Learning Games Initiative - What is the Learning Games Initiative (LGI)?

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New LGI member Max Lieberman is student in the Educational Technology Master’s program at the University of Arizona. He is a freelance web designer (www.crankybeardesign.com) and blogs about serious games and education at http://boomculture.blogspot.com. He's worked in journalism, public relations and corporate communications, and lived most recently in Ohio, Boston and Philadelphia. He came to the University of Arizona intending to use the Educational Technology program to study education, instructional technology and programming, so that he could one day work with school systems, nonprofit organizations and other groups interested in creating custom games. In the past, he has written and done scripting for mods of games including Marathon (www.marathonrubicon.com) and Neverwinter Nights, and has always enjoyed drawing connections between seemingly disparate interests. Welcome aboard, Max!

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NB: As of December 31, 2008, the LGI site will be undergoing a major renovation. Over the next couple of months, virtually all of the areas of the site will be taken down, updated, and remounted. As a result, these areas will be intermittently inaccessible. We will do our best to minimize the inconvenience to everyone by conducting these upgrades between the hours of midnight and 5 am. If you have a pressing need for something on the site, feel free to contact the site administrator or one of the Co-Directors. To keep track of the upgrades, check out the forum area devoted to website maintenance.
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In 1999, a small group of people in Tucson, Arizona inaugurated a research collective called the Learning Games Initiative (LGI). The purpose of the collective was to examine computer games (arcade, console, PC, and handheld) in order to better understand their cultural and pedagogical import. LGI has since grown into an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research group: not only are numerous University of Arizona departments represented (by faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students), but so too are scholars and researchers from a dozen other U.S. and international universities, as well all sorts of community organization and business leaders.

Over the past ten years, LGI has generated many productive and well-received collaborations, all of which focus on at least one of three guiding principles: Study-Teach-Build. Our members have led workshops at national conferences; presented numerous academic talks; written books, book chapters, journal articles, and other scholarly materials; organized the first annual Academic Gaming Symposium; and created an online game studies bibliography that contains well over two-thousand entries. In addition, LGI founded the International Digital Media and Arts Association's special interest group on game studies, and we are currently in the process of building a new game, Looter!, a demo of which will soon be available.

LGI's research and teaching are designed to fashion bridges among departments, academic and community organizations, and educational institutions around the world. Feel free to explore this site, and contact us if you'd like to participate in our projects or to let us know about your similar work!

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