Campus Directory

Pronouns he/him

Division Baskin School of Engineering

Department/College/Unit Computational Media

Title Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Center for Computational Experience
Digital Arts and New Media

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise Video Games, Game Design, Game Studies
Fiction
Digital Media
Digital Humanities
Digital Arts
Game Studies
Game Technology
Game Design
Artificial Intelligence
New Media

Web Site

Primary Office Location Engineering Building 2
Room 271

Mail Stop SOE3

Biography, Education and Training

• Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a Professor of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His collaborative, interdisciplinary research ranges across game studies, software studies, electronic literature, interactive narrative, social simulation, game generation, and game scholarship tools — resulting in more than 100 co-authored, peer-reviewed publications. His collaborative computational media works have been shown by institutions ranging from the Whitney Museum of American Art to the IndieCade Festival. He has published six books with the MIT Press, including How Pac-Man Eats (2020). His most recent book is Animal Crossing: New Horizons — Can a Game Take Care of Us? (University of Chicago Press, 2025). With Michael Mateas, he co-directed the Expressive Intelligence Studio (a technical and cultural research group) from 2008 to 2025. The studio graduated more than 40 PhD and MFA students, many of whom are active in creative production, scholarly research, and teaching students of their own. He is a HEVGA Fellow and co-edits the Software Studies series from the MIT Press.
• Noah holds a BA from the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands, an MA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, an MFA from the Literary Arts program at Brown University, and a self-designed PhD through the Special Graduate Study mechanism at Brown. He is also a father and husband, a Quaker, a Henson/Muppet fan, and disabled.

Research Interests

• New models of storytelling in games, software studies, how games express ideas through play, digital literature, how games can help broaden understanding of the power of computation, game and software preservation, discovery, and citation