Judith Pintar

Research focus

Game studies, gameful pedagogies, edu-larp, narrative design, propaganda, suggestibility, and misinformation, Southeastern European Studies.

Biography

Pintar is a teaching professor at the iSchool and serves as the director of the Game Studies and Design Program. She is a sociologist and game designer whose research and teaching interests include narrative design, game studies, and gameful pedagogies, which she pursues through the E-Literatures & Literacies Lab (EL3).

Courses currently teaching

Office hours

By appointment, please contact professor

Publications & Papers

Pintar, J. & S.J. Lynn. 2008. Hypnosis: A brief history. Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley.

Pintar, J. 2020. The Valley Between Us: Narrative manipulation and information bias in the racial segregation of Milwaukee. In W. Aspray and M. Ocepek (Eds.), Deciding Where to Live: Information Studies on Where to Live in America. (pp. 177-210). Rowman & Littlefield.

Pintar, J. 2021. Stories from the Other Notebook: The poetics of encounter in post-war Croatia. In W. Leggett and I.F. Leggett (Eds.), Field Stories: Teaching the Relevance of Anthropology in the 21st Century. (pp. 23-38). Lexington Press.

Pintar, J. 2022. Not Your Grandmother’s Family Tree: Technology-mediated kinship & practices of privacy in genetic-genealogy networks. In W. Aspray (Ed.), Information Issues for Older Americans. (pp. 221-246). Rowman & Littlefield.

Pintar, J. & D. Hopping. 2023. Information Sciences: The basics. Oxford: Routledge.

Pintar, J. 2023. Invisible, Aesthetic, and Enrolled Listeners across Storytelling Modalities: Immersive preference as situated player type. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231206505.

Pintar, J. & L. Bievenue. 2024. Playful by Design: A third space community of practice for game studies & design. International Journal of Games and Social Impact. 2(1), 8-27.

Pintar, J., C. Richardson, A. Choi, J. Fuller, D.A. Hopping, M. Mecolli, and R. Oshe.. 2025. Course Design for Well-being: Towards a students’ bill of rights. International Journal of Games and Social Impact. 27 pages. Accepted for publication.

Presentations

Pintar, J. 2020. The Problem of Innocence: Suicide in the films of Vinko Brešan, Goran Paskaljević, and Pjer Zalica. Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Meetings, Washington D.C. Online.

Pintar, J. 2021. Chatbots, Deepfakes & the Agency of the Dead. Witnessing and Worlding Beyond the Human: An Interdisciplinary and Interspecies Conversation. Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois. Online.

Pintar, J. 2021. Distributed Memories: CompuServe’s Gamer’s Forum and the Halcyon Days of the Adventure Game Toolkit. Electronic Literature Organization 2021 Platform (Post?) Pandemic Conference, Aarhus University, Denmark. Online.

Pintar, J. 2021. Taking Embodied Learning Online: Table-top roleplay to teach propaganda and media manipulation. Europe’s Past, Present, and Future: Utopias and Dystopias. Council for European Studies International Conference for Europeanists. Online.

Hopping, D.A. and J. Pintar. 2022. Gameful Pedagogy: Towards a Students’ Bill of Rights. Playful by Design: Transformative Approaches to Game Studies, Universidade Lusófona, Porto, Portugal.

Pintar, J. 2023. Invisible to Embodied: Understanding Immersive Preferences as Situated Player Types. Storytelling in Immersive Media, MIX 2023, London, British Museum.

Pintar, J. 2023. The Appeal of an Endless Horizon: Teaching narrative design inside a massive multi-authored sandbox. Storytelling in Immersive Media, MIX 2023, London, British Museum.

Pintar J. 2024. Why Wikis Work: Integrating the digital and the physical in collaborative and studio-based learning. Playful by Design: Challenges in the era of digital education. Universidade Lusófona, Lisbon, Portugal.

Pintar J. 2024. Automated Persuasions: Reconsidering the power of suggestion in the era of AI. Propaganda and Emerging Technologies, Information Society Project, Yale Law School.