogames, Playing with Videogames, Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence, 100 Videogames, and Teaching Videogames. James is a co-founder of the UK’s National Videogame Archive, which is a partnership with the Science Museum, and a curator at The National Videogame Arcade.
Michael Z. Newman is Professor of Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in the Department of English. He is the author of Indie: An American Film Culture, Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium, Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America, and the co-author with Elana Levine of Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status.
Randy Nichols is an assistant professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma. He is the author of The Video Game Business, co-author of Inside the Video Game Business and has written numerous chapters and articles on the political economy of the video game industry.
Rolf F. Nohr is a professor of media aesthetics and media culture at the University of Arts, Braunschweig. He is author of Die Natürlichkeit des Spielens (The Naturalness of Play), Nützliche Bilder: Bild, Diskurs, Evidenz (Useful Images: Picture, Discourse, Evidence) and Die Auftritte des Krieges sinnlich machen (Making the Appearances of the War Sensual). He is also a co-editor of the anthologies The Cake is a Lie! Polyperspektivische Betrachtungen des Computerspiels am Beispiel von ›Portal‹ (The Cake is a Lie! Polyperspectival Considerations of Computer Games Using Portal as an Example), and Strategie Spielen (Playing Strategy).
Casey O’Donnell is an associate professor in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University. His research examines the creative collaborative work of video game design and development. His first book, Developer’s Dilemma, was published in 2014. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
David O’Grady is a doctoral candidate in the Cinema and Media Studies program at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has written about visual media for the Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming; The Game Culture Reader; and the New Review of Film and Television Studies. He is also a researcher at the UCLA Game Lab and an instructor at California State University, Long Beach.
Matthew Thomas Payne is an associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, & Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11 and is a co-editor of the anthologies Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence and Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games.
Amanda Phillips is an assistant professor of English at Georgetown University. She writes about race, queerness, and social justice in video games and the digital humanities. You can find her work in Games and Culture, Digital Creativity, and Debates in the Digital Humanities.
Bonnie Ruberg is an assistant professor of digital media and games in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. They are the author of Video Games Have Always Been Queer, the co-editor of Queer Game Studies, and co-lead organizer of the annual Queerness and Games Conference.
Judd Ethan Ruggill is an associate professor and head of the Department of Public and Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona. He is also co-founder and co-director of the Learning Games Initiative. He researches video game technologies, play, and cultures and has published a variety of books and articles on these subjects.
TreaAndrea M. Russworm is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she teaches classes on video games, digital cultural studies, and African American popular culture. She is a co-editor of Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, the author of Blackness is Burning: Civil Rights Popular Culture, and the Problem of Recognition, and co-editor of From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry.
Anastasia Salter is an associate professor of Games and Interactive Media at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of What is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books and Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects, and co-author of Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media and Flash: Building the Interactive Web.
Adrienne Shaw is an associate professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production at Temple University. She is the author of Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture and the co-editor of the anthologies Queer Game Studies, Queer Technologies and Interventions: Communication Research and Practice.
Miguel Sicart is an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. He is the author of The Ethics of Computer Games, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay and Play Matters.
Gregory Steirer is an assistant professor of English at Dickinson College. His work on media industries, digital culture, and aesthetics has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Television & New Media, The Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics, Convergence, and Postmodern Culture. His book on the American comic book industry and Hollywood, co-authored with Alisa Perren, will be published by BFI/Bloomsbury in 2019.
Evan Torner is an assistant professor of German Studies and Film & Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He co-edited Immersive Gameplay, co-edits Analog Game Studies, and is an active role-playing games scholar.
John Vanderhoef is an assistant professor of emerging media at California State University Dominguez Hills. His research explores amateur and indie digital game production, media industries, residual media, and discourses around gender, sexuality, and race in media producing and consuming cultures. He has published work in Television and New Media, Ada, Production Studies the Sequel, and The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies.
Emma Witkowski is a senior lecturer at RMIT University. Her research explores esports, media sports, and socio-phenomenological expressions of high-performance team play. She is a board member of the Australian Esports Association.
Mark J. P. Wolf is a professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University Wisconsin. He has written extensively about video games, publishing over a dozen books. His recent works on video games include The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, LEGO Studies, Video Games Around the World, the four-volume Video Games and Gaming Culture, and Video Games FAQ.