Category: Blog

With 7 days left on the international application deadline to our Master programme we’ve got some great news to share! Professor Doris C. Rusch and Mischa Hießböck (DePaul University) are moving to the island and joining the department full-time, in June!

Mischa hails from a series of Austrian studios such as Game Gestalt, Sproing and Ferrytells, while Doris founded the Deep Games Laboratory at DePaul, worked at the GAMBIT Game Lab, MIT and at Vienna University of Technology. Their work represents a veritable smörgåsbord for our department’s wish list. Not just encouraging, but dragging games to be better: to talk to the human condition; to represent nuance and a range of emotions.

Rusch’s work is focused on the theory and practice of game design, particularly in regard to games that model the human experience. For example she’s made;

• Zombie Yoga a game for emotional empowerment
• Elude – a metaphorical game on depression
• For the Records – an interactive documentary that deals with young adults and mental disorders such as OCD, ADD, eating disorder and bipolar disorder and
• Soteria – Dreams as Currency, a game to teach strategies to overcome anxiety disorders.
• Doris also published the book Making Deep Games, on how to make games about the human experience using metaphor and allegory.

Join us at the Gotland Game Conference (5-6th June) to say hi and welcome them both!

An early Christmas present to our students:  Uppsala University Library has just helped us extend the GDC Vault subscription throughout 2019, and vastly expand our access to Safari Tech Books Online.

Safari Book previously held only our 100 most used course books and references, and supported a measly 5 simultaneous users – which made it practically useless as a replacement for expensive course literature when an entire class needed it at the same time. From 2019 the database will be merged into the New O’Reilly Safari Collection, with access to 40 000+ books, and unlimited simultaneous users!

GDC Vault lets you stream from the ~12000 presentations that the Game Developers Conference has uploaded so far.

You can access both from the university library database page, and they both require password A for access.