Duncan Buell, Principal Investigator, is the Chair of the Department of Computer Science Engineering at the University of South Carolina. His research interests include pure mathematics, pattern recognition within data, and facilitating undergraduate research. Dr. Buell is quite experienced in building and delivering serious games for education and training. In the past, he has worked with faculty working in Law and Business to develop game models for learning. For the Humanities Gaming Institute, Dr. Buell will lead the game development team.

Randall Cream, Co-Principal Investigator, is Associate Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of South Carolina. His research interests include educational use of games, data mining and behavior modeling, and critical pedagogy. Dr. Cream has experience in serious games research, using gameplay decisions to model cognitive impact of the game. In the past, he has worked with students from across the university building learning games and studying causal games as learning moments. For the Humanities Gaming Institute, Dr. Cream will coordinate the game development team and the theory and design team.

Heidi Rae Cooley, Co-Principal Investigator, is a theory-oriented new media scholar in the Department of Art/Media Arts and Film and Media Studies Program (University of South Carolina). Interested in the articulation of poiesis (creative production), aesthesis (sensory knowing), and ethos (practice of living), she will invite Institute participants to conceptualize serious gaming in terms of an ethical engagement, one that is attuned to the inter-relations among technology, sociality, and living bodies. Dr. Cooley will facilitate several of the reading discussions, participate in the discussions of game design, and enjoy the game play. Drawing on a notion of “eco-logical praxis” (Felix Guattari), she will suggest that gaming interpreted and pursued along these lines evolves in a dynamic, more intuitive manner because it recognizes and attends to our condition of always being in-relation. Points for discussion drawn from this philosophical perspective will strive to imagine serious games as the condition of possibility for destabilizing the politicization of life attributed to modern governance of populations.

Simon Tarr, Co-Principal Investigator, is a media practitioner and theorist in the Art Department’s Media Arts and Studio Arts division at the University of South Carolina. Prof. Tarr will be providing crucial design support for the Institute participants as they work toward developing their own serious games. Well-versed in several of the gaming platforms to be introduced, as well as familiar with the aesthetics of animation and gaming, he will challenge participants to think more complexly about the interface of their games. Moreover, given his theorizing of interactivity, he will invite participants to imagine serious gaming as a mode of performative enactment of ideas.