In Memoriam — Bio excerpt from “Bob’s Story” (University of Utah):
Bob was one of the founders of EAE and led the program as its first Director for nine years. Previously he had served as the chair of the School of Computing, and was the founder of the Center for Software Science, a state of Utah Center of Excellence. He was a consummate mentor and teacher and was awarded both the University of Utah’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2001, and the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2019. Through his work, he had a transformative impact on the dozens of staff and faculty that had the privilege to work for him, and thousands of students that learned from him. Bob’s love for teaching and for EAE students was obvious to everyone who knew him, as was the respect and love shown to him by the students that he inspired, many of whom freely admit that having Bob as their professor changed their lives and opened up careers for them.
Bob co-founded EAE along with two graduate students, Roger Altizer and Mark van Langeveld, who are now EAE faculty. At a time when there were only a handful of games programs on college campuses, Bob worked with his collaborators to pioneer a new model for games teaching and scholarship, and created EAE as a teaching program in 2010. “Bob was a friend, mentor, and role model,” said Roger Altizer, “he was about to start retirement when we started EAE. He decided to stay at the U, instead, because he saw the potential of games as an academic field, as well as the passion of his students and colleagues. Without Bob there would be no EAE. I’m not sure I’d be a professor without his support, and I know that the hundreds of game developers out there who studied under him would say the same about their careers. The U, EAE, it’s students, faculty, and staff all know that we owe so much of our happiness and success to Bob. Some shoes are hard to fill, his will be impossible to do so.”
TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Interactive Media & Games Division at the University of Southern California. She is also the founder of Radical Play (a games-based public humanities initiative and afterschool program), and she has been a professor and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UMass Amherst. 
Paolo Pedercini is a game developer, curator and educator. He teaches digital media and experimental game design at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Since 2003 he works under the project name “Molleindustria” creating provocative games addressing social justice, labor, and environmental issues.
Gillian Smith is Director of the Interactive Media & Game Development program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which is one of the oldest academic games programs in the United States of America. She is an award-winning game designer whose scholarship focuses at the intersections of generative AI, game design, textile crafts, and social justice. In recent years, they have been developing and assessing new approaches to pedagogy for games and computer science, including fostering student metacognition through ungrading and project-based learning.
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.
Dr Souvik Mukherjee is assistant professor in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, India and a pioneering games studies scholar from the Indian Subcontinent. In his research spanning two decades, he looks at a diversity of topics starting with a poststructuralist reading of videogames as storytelling media, videogames as colonial and postcolonial media, videogame production studies in the Indian Subcontinent and currently, Indian boardgames and their colonial avatars. Souvik is the author of two monographs, Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) and Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back (Springer UK 2017), as well as many articles and book chapters in national and international publications. His upcoming book, Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent (Bloomsbury India) is in press, currently.
Lisa Nakamura is Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Culture and the founding Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of several books on race, digital culture, and identity.
Soraya Murray is an interdisciplinary scholar of contemporary visual culture, with particular interest in film, art, and video games. Murray holds a Ph.D. in art history and visual studies from Cornell University, and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine. She is an Associate Professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her writings have been widely anthologized nationally and internationally, and published in journals in the areas of contemporary art, film and digital culture. Murray’s book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback 2021), considers video games from a visual culture perspective, and how they both mirror and are constitutive of larger societal fears, dreams, hopes and even complex struggles for recognition. Murray is currently co-editing an anthology with TreaAndrea Russworm on antiracist futures in games and play. She is also completing a book on contemporary cinema, difference, and the technological imaginary. Murray is a member of the critical/historical game studies journal ROMchip’s editorial group.