Rate My Professor Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a Professor of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the Baskin School of Engineering. He earned a PhD in 2006 and an MFA in 2003 from Brown University, an MA in 2000 from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, and a BA in 1994 from the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands. From 2008 to 2025, Wardrip-Fruin co-directed the Expressive Intelligence Studio, a technical and cultural research group, with Michael Mateas. The studio graduated more than 40 PhD and MFA students, many of whom are now engaged in creative production, scholarly research, and teaching.

Wardrip-Fruin's collaborative, interdisciplinary research ranges across game studies, software studies, electronic literature, interactive narrative, social simulation, game generation, and game scholarship tools. His interests include new models of storytelling in games, how games express ideas through play, the literary possibilities of computational media, and how cultural software can be preserved, discovered, and cited. He has authored or co-edited six books with the MIT Press, including The New Media Reader (2003, co-edited with Nick Montfort), which has been influential in the development of interdisciplinary digital media curricula; First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004, co-edited with Pat Harrigan); Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (2009); Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2010, co-edited with Pat Harrigan); Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009, co-edited with Pat Harrigan); and 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). Wardrip-Fruin has co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications. His collaborative playable media projects, including Screen and Talking Cure, have been shown by institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Krannert Art Museum, Hammer Museum, and a wide variety of festivals and conferences. He is a HEVGA Fellow and co-edits the Software Studies series for the MIT Press.