Rate My Professor Nadav Lipkin

Nadav Lipkin, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor and Chair of the Communication, Media & Technology department at La Roche University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He earned his Ph.D. from the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University in 2016. His doctoral dissertation, titled "Agents at Work: Decision Making Capacity and Creative Labor in Network Society," explores decision-making and creative labor within networked environments. Prior to his current role, Lipkin was a doctoral student at Rutgers, where he contributed to research on media studies and game production.

Lipkin's research specializations center on labor practices in independent media production communities, with a particular emphasis on independent videogames, creative labor, and decision-making processes within labor networks. His scholarship examines the political-economic conditions of independent game development, including the "Indiepocalypse"—a term describing economic turmoil due to overproduction in the indie market on platforms like PC. In his 2019 article "The Indiepocalypse: the Political-Economy of Independent Game Development Labor in Contemporary Indie Markets," published in Game Studies, Lipkin analyzes developer motivations amid worsening conditions, drawing from interviews with the New York City indie community and highlighting self-exploitation and market dynamics. Earlier, his 2013 publication "Examining Indie's Independence: The Meaning of 'Indie' Games, the Politics of Production, and Mainstream Cooptation" in Loading... journal traces the evolving definition of "indie," its ideological underpinnings, and the impact of mainstream appropriation on developer protest through production. He also authored the chapter "Controller Controls: Haptics, Ergon, Teloi and the Production of Affect in the Video Game Text" in Ctrl-Alt-Play: Essays on Control in Video Games. At La Roche University, Lipkin teaches courses including Introduction to Game Studies, which covers game nature, player engagement, industry economics, gender issues, and violence relations, and Games, Culture and Society, enabling students to design games and apply gamification principles.