San Francisco, CA – March 21, 2023 – The Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) today announced its 2023 HEVGA Fellows at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). Four new members were inducted.
Established in 2017, HEVGA’s Fellows Program recognizes senior scholars in the games domain who have made significant contributions to the field in design, theory, or research. HEVGA Fellows are elected by their peers for outstanding contributions to games-based research and design in higher education. Fellows serve as integral ambassadors for the organization and are inducted as lifetime members.
Because fellowship is achieved by election, there is no fellowship application process and nominations may only be submitted and confirmed by current Fellows. Consideration of a candidate begins with their nomination, followed by an extensive and careful vetting process that results in a final ballot of current Fellows.
In 2023, HEVGA’s Fellows inducted four new members:
Bob Kessler
Professor — University of Utah
In Memoriam
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.”
Paolo Pedercini
Associate Professor of Art – Carnegie Mellon University
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.
Doris Rusch
Professor – Uppsala University
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.
TreaAndrea Russworm
Professor – University of Southern California
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.
Gillian Smith
Associate Professor and Director, Interactive Media & Game Development – Worcester Polytechnic Institute
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.