Judith Pintar presentation

Senior Lecturer Judith Pintar will give the presentation, "The Appeal of an Endless Horizon: Collaborative Game Design as Meta-hodological Play."

Abstract: Theoretical work in game studies is increasingly being taken up by scholars of social informatics and science and technology studies (STS). In this presentation I address collaborative game design as a central area of interest in both my teaching and research which sheds light on two broader questions related to knowledge creation within sociotechnical networks. First, how do shared narratives shape information flow, boundary processes, and user/player practices in the spaces (physical and digital) where knowledge is collaboratively made? Secondly, how can teaching world creation in the game design process help students to understand that the narrative-empowered rules governing our real-life social worlds, particularly those which reproduce structural inequalities, have been designed, and can be changed? 

Pintar received a Ph.D. in sociology from Illinois. She has been a senior lecturer in the iSchool since August 2018 and an Informatics affiliate since 2015, during which time she was also a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Prior to that, she had been a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, where she received the Alpha Lambda Delta Freshman Honor Society Campus Award for Outstanding Teacher of Freshman. She established the Electronic Literatures & Literacies Lab (EL3), at Informatics, to encourage collaboration at the intersection of the digital humanities and game studies, and she is the director of Playful by Design, an EL3 initiative now completing its second year of funding through the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH). In a collaboration between Informatics, the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning and the Siebel Center for Design, Playful by Design is working towards the development of interdisciplinary game studies programs on this campus. Pintar is also a game designer and the author of canonical works of interactive fiction. She sits on the national board of directors of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF) where she chairs the education committee.