Learn from professors who both teach and work in the industry, earning international recognition and awards.
Our Computer Game Design faculty work with some of the industry’s biggest names to innovate and create cutting-edge games. These award-winning educators combine practical research with mentorship to bring out the very best in our students and are frequent speakers at game conferences in the United States and around the world.
Our faculty work on games across the spectrum, from mobile to PC to the latest consoles, with industry giants like EA and Pixar. They present their work and support our students’ competition at the East Coast Game Conference (ECGC) and the Game Developers Conference (GDC). Many are also published authors who share their insights through books, scholarly articles, and global public presentations.
There are some outstanding faculty members who come from the game design industry and who really put a lot of effort into ensuring the students grow the necessary skills and abilities to succeed. We were also exposed to most aspects of the industry which has been very helpful.
Members of our faculty are entrepreneurs who offer real-world opportunities for our students, from independent study to internships to part-time positions. Students can gain real-world expertise working alongside our faculty as assistants in the Mason Game and Technology Academy (MGTA) and the Virginia Serious Games Institute (VSGI).
Game Design Faculty Achievements
Our faculty have won awards:
- Sang Nam (Director of the Computer Game Design Program) - 2010 National Teaching Scholar Award (Carnegie Foundation/Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning), the Elon Teaching Scholar Award (2010-2021), and the 2008 Wisconsin Teaching Fellow Award (University of Wisconsin Systems)
- Greg Grimsby and Eric Piccione - George Mason Teaching Award for excellence in teaching
- Seth Hudson - Teacher of Distinction awarded by George Mason University’s Stearns Center
- Kelly Nam - National Teaching Scholar awarded by the Carnegie Academy (Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning)
Our faculty have published books advancing the field of study:
- So You've Landed in a Fantasy World: How to Survive and Thrive Paperback, by Josiah Lebowitz, January 2022
- Mathematics of Game Development: A Collection of Applied Lessons (forthcoming, Spring 2022), by Jacob Enfield
- Serious Games in Personalized Learning (New Models for Design and Performance), Routledge, 2021, by Dr. Scott Martin
- Artificial Intelligence, Mixed Reality, and the Redefinition of the Classroom, Rowman & Littefield, June 2019, by Dr. Scott Martin
- The chapter called Creating personalized learning using aggregated data from students’ online conversational interactions in customized groups in: Learning Engineering for Online Education, Routledge, 2018, by Dr. Scott Martin
- Interactive Storytelling for Video Games, Focal Press; 1st edition, March 15, 2011, by Josiah Lebowitz and Kris Klug
Our faculty have worked at some of the top video game design companies:
- Activision (Eric Piccione)
- Electronic Arts (Matt Strangio, Eric Piccione and Greg Grimsby)
- Edutainment Systems LLC
- Pixar Animation Studios (Matt Strangio)
- Sega (Eric Piccione)
- Winterion Game Studios (Daniel Greenberg - owner and founder)
Our faculty members have created or contributed to such games as:
- Air Warrior II (Greg Grimsby)
- Aliens Online (Greg Grimsby)
- Alien Petshop Board Game (Greg Grimsby)
- Aurora’s Nightmare (Josiah Lebowitz)
- Coup (Robbie Dieterich)
- Dark Age of Camelot (James Casey, Greg Grimsby)
- Dungeon Keeper (James Casey)
- Eden to Green (Robbie Dieterich)
- Elite Beat Agents (Robbie Dieterich)
- EverQuest Next (Josiah Lebowitz)
- Gitarooman Lives (Robbie Dieterich)
- Imperator Online (James Casey)
- Infinity Blade Cross (Robbie Dieterich)
- Lips (Robbie Dieterich)
- Multiplayer Battletech: 3025 (Greg Grimsby)
- Ookibloks (Robbie Dieterich)
- Robot Legions Reborn (Robbie Dieterich)
- The Black Eyed Peas Experience (Robbie Dieterich)
- The Verities Silex trilogyUltima Forever (Josiah Lebowitz)
- Titanic (3D version) (Ted Prawat)
- Ultima Forever Online (James Casey)
- Warhammer Online: Age of Chaos (Greg Grimsby)
- Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes (James Casey)
Director of the Computer Game Design Program.
Director Sang Nam, has explored new possibilities when art and technology merge, and his work has been exhibited worldwide, including the US, UK, Korea, and Hungary. As a teacher-scholar, Nam has actively pursued his research on the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning. He has been selected as 2010 National CASTL Teaching Scholar, 2010-2012 Elon CATL Teaching Scholar, and 2008 Wisconsin Teaching Fellow. He was selected to participate in Data Viz + Cancer Innovation Lab in August, 2021. He has also been invited to give a lecture in Korea in October 2021 at UNESCO's World Higher Education Conference.
Professor Nam has been producing serious games for clients including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Department of Defense, and many other government agencies and private companies. He partnered with ThunderCat Technology, and they officially became a U.S. Army Information Technology Enterprise Solutions Software 2 (ITES-SW2) contract holder in 2020. They will be one of only 31 contractors on the $13 billion 10-year award.
In 2024, Professor Nam was one of 17 faculty members awarded the 4-VA@Mason 2024-25 Collaborative Research Grant for his proposal Developing A Multimodal LLM AI Agent for the XR, Extended Reality Platform for Personalized and Highly Immersive Trauma Training (in collaboration with partner school UVA).
Dr. Martin is an inventor, mentor, educator, entrepreneur, author and founding director of both the Computer Game Design program and the Virginia Serious Game Institute, the only one of its kind on the East Coast. His research work has resulted in multiple U.S. PTO patent applications, global public presentations, and several recent publications.