Katie Salen is an Associate Professor in the Design and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design and co-author of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, a textbook on game design, as well as the Game Design Reader, both from MIT Press. Interested in games as both aesthetic and cultural forms, she has developed a critical practice that includes designing games of many different types, from big games, to downloadable games, to conference games and game-hybrids that take gaming as a point of departure. She writes extensively on game design, design education, and game culture, including authoring some of the first dispatches from the previously hidden world of machinima. Katie has worked on a range of projects for Microsoft, Gamelab, the Hewlett Foundation, the Design Institute, mememe Productions, Salty Features, the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and others. She is a former member of Playground, a design team focused on large-scale, experimental, urban games. Playground has been recognized as helping to pioneer a genre of games know as Big Games-large-scale urban games that engage players in activity both in physical and online space‹and recently explored another new genre of games-Slow Games-in the 25th anniversary issue of Metropolis magazine. Slow Games take 25 years to play.
Katie is currently working as Lead Designer on a digital game designed to teach game design to middle school and high school youth. It is supported through a 1.2 million dollar MacArthur Foundation grant, produced in conjunction with Gamelab and GAAPS, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is concurrently editing a book on the Ecology of Games for the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning, set for publication in 2007.
Katie was a recent recipient of the ISEA/ZeroOne CADRE Laboratory Residency with Marina Zurkow and Nancy Nowacek. Together they created "Karaoke Ice," an ice-cream truck turned mobile karaoke unit deployed to transform the city streets of San Jose. She is also working with a talented team on the second iteration of Squidball, a large-scale, real world game involving helium-filled weather balloons, cel phones, and motion capture cameras.
Katie is a contributing writer for RES magazine, and worked as an animator on Richard Linklater's critically acclaimed animated feature Waking Life, as well as two music videos for the band Zero 7 (In the Waiting Line; Destiny). In 2003-04 she partnered with screenwriter and director Hampton Fancher (Minus Man; Bladerunner) on a project for the XEN division of Microsoft to develop an animated storytelling experience distributed through Xbox Live. She teaches and lectures widely, and has helped curate programs at the Lincoln Center, Cinematexas, ZKM, Exploding Cinema, and the Walker Art Center on machinima, the practice of creating animated films using game engines. Katie spends much of her time playing games on trains and planes in lieu of single serving meals.
