Dr. Doris C. Rusch is a professor at Uppsala University, department of Game Design, with a focus on transformative play, and regenerative systems design. She is the author of “Making Deep Games”, numerous journal papers and book chapters on existential, transformative game design and deep game design processes, as well as lead designer of numerous award-winning games about the human experience, e.g. “Elude”, “Zombie Yoga”, “Soteria – Dreams as Currency” and “For the Records”. In her non-academic life, she is a certified coach with training in health coaching, strategic intervention, neuroscience for coaches and embodied transformation. She is the founder and custodian of The Hut, an organization dedicated to connecting people to their core values, each other and nature through body-based (somatic) strategies, intentional creativity, and the magic of play and symbolic action.
Her experiences of having journeyed through the academic landscape on both sides of the Atlantic, receiving tenure in the US, docenture in Europe and eventually leveling up to full professor, now inform her contributions to various doctoral schools in the form of workshops and leadership trainings, and her mentoring of researchers of all career stages, so they can navigate the game of academia with dignity, grace, personal agency, inner resourcefulness and joy.
Doris lives on the magical island of Gotland in Sweden with her husband, Mischa, and their kiddo, Max, their cats Ghost and Spunk and bunny Hugo. She spends a lot of time at the local CrossFit box and holds a CF LV1 trainer certificate. She sleeps a lot in the winter and can’t wait to sink her hands into the dark, rich soil again in Spring to engage in the endlessly fascinating experiment of connecting with nature and its many critters.