About the Course

Taught by Prof. Tanya Krzywinska and Steve Jackson, Brunel University's new MA programme "Digital Games: Theory and Design", is a cutting edge course fusing practical game design teaching with serious adademic study of games and their socio-cultural contexts. Currently in its second year, the course combines teaching from industry veterans and dedicated game theory academics, and attracts a diverse group of students with backgrounds ranging from Computer Science to Literary studies. Current students have had two game designs critiqued, written and presented close readings of specific titles and completed studies of various aspects of games and game culture.

Steve Jackson is a Co-Founder – along with industry legend Peter Molyneux - of Lionhead Studios Ltd, developers of Black & White, Fable and The Movies. Steve was a director of the company until its purchase as a Microsoft Game Studio in 2006. He was also a co-founder, with Ian Livingstone, of Games Workshop Ltd, the world's largest company specialising in Fantasy Role-Playing and Miniatures Games. Though Games Workshop was originally created to introduce the Dungeons & Dragons hobby to the UK, it is now better known as creators, publishers and retailers of the Warhammer series of tabletop miniatures games

Steve is co-author (with Ian Livingstone) of the Fighting Fantasy series of interactive gamebooks published originally by Penguin Books and now by Icon Books. This series of solo role-playing adventure books comprises over 70 titles and worldwide sales exceed 15 million. He was also designer of the first interactive telephone game, F.I.S.T. (Fantasy Interactive Adventures by Telephone). And in 1993 Steve won the title of 'Bester Europaischer Einzelspieler' (Best Individual Player) at the prestigious 'Intergame' tournament held at the world's largest games exhibition, held annually in Essen, Germany.

Tanya Krzywinska is Deputy Head for Postgraduate Study in the Schools of Arts. She is the author of A Skin for Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in Film (Flicks Books, 2000), Sex and the Cinema (Wallflower, 2006), co-author with Geoff King of Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogames Forms and Contexts (IB Taurus, 2006), and co-editor of ScreenPlay: cinema/videogames/interfaces (Wallflower, 2002) and Videogame,Player,Text (MUP, 2007) and has been guest editor of an edition of Games and Culture (Sage) devoted to the analysis of World of Warcraft. Tanya is President of DiGRA, and is on the editorial board of the journals Game Studies and Games and Culture. Her next book project is: Fantasy Worlds: A cross-media study of the aesthetic, formal and interpolative strategies of virtual worlds in popular media. She is an avid MMoRPG player and can be found playing truant in WoW or LOTRO.