Lindsay Grace


Lindsay Grace is a video game designer, artist, professor, and writer who currently lives in Miami, FL. He is best known as an academic game designer who employs critical design. He is the 2019 Games for Change Vanguard Award winner. He serves as director of the American University Game Lab and Studio, which includes the Fake News game, Factitious and the NPR game Commuter Challenge. In 2013 his game, Wait was inducted in the Games for Change Hall of Fame as one of the five most significant games for change in the last decade. Created in 2009, players must navigate a 3D world that fades away when the player moves, and grows more detailed as they wait. If players fail to move for long, the world also recedes. Other notable games include Big Huggin', a game controlled by a giant stuffed animal that players must hug to meet game goals. Big Huggin' was Kickstarted with notable support from Jane McGonigal and selected for the ACM SIGGRAPH's Aesthetics of Gameplay Show.
Grace has created more than 15 independent games, acting as the sole designer, developer, and artist. He has written articles about this process and supports such activity as one of 8 executive board members organizing the Global Game Jam. He also exhibits art internationally and curates exhibits. He co-curated the Indie Arcade 2014 and 2016 events at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Lindsay Grace has publicly opposed the link between video games and violence.

Career

Grace is Knight Chair at the University of Miami. He is Vice President of both the Global Game Jam and the Higher Education Video Game Alliance.
Grace lead the games program at American University School of Communication in Washington D.C. Grace has published more than 45 academic articles since 2009.
He was the C. Michael Armstrong Professor of Creative Arts at Miami University/Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami University where he ran the Persuasive Play Laboratory. He taught video game design, interaction design and theory at American University.
He publishes writing and video games that relate the concept of "philosophy of software" and Critical Design as practice in the arts and games. This practice falls between captology and critical design.
The Critical Gameplay games employ theories in the design of video games and society. The work for Critical Gameplay has been shown in more than 15 cities including Athens, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Vancouver, Taipei, Chicago, Paris and Istanbul. It is internationally recognized.
Grace's independent video game publications include Penguin Roll, Zombie Master, Polyglot Cubed and several games under the Mindtoggle Software company. He also writes about games and independent game-making. According to App Annie statistics, his Game Black Like Me was a top 100 game in 3 countries by number of daily downloads.
In 2008, Grace created Polyglot Cubed which was recognized at the Meaningful play conference at Michigan State, was a serious games showcase finalist at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference IITSEC, and the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology. Gamasutra ran an article about it. His research includes algorithmic music generation using visual emergent behavior.
He is an alumnus of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois as well as two degrees from Northwestern University.

Select publications and exhibits

2005

Grace, Lindsay D.. Doing Things with Games: Social Impact Through Play. CRC Press. p. 127.. Retrieved August 22, 2019.