Patrick Jagoda

Patrick Jagoda is a digital media theorist and game designer. He is Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Patrick is also the co-founder (with Melissa Gilliam) of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab, as well as Executive Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry and the faculty director of the Weston Game Lab. Patrick’s books include Network Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016, with Michael Maizels), and Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020, forthcoming). Patrick has co-directed several alternate reality games, including Speculation (2012), the parasite (2017), and Terrarium (2019). Information about his books, essays, and collaborative game projects appears on his website.

Patrick’s current project, Story Lab: Narrative Methods for a Transmedia Era, is a collaborative experiment in the public humanities and multimedia publication that explores storytelling-based research. Beyond entertainment and art, networked and digital media formats have introduced applications of storytelling as a transdisciplinary method. Story Lab examines how emergent forms in the arts and humanities — digital storytelling, body mapping, transmedia collage, speculative design, narrative videogames, and alternate reality games — can influence the social and medical sciences.

Photo Credit: Jimmy Boratyn, Shot Time Productions