New York, NY – June 27, 2024 – The Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) today announced its 2024 HEVGA Fellows at the Games for Change (G4C) Festival. 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 2024, HEVGA’s Fellows inducted four new members:
Mitu Khandaker
Associate Arts Professor – NYU
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.
Hartmut Koenitz
Professor – Södertörn University
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.
Bo Ruberg
Professor – University of California, Irvine
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.
Anne Sullivan
Associate Professor – York University (Canada)
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.