Dr. Ian Bogost is an author, an award-winning game designer, and an interdisciplinary scholar. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he holds faculty positions in the School of Arts & Sciences, the Sam Fox School of Art & Design, and the McKelvey School of Engineering. At WashU, Bogost is also the Co-Executive Director of the Office of Public Scholarship and a Provost’s Fellow in Interdisciplinary Initiatives. Prior to joining Washington University, Bogost spent almost 20 years on the faculty of Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was appointed in the colleges of liberal arts, computing, design, and business.
In addition to his academic life, Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Writer at The Atlantic.
He is author or co-author of ten books:
Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism
Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System
Newsgames: Journalism at Play
How To Do Things with Videogames
Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to Be a Thing
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The Geek’s Chihuahua: Living With Apple
How To Talk About Videogames
and Play Anything
Bogost’s next book, to be published by Simon & Schuster, is about gratification, what it is, and how to find more of it by learning to engage more joyfully and deliberately with the material world in an age of efficiency and automation.
Beyond his own books, Bogost is also the co-editor of the Platform Studies book series at MIT Press, and the Object Lessons book and essay series, published by The Atlantic and Bloomsbury.
Bogost is well videogames about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, consumer debt, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, pandemic flu, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited or held in collections internationally, at venues including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Telfair Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, the Laboral Centro de Arte, and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
His independent games include Cow Clicker, a Facebook game send-up of Facebook games that was the subject of a Wired magazine feature, and A Slow Year, a collection of videogame poems for Atari VCS, Windows, and Mac, which won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at the 2010 IndieCade Festival.
Bogost holds a Bachelors degree in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, and a Masters and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA.
Contact
I’m always happy to hear from you. Some tips before contacting me:
- Usually the best way to reach me is by email.
- I enjoy giving interviews or opinions to the press, but if you’re a journalist on deadline please send me specific questions so I can help you.
- I am available for consulting and speaking engagements. Feel free to contact me for more information, but please don’t send me unsolicited game or product ideas.
- I get a lot of requests, so please forgive me if I can’t respond.
All that said, here’s how to reach me:
At Washington University:
At Persuasive Games:
Curriculum Vitae
You can find my recent CV here (updated approximately once per quarter).