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Notable Games Researchers

Note: this was written on 2020-9-11, and then updated 2026-10-15, so by the time you read it, it will probably be out-of-date.

Note 2: In many cases the sites I’ve found to link to are as out-of-date as this one will soon be. Often times looking someone up on Google Scholar is a better way to see what kind of research they do than looking at the website they haven’t updated in a couple of years.

This is a list of people and institutions who do interesting research on game design, games as a medium, and/or games with/about/for AI. Take it with a grain of salt: it’s very biased towards people I know and/or people who do the specific kinds of research that I also do; there’s actually a lot more out there in terms of games research than fits on such a short list, but if you didn’t know that, maybe this will help inspire you to seek out whoever is doing the kinds of research that you’re most interested in!

I’ve written this list with an intended audience of undergraduates who might be interested in doing research on games from either a media studies or a computer science angle. But it might also be useful for high school students looking for colleges to apply to.

People with Graduate Research Labs

• I went to grad school at UCSC, where relevant people include my advisors Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin as well as others like Robin Hunicke, Katherine Isbister, and Adam Smith. There’s a Computational Media department with Masters and PhD programs, as well as a Digital Art and New Media MfA program, and there are other people besides those I mention here that you can look at faculty profiles for.
• Julian Togelius does a lot of stuff with games and AI. He was at NYU and is now at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden.
• Mark Riedl does interesting stuff with interactive narrative at Georgia Tech. His website indicates that he cannot currently support additional PhD students as of 2026-10-15.
• Anne Sullivan (fellow UCSC alum) is at York University in Toronto, and does work on computational craft, including PCG crafts and other cool stuff.
• Jichen Zhu at IT University Copenhagen does stuff with interactive narrative, computational metaphor, and games.
• Gillian Smith is another UCSC alum who is now at WPI and does work on games and craft. The WPI IMGD program is an interesting group.
• Arnav Jhala at UNC Raleigh was on my dissertation committee at UCSC and there are a few other people there doing interesting things.
• Ian Horswill at Northwestern University does a lot of cool stuff involving logic programming and games/AI.
• Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera at the University of Utah does stuff with AI and game design.
• David Thue at Carleton University (in Ottawa, Canada) does interesting stuff with AI and interactive narrative, particularly for experience management.
• Fox Harrell in CSAIL (and also CMS) at MIT does work on virtual identities. T.L. Taylor at MIT also does really cool work, including around streaming platforms like Twitch.
• Tracy Fullerton at USC and the masters program there in game design has a very good reputation.
• Josh McCoy at UC Davis works on social simulation games, and was a fellow UCSC student.
• Mike Treanor at American University does work on game design and procedural rhetoric.
• Ben Samuel at the University of New Orleans does work that involves procedural generation, shared human/computer authorship, and theater.
• Sercan Şengün (who I worked with as a post-doc at MIT) is a professor at University of Central Florida and does work on virtual identity and game design.
• Max Kreminski is yet another former fellow UCSC PhD student; now an Assistant Professor at Cornell Tech. Max does work on mixed-initiative creative tools for game design & making.

People Without Graduate Labs

People on this list don’t necessarily have their own research lab that you can join as a graduate student, but they’ve done intensely interesting work and I bet some of them might in a few years. Some of them are also part of existing labs that you could join to be working alongside them. (Most of these people are fellow UCSC students).

• Kate Compton was a fellow student at UCSC and does amazing work. She’s was a Professor of Instruction at Northwestern University (same place as Ian Horswill) but now does research for LEGO. She does amazing work on bots of all kinds and human-controlled PCG, i.e., casual creators.
• Michael Cook is a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London, but I’m not sure whether he works with graduate students or not. His ideas are very cool, if you’re interested in looking overseas that’s a place I’d think about.
• James Ryan has made some extremely cool simulationist narratives, but currently works on “AI Alignment.”
• Joe Osborn is a professor at Pomona College and does really cool work on AI for game design and formal representations of games.
• April Grow is an Assistant Professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She does work on AI embroidery and other computational crafts. She might supervise masters students but as far as I’m aware her institution does not offer PhD degrees.
• Adam Summerville is a professor at Cal Poly Pomona and does cool work on AI for game and level design, using deep learning and other sophisticated AI techniques. (Cal Poly Pomona has a masters program but no PhD programs as far as I’m aware.)
• Danielle Olson is an AI/ML Human Factors Researcher at Apple. She was a PhD student at MIT working with Fox Harrell when I did my postdoc there, and she did work on virtual identity and virtual reality.
• Pablo Jose Ortiz-Lampier is another MIT PhD student working with Fox who is interested in role-playing games and procedural rhetoric. He completed his PhD in 2021, and I don’t know what he’s doing now.
• Stacey Mason was a PhD student at UCSC contemporary with me who does great work on hypertext and link-based narratives, as well as other computational narrative and interactive fiction work. She has since worked in the game industry and has now founded Storymason Media.
• Jacob Garbe completed his PhD at UCSC in 2020 and does very cool work on generative narrative and deeply interactive fiction, sometimes including aspects of augmented reality. Not sure exactly where he is now.
• Melanie Dickinson is another former UCSC PhD student who works on expressive simulation (more cool AI & PCG stuff). She currently works in the games industry.
• Noor Shaker was at Aalborg University Copenhagen did great work on procedural content generation. She now works in biological/pharmaceutical AI at SpatialX in Pittsburgh, PA.
• Theresa Jean Tanenbaum was a professor at UC Irvine until 2025 who has done interesting work on the demographics of virtual spaces and in-game identity. I’m not sure whether she’ll end up back in academia or not.

PhD Students

These people are a little further from mentorship positions, but might be interesting people to talk to about their experience in graduate school, and you can also look at their CVs to see what kinds of research people are doing in games studies today.

• Cale Passmore is a PhD student at the University of Saskatchewan, and does awesome work on game communities and representation in virtual spaces.

Special Mention

These people aren’t in academia and I don’t expect them to be, but I’m listing them here so that when I update this page I remember to check in on what they’re doing.

• Aaron Reed was a fellow UCSC PhD student and is an independent artist and author of text games (both digital and tabletop) as well as books about text games.