Celia Pearce/Biography

Celia Pearce is a game designer, artist, author, curator, teacher, and researcher specializing in multiplayer gaming and virtual worlds, independent, art, and alternative game genres, as well as games and gender. She currently holds a position as Associate Professor of Game Design at Northeastern University in Boston, and is the co-founder and Festival Chair of IndieCade, an international independent game festival and showcase series. Dr. Pearce began designing interactive attractions and exhibitions in 1983, and has held academic appointments since 1998. Her game designs include the award-winning virtual reality attraction Virtual Adventures(for Iwerks and Evans & Sutherland) and the Purple Moon Friendship Adventure Cards for Girls. More recently she has been developing art and experimental games under the auspices of Paidia Studios, formed at Northeastern University in 2014; the studio’s games have been shown at festivals and events including the Boston Festival of Independent Games, SIGGRAPH Gallery, and Come Out & Play. Previously she worked at Georgia Tech, where she directed the Experimental Game Lab and the Emergent Game Group. She is the author or co-author of numerous papers and book chapters, as well as The Interactive Book (Macmillan 1997) and Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (MIT 2009), and Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method (Princeton 2012), along with Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, and T.L. Taylor, and co-editor of volume Meet Me at the Fair: A World’s Fair Reader (CMU-ETC 2014), along with Laura Hollengreen, Rebecca Rouse and Bobby Schweizer. She has also curated new media, virtual reality, and game exhibitions, including XYZ: Alternative Voices in Game Design at the Museum of Design Atlanta, the first exhibition devoted to women’s contribution to game design. She was also a co-founder of the Ludica women’s game collective. She received her Ph.D. in 2006 from SMARTLab Centre, then at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London.