Ian Bogost, assistant professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Tech, is a videogame researcher and designer. He teaches in the undergraduate program in Computational Media and the graduate program in Digital Media.

Bogost is interested videogames as cultural artifacts, particularly in how we critique games alongside other media like literature, film, and art; and how games make arguments. He is the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press), Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press), co-editor (with Matteo Bittanti) of Ludologica Retro: Vintage Arcade Games 1972-1984 (Costa & Nolan), and author of more than fifty articles, book chapters, and conference presentations on videogames, digital media, literature, and film. Bogost is also co-editor (with Gonzalo Frasca) at Water Cooler Games, the online resource about videogames with an agenda, and he is a regular columnist at videogame trade publication Gamasutra. Currently he is finishing a book on the Atari 2600 and a videogame about the politics of nutrition.

Bogost is also the founder of two companies, Persuasive Games, a game studio that designs, builds, and distributes electronic games for persuasion, instruction, and activism; and Open Texture, a publisher of cross-media education and enrichment materials for families.

Bogost’s videogames about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited at venues including Laboral Centro de Arte, Fournos Centre for Digital Culture, Eyebeam Center, Slamdance Guerilla Game Festival, The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and the Israeli Center for Digital Art. Bogost was co-designer of the first official U.S. presidential election videogame (for Howard Dean, 2003), and he is especially interested in the ways videogames can change the future of politics and public policy.

Bogost has over a decade of experience in digital media production for film, music, games, advertising, and business. Prior to joining He holds a BA degree in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, and an MA and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles.