Hi, I'm Ian Bogost. I am a designer, philosopher, critic, and researcher who focuses on computational media—videogames in particular. I'm also an author and an entrepreneur. I am a professor at Georgia Tech (a university), a Founding Partner at Persuasive Games (a videogame studio), and a Board Member at Open Texture (an educational publisher).

In my academic life, I am Professor at The Georgia Institute of Technology, where I work in the School of Literature Communication and Culture. I am also affiliated faculty at the College of Computing's GVU Center. At Georgia Tech, I teach in the undergraduate program in Computational Media and I serve as Director of the graduate program in Digital Media.

My research focuses on videogames as cultural artifacts. In particular, I'm interested in contextualizng games in the long history of human expression (game criticism), in how games make arguments (game rhetoric), and in the relationship between computer hardware and expression. These three subjects are the respective topics of my recent books: Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press 2006), Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press 2007), Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press 2009, co-authored with Nick Montfort), Newsgames: Journalism at Play (MIT Press 2010, co-authored with Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer), and the forthcoming How To Do Things with Videogames (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Much of my work concerns the uses of videogames outside entertainment, including politics, advertising, learning, and art. But I'm also very interested in mainstream commercial videogames and historical approaches to videogames, as well as experimental, independent, and artistic games. I write frequently in the videogame trade press.

More recently, I've been looking at on the way hardware and software platforms influence creative practice. Nick Montfort and I co-edit a book series on this topic called Platform Studies, and we've written the first book in that series, on the Atari, mentioned above. I'm fascinated to the point of obsession with the Atari, and I often use it in teaching, research, and in my own artistic practice.

Through my work with platforms, I've also developed an interest in new trends in philosophy, particularly speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. My philosophical study of the phenomenology of objects, Alien Phenomenology, will be published by Open Humanities Press (and available open-access) in 2011.

I am the co-founder of Persuasive Games, an award-winning independent videogame studio that makes games about social and political issues. Our work covers a wide variety of topics not usually found in videogames, including airport security, disaffected copy store workers, global petroleum market, Christmas shopping, tort reform, suburban errands, and pandemic flu. Our games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally at venues including Laboral Centro de Arte (Madrid), Fournos Centre for Digital Culture (Athens), Eyebeam Center (New York), Slamdance Guerilla Game Festival (Park City), the Israeli Center for Digital Art (Holon) and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne).

We also create games for advertising, learning, corporate training, and politics. Our clients have included Dominos Pizza, Cisco, Chrysler/Jeep, and Cold Stone Creamery. We've also focused on "newsgames," a genre that blends videogames with editorial cartoons. In mid 2007 we published games with The New York Times, who ran our games in the op-ed section of their online paper.

I'm also a co-founder of a small media publishing company called Open Texture. We are a small, independent publisher of books and media, focusing on new approaches to classic forms. From helping children learn Ancient Greek to bringing poetry to videogames, we're reinventing familiar ideas for the twenty-first century.

We've published an ancient Greek curriculum suitable for anyone, from kids as young as 2nd or 3rd grade up through adults. I leant my voice to the Elementary Greek series, reading the audio companions for all three years of the course.

More recently, we've started publishing independent videogames, starting with my own title A Slow Year. We're particularly interested in bringing work to market that offers an alternative to current trends in digital distribution, focusing instead on the creation of thoughtful, deliberate physical products.

In the past I've worked in financial services, graphic design, advertising, technology, business consulting, and entertainment. I was CTO of an interactive studio in Los Angeles during "Bubble 1.0." Before I settled down to do my dissertation on videogame criticism, I was a scholar of poetry, mostly European modern, contemporary American, and Greek Lyric. I have 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.