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EVL Alumnus Lindsay Grace Profiled in the UIC Magazine Spring 2020 Edition
Participants: Lindsay Grace
URL: http://www.uicmagazine.org/uic/spring_2020/MobilePagedReplica.action?pm=2&folio=38#pg40 Good Gamer Pearl Shin (UIC Magazine, Spring 2020) Lindsay Grace, MFA ’09 - Knight Chair of Interactive Media at the University of Miami (Fla.) School of Communication - has turned his passion for video games into a career, and in the process, created innovative games with a positive social impact. WHAT LED YOU TO GAME DESIGN? I had an off-again/on-again romance with games until I became a web developer. Then I really started to see the long-term potential for games to offer positive social impact and engagement. HOW DID YOUR TIME AT UIC CONTRIBUTE TO YOUR WORK? I took my first game course at UIC’s Electronic Visualization Lab. I wasn’t the best student, but I was eager, and I found UIC to be an invigorating environment, especially when you mixed arts-focused students and faculty with engineers and computer scientists, as EVL did. IN WHAT WAYS DO YOU THINK GAMES HAVE A SOCIETAL IMPACT? Play helps us learn; it helps us be creative and serves many other functions. Games help shape our play, by giving us new challenges and frameworks. So, when we create educational games, we tap into the innate propensities of play to produce social good. I find it rewarding when teaching opens whole new perspectives for my students - the moment they go from media consumers to producers and critics. They can peek behind the curtain, understand how things work and identify how they can be improved. Date: June 10, 2020 |
