May 9, 2013

University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) Professor Dr. Noah Wardrip-Fruin co-directs ones of the world’s largest technical research groups on gaming at his University’s Expressive Intelligence Studio. His research explores new models of storytelling in games, how games express ideas through play, and how games can help broaden one’s understanding of computation.

Dr. Wardrip-Fruin’s interdisciplinary projects have attracted international attention in the academic, private and public sectors, winning him support from the National Science Foundation, Microsoft and Google and presentations at the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. He has authored or edited five books on games and digital media for the MIT Press – most recently Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (2009).

The Digital Media program and Professor Jichen Zhu will host Dr. Wardrip-Fruin for a public lecture Tuesday, May 14 at 5 p.m. in the URBN Center, Room 239. Discussion topics will include his experiences with game-based research. Dr. Wardrip-Fruin will spend the rest of his visit in one-on-one workshops with students and faculty.

Digital Media Assistant Professor Dr. Jichen Zhu is supporting Dr. Wardrip-Fruin’s visit through her Drexel Career Development Award, which she awarded for her research project, “Envisioning the Future of Computer Game Design.” The University selects only a handful of projects for Career Development Awards, which are designed to help faculty increase their exposure to colleagues at other institutions who can be collaborators and role models while introducing outside scholars to faculty at Drexel.