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Notable Games Researchers

Note: this was written on 2020-9-11, so by the time you read it, it will probably be out-of-date.

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 at NYU.
• Mark Riedl does interesting stuff with interactive narrative at Georgia Tech. Anne Sullivan (fellow UCSC alum) is also there, and does work on computational craft, including PCG crafts and other cool stuff.
• Jichen Zhu at Drexel 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.
• 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.
• Theresa Jean Tanenbaum is a professor at UC Irvine who has done interesting work on the demographics of virtual spaces and in-game identity.
• Sercan Şengün (who I worked with as a post-doc at MIT) is a professor at Illinois State University and does work on virtual identity and game design.

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 a Professor of Instruction at Northwestern University (same place as Ian Horswill) and does amazing work on bots of all kinds and human-controlled PCG, i.e., casual creators.
• Michael Cook is not a professor right now, but he’s a researcher in the Game AI Research Group at the Queen Mary University of London, and since his ideas are so cool, if you’re interested in looking overseas that’s a place I’d think about.
• Noor Shaker at Aalberg University Copenhagen does great work on procedural content generation. It looks like she’s a post-doc at the moment, but she might be able to put you in touch with a supervisor who is working on cool projects.
• James Ryan is a visiting professor at Carleton college (in Northfield, Minnesota, U.S.A.) and has made some extremely cool simulationist narratives.
• Joe Osborne is a professor at Pomona College and does really cool work on AI for game design and formal representations of games.
• April Grow is a lecturer at Goldsmiths University of London. She does work on AI embroidery and other computational crafts.

Ph.D. 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 Ph.D. student at the University of Saskatchewan, and does awesome work on game communities and representation in virtual spaces.
• Danielle Olson is a Ph.D. student at MIT working with Fox Harrell who does work on virtual identity and virtual reality.
• Pablo Jose Ortiz-Lampier is another MIT Ph.D. student working with Fox who is interested in role-playing games and procedural rhetoric.
• Stacey Mason is a Ph.D. student at UCSC who does great work on hypertext and link-based narratives, as well as other computational narrative and interactive fiction work.
• Jacob Garbe is just completed his Ph.D. at UCSC and does very cool work on generative narrative and deeply interactive fiction, sometimes including aspects of augmented reality. Not sure whether he’ll end up in academia or not.
• Melanie Dickinson is another UCSC Ph.D. student who works on expressive simulation (more cool AI & PCG stuff).
• Max Kreminski is yet another UCSC Ph.D. student who does work on mixed-initiative creative tools for game design & making.