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Eric Zimmerman - Professional Bio

Eric is a game designer and academic exploring the theory and practice of game design. Eric's diverse activities has made him one of the New York Observers's "Power Punks," one of Interview Magazine's "30 To Watch" and also one of International Design Magazine's ID 40 (40 influential designers). He has been working in the game industry since 1994.

Eric is the co-founder and CEO of gameLab (www.gamelab.com), a game development company based in New York City that was recently named one of 5 "Rising Star" design firms by HOW Magazine. gameLab's games, which include Diner Dash, Subway Scramble, BLiX, LOOP, LEGO Junkbot, FLUID, and Arcadia, have won awards from the Independent Games Festival, ID Magazine, Art Directors Club, ARS Electronica, and others, as well as finalist nominations in the Webby Awards and the IGDA Developers Choice Awards.

gameLab was co-founded with Peter Lee in 2000. The company is known for creating experimental games for a broad audience of non-gamers. Most of gameLab's work consists of singleplayer and multiplayer online games, although gameLab has created games in other media both on and off the computer. gameLab has worked with clients and publishers including LEGO, HBO, Microsoft, Ragdoll, Mattel, and PBS. Eric's game design work prior to gameLab includes the critically acclaimed SiSSYFiGHT 2000 (www.sissyfight.com) as well as the PC games Gearheads and The Robot Club.

Eric is the director of RE:PLAY, a series of events on game design and game culture that included an online conference and real-world conference in 1999 and book published in fall 2003 by Peter Lang Press. Eric is also the co-author of Life in the Garden, an interactive paper book he created with Nancy Nowacek. Eric has exhibited non-computer game projects in gallery and museum spaces including Artists Space and the Sara Meltzer Gallery in New York City, the Center for Contemporary Arts in Grenoble, France, and the Bellevue Museum in Seattle. He has also created several non-computer social games played by hundreds or thousands of players at conferences and events.

Eric is a published author on the topic of interactive entertainment, with recent articles and chapters appearing in publications like 21C, Merge, Zed, If/Then, Allworth Press' Art and Allure of Graphic Design, and I.D. Magazine, where he has also served on the Interactive Design Awards Jury. Eric is the co-author of Rules of Play (with Katie Salen), published my MIT Press in 2003. He has chapters appearing in books like Design Research (MIT Press 2004) and First Person (MIT Press 2003). The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, co-edited with Katie Salen, will be published later this year.

Eirc has taught game design, interactive narrative design, and related courses at MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program, New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, Parsons School of Design's MFA in Digital Technologies Program, and School of Visual Arts' Design as Author MFA Program. He has lectured widely on these subjects in the US and abroad.