#004:Enriching Esports: Four Years of Research Findings on NASEF with Constance Steinkuehler

LevelUp Life

Constance Steinkuehler is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine where she researches culture, cognition, and learning in the context of multiplayer online videogames. She is an ADL Belfer Fellow, Chair of UCI’s Game Design and Interactive Media Program, and Co-Director of the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Center. She teaches courses on games and society, games as social platforms, research methods, and visual design. Her current projects include investigations of toxicity and extremism in online games, an audit of game company policies related to player-vs-player behavior, reasoning with misinformation, and a literature review of the impact of gaming tech on adjacent and distal fields.
Constance formerly served as Senior Policy Analyst under the Obama administration in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, advising on videogames and digital media. She is the founder of the Federal Games Guild, a working group across federal agencies using games and simulations as tools for thought, and the Higher Education Video Games Alliance, an academic non-for-profit organization of game-related programs in higher education. Her research has been funded by the Anti-Defamation League, the Samueli Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Universities of Cambridge, Wisconsin-Madison, and California-Irvine. She has published over one hundred articles and book chapters including six conference proceedings, four special journal issues, and two books. She has worked closely with the National Research Council and National Academy of Education on special reports relate to videogames, and her work has been featured in Science, Wired, USA Today, New York Times, LA Times, ABC, CBS, CNN NPR, BBC and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
In this interview, Constance tells us more about her motivation to use games for teaching, and shares lifelong experiences and insights about how she sees games can be used for learning, for motivation and for change.