Tag: News

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.

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.

Irvine, CA – June 16, 2022 – The Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) today announced its 2022 HEVGA Fellows at the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Conference. Eight 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 2022, HEVGA’s Fellows inducted eight new members:

Mirjam Eladhari
Associate Professor – Stockholm University
Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari is an associate professor at the Department of Computer and System Sciences (DSV) at Stockholm University (SU) in Sweden where she teaches game design, artificial intelligence (AI) , and game research methods. Her work connects AI, game design, interactive narrative and computational expression. A main theme of her research is co-creation, in particular how players can add stories and elements from their real lives in order to help them reflect on their own existence and gain new perspectives.

Mirjam has worked as a lead game designer and programmer both in the industry and in various research projects, such as the EU project C2Learn. Mirjam is a board member of HEVGA and ARDIN, and active member of the EU project INDCOR (Interactive narrative design for complexity representation) as well as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Games. During 2021 she was an independent expert for the EC, in regards to the “A European AI On Demand Platform and Ecosystem” (AI4EU) a project feeding into a new and comprehensive strategic research innovation agenda for Europe. Mirjam’s dissertation was in computing science (Teesside University, UK, 2010), and included work done at UC Santa Cruz, Georgia Institute of Technology and Tokyo Institute of Technology. She explored, by making prototypes, characterisation and story construction in MMO’s focusing on character/agent AI.

At the moment (2022) she is starting up the project PSP (Platform for Smart People) together with her colleagues at SU and KTH. PSP will create a platform using IoT technologies and machine learning helping people with cognitive diversities, such as autism, in their everyday lives. Besides, she works as an independent game designer under the label Otter Play. Mirjams hobby is drawing and painting.

Lindsay Grace
Associate Professor, Knight Chair – University of Miami
Lindsay is Knight Chair in Interactive Media and an associate professor at the University of Miami School of Communication. He is Vice President for the Higher Education Video Game Alliance and the 2019 recipient of the Games for Change Vanguard award. Lindsay’s book, Doing Things with Games, Social Impact through Design, is a well-received guide to game design. In 2020, he edited and authored Love and Electronic Affection: a Design Primer on designing love and affection in games

His work has received awards and recognition from the Games for Change Festival, the Digital Diversity Network, the Association of Computing Machinery’s digital arts community , Black Enterprise and others. He authored or co-authored more than 50 papers, articles and book chapters on games since 2009. His creative work has been selected for showcase internationally including New York, Paris, Sao Paolo, Singapore, Chicago, Vancouver, Istanbul, and others. Lindsay curated or co-curated Blank Arcade, Smithsonian American Art Museum’s SAAM Arcade, the Games for Change Civic and Social Impact and others.

He has given talks at the Game Developers Conference, SXSW, Games for Change Festival, the Online News Association, the Society for News Design, and many other industry events.

Between 2013 and 2018 he was the founding director of the American University Game Lab and Studio. He served as Vice President and on the board of directors for the Global Game Jam™ non-profit between 2014-2019. From 2009 to 2013 he was the Armstrong Professor at Miami University’s School of Art. Lindsay also served on the board for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) between 2013-2015.

Kishonna Gray
Associate Professor – University of Kentucky
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.

Dr. Gray is the author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming (LSU Press, 2020). She is also the author of Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live (Routledge, 2014), and the co-editor of two volumes on culture and gaming: Feminism in Play (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018) and Woke Gaming (University of Washington Press, 2018).

Souvik Mukherjee
Assistant Professor – Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
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.

Soraya Murray
Associate Professor, Film and Digital Media – University of California at Santa Cruz
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.

Lisa Nakamura
Professor – University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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.

Jaakko Stenros
University Lecturer – Tampere University
Jaakko Stenros (PhD) is a University Lecturer at Tampere University. There he runs the international Master’s Programme in Game Studies and researches at the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies. He has published ten books and almost a hundred articles and reports, and has taught game studies for well over a decade. Stenros studies play and games, his research interests include norm-defying play, role-playing games, game rules, queer play, game jams, and playfulness. Stenros has also collaborated with artists and designers to create ludic experiences and has curated many exhibitions at the Finnish Museum of Games. University of Turku has awarded Stenros the Title of Docent in 2019 in Game and Play Studies.

Emma Witkowski
Senior Lecturer – RMIT University
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.
She is an academic consultant across government departments and for professional esports and sports organisations. As a director of Order Esports, and board member of the Australian Esports Association and the New Zealand Esports Federation women’s sub-committee, she represents the position of discrimination-free and sustainable esports.

New York, NY – July 16, 2020 – The Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) today announced its 2020 Fellows at the Games for Change (G4C) Festival. Six 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.

Typically announced at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), HEVGA elected to announce its Fellows at the Games for Change Festival following GDC’s postponement. We are grateful to Games for Change for the opportunity to announce our new Fellows on the mainstage.

In 2020, HEVGA’s Fellows inducted six new members:

NAOMI CLARK
ASSISTANT ARTS PROFESSOR – NYU
Naomi Clark has been designing, producing and writing games for all sorts of platforms and audiences for over two decades. The roughly three dozen games she’s contributed to include early text-based virtual worlds, downloadable and mobile games for mass audiences, online games for LEGO, educational games on subjects ranging from upcycling to electrical circuits, game development tools for kids, and digital brick-building software. She’s been a game reviewer and pop culture critic for the pioneering feminist site Feministe and has contributed to several critical collections on games (Videogames for Humans, Queer Game Studies) in addition to co-authoring a textbook, A Game Design Vocabulary. Her recent games includes card games like Consentacle, a two-player game of trust, communication and intimacy, and Lacerunner, a unauthorized narrative re-invention of Android: Netrunner.

D. FOX HARRELL
PROFESSOR OF DIGITAL MEDIA AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – MIT
D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D., is Professor of Digital Media & Artificial Intelligence in the Comparative Media Studies Program and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. He is the director of the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality. His research explores the relationship between imagination and computation. His research involves developing new forms of computational narrative, videogaming, extended reality (VR, AR, etc.), and related digital media forms based in computer science, cognitive science, and digital media arts. He has worked as an interactive television producer and as a game designer. His book Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression was published by the MIT Press (2013).

TANYA KRZYWINSKA
PROFESSOR – FALMOUTH UNIVERSITY
Tanya Krzywinska is chair for Digital Economy at Falmouth University. She taught film and games at Brunel University, Uxbridge for 25 years before moving to Cornwall to set up the Games Academy and games research at Falmouth University. Tanya is the author of many books and papers on games and related media, as well as the Editor of the academic peer-reviewed journal Games and Culture (Sage). She is also an exhibiting artist, working mainly in Oil paint. Over the past four years, she has led a team of researchers to provide immersive experiences for museums in the region, using Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Reality and has recently become a Trustee at Royal Cornwall Museum.

TORILL ELVIRA MORTENSEN
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR – IT UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN
Torill Elvira Mortensen is associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. She has a Cand. philol in Mass Communication and Culture, and a Dr. art. on the use of text-based computer games, both from the University of Bergen. She was a co-founder of the journal Game Studies, on the board of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) 2006-2010, and on the board of Norsk Tipping, the Norwegian lottery authority, 2011-2015. In 2019 she was awarded DiGRA distinguished scholar. Her most recent book is the co-authored work The Paradox of Transgression in Games (2020), and her research is on the use of digital games, the practice of play, and the integration of digital media practices in the everyday life.

JANE PINCKARD
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF THE PRACTICE OF CINEMATIC ARTS – UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Jane Pinckard is Associate Professor of the Practice of Cinematic Arts in the Interactive Media & Games division of the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. She is a writer, critic, and educator who has studied the culture of video games for twenty years. She has written about games for publications such as Gamepro, EGM, 1UP and Salon, as well as on her games culture blog, GameGirlAdvance. She led the East Coast business development operations for Foundation 9 Entertainment, and served as Vice Chair of the International Game Developers Organization. She is on the editorial board of the Well-Played Journal from ETC Press, Carnegie Mellon University. From 2011 to 2014, she was Associate Director of the Center for Games and Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz. A graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy writing workshop, she writes fiction about robots and palaces under the sea. Her favorite game is Final Fantasy Tactics.

JOSÉ ZAGAL
PROFESSOR, LECTURING – UNIVERSITY OF UTAH
Dr. José P. Zagal is a game designer and scholar. He is also a Professor with the University of Utah’s nationally ranked Entertainment Arts & Engineering program where, among other things, he teaches courses on game design, ethics in videogames, and experimental games. He taught his first university-level class in 2000 and has since supervised multiple award-winning student projects, and many of his former students work at leading game studios worldwide.

José’s research explores the development of frameworks for describing, analyzing, and understanding games from a critical perspective. He is also interested in supporting games literacy and game education. His book on this topic, “Ludoliteracy: Defining, Understanding, and Supporting Games Education” was published in 2010. In 2012 he edited “The Videogame Ethics Reader”, a collection of writings that provide an entry point for thinking, deliberating, and discussing ethical topics surrounding videogames. “Role-Playing Game Studies”, edited in collaboration with Dr. Sebastian Deterding, was published in 2018 and provides an in-depth examination of role-playing games across different media and disciplinary contexts. His most recent book, “Game Design Snacks” (ETC Press, 2019) is an edited collection of nuggets of game design wisdom covering various areas in game design with examples from commercially released videogames.

José received his PhD in computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008, his M.Sc. in engineering sciences and a B.S. in industrial engineering from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in 1999 and 1997.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – MARCH 20, 2018 – ​Established in 2017, The Higher Education Video Game Alliance Fellows Program recognizes senior scholars in the games domain who have made significant contribution 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 2018, HEVGA’s Fellows inducted six new members, including one in memoriam.

2018 FELLOWS

STAFFAN BJÖRK
GOTHENBURG UNIVERSITY, SWEDEN
Staffan Björk is a full professor at the department of Computer Science and Engineering at Chalmers and Gothenburg University. He conducts research within the areas of gameplay design, pervasive games, and interaction design. A primary result of this work is the gameplay design patterns concept and the book Patterns in Game Design co-written with Jussi Holopainen. Together with Petri Lankoski he was editors for the bookGame Research Methods: An Overview. Staffan is one of the founders of DiGRA. More about Staffan.

BRENDA LAUREL
INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR
Brenda Laurel has worked in interactive media since 1976—in the computer game industry from Atari to Activision, and in research labs at Atari, Interval Research, and as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Labs. At the Banff Centre, she co-designed and produced the ground-breaking VR piece, Placeholder. She researched gender and technology at Interval and she co-founded Purple Moon—interactive media for girls—in 1996. She designed and chaired the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design (2001-2006) and the Graduate Design Program at California College of the Arts (2006-2012). She also served as an adjunct Professor in the Games and Palayble Media Program at UC Santa Cruz (2013-2015). She is the author of several books. In 2015, she received the Trailblazer Award from Indiecade. More about Brenda.

RANDY PAUSCH
CARNEGIE MELLOW UNIVERSITY
Randy Pausch (October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was a professor of computer science, human-computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University. Randy was a virtual reality pioneer, co-founder of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center, and creator of the Alice software project. In 2006, Randy learned he had terminal pancreatic cancer and was given 3-6 months to live. He is widely known for “The Last Lecture”, a lecture given following a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer. He co-authored a book of the same name, which became a New York Times best-seller. In May 2008, Randy was listed by Time as one of the World’s Top-100 Most Influential People. More about Randy.

ADRIENNE SHAW
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY
Adrienne Shaw is an Assistant Professor in Temple University’s Department of Media Studies and Production and School of Media and Communication graduate faculty. Her book Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture won the 2016 Outstanding Book Award from the Popular Communication Division of the International Communication Association. She also co-edited Queer Game Studies with Bonne Ruberg,Queer Technologies with Katherine Sender, andInterventions: Communication Research and Practice with D. Travers Scott. In addition, she is a founder of the LGBTQ Game Archive. More about Adrienne.

MIGUEL SICART
IT UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN
Miguel Sicart is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. He is the author ofThe Ethics of Computer Games, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay, and Play Matters. Miguel teaches game and play design, and researches on the philosophy and design of digital playthings. More about Miguel.

NOAH WARDRIP-FRUIN
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a Professor of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. With Michael Mateas he directs the Expressive Intelligence Studio, a technical and cultural research group that creates experimental games such as Prom Week, The Ice-Bound Concordance, and Bad News. With Pat Harrigan, he edited a series of books that contributed to the development of game studies: First Person, Second Person, andThird Person. He led the design of three interdisciplinary graduate programs, including the PhD in Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz, which welcomed its first students in Fall 2017. More about Noah.

Click here to read more about all HEVGA fellows.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – March 19, 2018 – The Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) today announced the appointment of Lindsay Grace and Mirjam Eladhari to the Board of Directors. Both will serve on the Executive Committee, with Grace as Vice President and Eladahri in a non-officer role, filling vacant positions previously held by founding board members and fellows Constance Steinkuehler and Tracy Fullerton.

“Lindsay and Mirjam are two colleagues who have done phenomenal work in a wide array of areas and roles for decades combined. Their passion and commitment to furthering our community is clear and will push us forward in new directions. Lindsay and Mirjam have long been leaders in the field and are uniquely equipped to focus on several of our key goals, particularly the continued expansion of HEVGA’s footprint internationally. In 2017, we held our first international meeting on the island of Gotland in Sweden during the Gotland Game Conference (GGC) at Uppsala University. This year HEVGA will again partner with GGC and Uppsala to hold a two-day symposium co-located with the conference. Lindsay and Mirjam’s experience will be indispensable as we grow our capacity in Europe and beyond. Our initiatives, committees, and reports will benefit greatly from their knowledge as we build a rich network and community pushing the collective and interdisciplinary boundaries of our field. I respect them both deeply and truly look forward to serving alongside them,” said Andy Phelps, President.

In addition to the appointment of Grace and Eladhari, the board of directors will expand to seven members later this year. Details on the election process will be available this spring.

LINDSAY GRACE
Lindsay is an associate professor at American University and founding director of the American University Game Lab and Studio. He was the Fall 2017 Visiting Knight Chair at the University of Miami. His work has received awards and recognition from the Games for Change Festival, the Digital Diversity Network, the Association of Computing Machinery’s digital arts community, Black Enterprise and others. He has published more than 50 papers, articles and book chapters on games since 2009. His creative work has been selected for showcase internationally including New York, Paris, Sao Paolo, Singapore, Chicago, Vancouver, Istanbul, and others. He has given talks at the Game Developers Conference, SXSW, Games for Change Festival, the Online News Association, the Society for News Design, and many other industry events.

Academic liason and former vice president (2015-2016) for the Global Game Jam™, Lindsay also served on the board for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) between 2013-2015.

MIRJAM ELADHARI
Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari is a game designer, researcher, and developer who entered the video game industry as a programmer in 2000. Her dissertation work (Teesside, 2010) explored characterisation and story construction in MMO’s focusing semi-autonomous avatars. Having focused on intelligent agents and story construction, her present research foci are AI based game design and story-making games. Her approach includes exploration of the game design space through experimental prototypes. She has worked as a game designer in various research projects, most recently in C2Learn. Mirjam has taught game design and related topics since 2004, and is now a senior lecturer at the department of Media Technology at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden.