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.
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.
Kishonna L. Gray is an Associate Professor in Writing, Rhetoric, & Digital Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is an interdisciplinary, intersectional, digital media scholar whose areas of research include identity, performance and online environments, embodied deviance, cultural production, content creation, streaming, and Black Cyberfeminism.
Emma Witkowski is a senior lecturer at RMIT University. She teaches game cultures, qualitative methods, and esports practices from a socio-phenomenological standpoint. Emma’s research explores high performance digital game worlds, and she has published widely on the intersections of these worlds and expertise, gender, media sports, embodiment, and the institutionalisation of esports in education, nonprofit and commercial sectors.
Tracy Fullerton, M.F.A. is an experimental game designer, professor and director emeritus of the USC Games program. Her research center, the Game Innovation Lab, has produced several influential independent games, including Cloud, flOw, Darfur is Dying, The Night Journey, with artist Bill Viola and Walden, a game, a simulation of Henry David Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond which was named “Game of the Year” at Games for Change 2017 and “Developer Choice” at IndieCade 2017. Tracy is the author of “Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games,” a design textbook used at game programs worldwide, and holder of the Electronic Arts Endowed Chair in Interactive Entertainment.