Category: Bio

Dr. Hartmut Koenitz is a scholar, designer, and artist. His research is concerned with the theory, practice, education and societal impact of interactive narratives and games. He is particularly concerned with the use of interactive narratives to better understand the complex world of the 21st century. His latest book “Understanding Interactive Digital Narratives. Immersive Expressions for a Complex Time” was published by Routledge in 2023 (http://understandingidn.com). Koenitz has published over 90 scholarly publications including the co-edited volume “Interactive Digital Narrative – History, Theory and Practice” (Routledge 2015).

He is a Professor in Media Technology at Södertörn University, a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam, and a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin.

Koenitz is also the president of ARDIN, the Association for Research in Digital Interactive Narratives (https://ardin.online) which organizes the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) and is partnered with the ZIP Scene conference. Koenitz is also the founding Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Interactive Narrative (https://journal.ardin.online), a pioneering academic journal specific to the topic which integrates interactive experiences within articles, published in collaboration between ETC Press and ARDIN.

Koenitz is the chair of the EU COST Action 18230 INDCOR (Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations – https://indcor.eu) and one of the editors of the upcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Interactive Digital Narrative.

He is a member of several academic and professional societies, including DIGRA (Digital Games Research Association), ACM, European Council member of HEVGA (Higher Education Video Game Alliance), RealTime Society’s Interactive Storytelling Group, ELO (Electronic Literature Organization), the International Society for the Study of Narrative and the European Narratology Network.

Koenitz holds a PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Digital Media on the theory and practice of Interactive Digital Narrative.

He is the creator of the ASAPS authoring tool, which has been used to create more than 150 works. Previously, Koenitz was the CTO of the Berlin-based startup Designnet, worked as a tech journalist writing more than 150 articles, consulted for clients like Stanford in Berlin and co-founded a tech company.

Koenitz is also a visual artist, and his works have been shown in Atlanta, Paris, Istanbul, Seoul, Copenhagen and Porto. His latest artwork, The Multiple Lives of Walter B. is a physical installation that explores virtual biographies of Walter Benjamin.

Dr. Bo Ruberg, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine and the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Ruberg’s research explores gender and sexuality in digital media with a focus on LGBTQ issues in video games. They are the author of three books: Video Games Have Always Been Queer (NYU Press, 2019); The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games (Duke University Press, 2020), for which they received the 2021 Stonewall Book Award for Non-Fiction from the American Library Association; and Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies (MIT Press, 2022), for which they received the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Ruberg is also the co-editor of multiple volumes and served as the lead organizer of the Queerness and Games Conference from 2013 to 2018.

Dr. Mitu Khandaker is a game designer, scholar, and entrepreneur. She is an Associate Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center, where she teaches game design and development. She holds a Ph.D. in designing games for immersive interfaces such as VR and AR and has a background in computer engineering. Mitu also co-founded Glow Up Games, a studio centered on telling stories about Black and brown joy, and the first-ever all-women of color-founded mobile game studio to raise over $1M in venture funding. Mitu was previously on the founding team at Spirit AI, a games AI middleware company, and has previously launched a location-based games startup. She also worked in the indie game space on titles such as the social simulation game Redshirt.

She has received a number of international accolades, including as a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit in 2013 and the Creative English Trailblazer Award in 2014. Mitu is particularly interested in encouraging diversity in game development and STEAM-related fields and has served on the advisory committee for the Advocacy Track at Game Developers’ Conference since 2014. She also served on the board of directors at Feminist Frequency and as an AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador to champion more middle school and teen girls into game development.

Dr. Anne Sullivan is an Associate Professor of Digital Media, and has over a decade of experience as a software engineer in the industry, much of which was spent at the AAA game company Electronic Arts (EA). Her research forges connections and creates bridges – between research fields, communities, and people – from a humanistic, artistic, and technical perspective. She approaches this predominantly through the domains of critical game design and analysis, co-creative artificial intelligence (AI), and human-computer interaction (HCI). She uses these lenses to critically examine and create playful, storied, and inclusive interactive experiences for education, craft, and games.

She has published over 45 peer-reviewed journal, conference, and workshop articles, including papers about her design-based research on generative tools for tabletop games, her work focusing on tangible and playful storytelling for queer histories, and her NSF-funded research on how craft-based generative tools can be used to teach computational thinking to quilters leveraging craft practices. Her work has also been featured in a number of international exhibits, including the loom-controlled game system Loominary, which was shown at multiple international exhibits, including at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

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.

A prolific author and editor, Russworm is a Series Editor of Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture (Duke University Press). She is the author or editor of three books: Blackness is Burning; Gaming Representation; and Theorizing Tyler Perry. With research expertise in digital culture, video games, and popular African American media, Professor Russworm’s scholarship and interviews have also been shared on CNN, The History Channel, Turner Classic Movies, in podcasts, and on streaming platforms like Twitch. She is a video game Hall of Fame voter, and she is currently writing a new monograph on The Sims and a book on race and the politics of play.

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.

Paolo is the director of LIKELIKE, a neo-arcade devoted to independent games and playful art in Pittsburgh, PA.

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.

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.

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.

He has been a board-member of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) and a founder-member of DiGRA India and DHARTI, the Digital Humanities group in India. Souvik has been named a ‘DiGRA Distinguished Scholar’ in 2019. He is also an affiliated senior research fellow at the Centre of Excellence, Game Studies at Tampere University.

His other interests are (the) Digital Humanities, Poststructuralist theory, Posthumanism and Early Modern Literature. His databases on the Dutch Cemetery at Chinsurah, the Scottish Cemetery in Kolkata and the nineteenth-century Bengali industrialist, Mutty Lall Seal are all available open-access.