Eric Zimmerman

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Eric Zimmerman

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Zimmerman says. "I take the stance that immersion is not about the richness of the graphics, but about the total relationship a player has with a game. Play engagement occurs not just visually, but on strategic, social and cultural levels as well.

Sissyfighter background in Salon

BIOGRAPHY

Eric is an accomplished game designer, artist, and academic exploring the emerging field of game design. Eric's diverse activities made him one of Interview Magazine's "30 To Watch" in 1999 and also one of International Design Magazine's ID 40 (40 influential designers) in 2000.

Projects include the computer game BLiX (www.stationblix.com) , which was a finalist in the 2000 Independent Games Festival and won a Silver Award in ID Magazine's 1999 Interactive Design Awards. BLiX has been exhibited at ARS Electronica 99 in Linz, Cyber99 in Lisbon, the 1999 Digital Salon in New York City, as well as the front cover of the October 1999 issue of Leonardo.

Current digital projects include SiSSY FiGHT 2000 (www.sissyfight.com), a perverse multiplayer game about girls abusing each other in a schoolyard, developed with Word.com. STRAIN, an artificial-life inspired computer game that premiered at the Rotunda Gallery in New York City in 1999 will be released on the Internet in 2000.

Eric is currently directing RE:PLAY a series of events on game design and game culture that included an online conference and real-world conference in 1999 and an upcoming book (www.eyebeam.org/replay). Organism, a cellular autonoma board game, has been published in ArtByte magazine in 2000 and will also appear in Flesh Eating Technologies, a project of Semiotext(e) Press and Banff Center for the Arts. Life in the Garden, a non-computer interactive book, will be published by Razorfish Studios in 2000. Eric has also exhibited non-computer game projects in Artists Space and the Sara Meltzer Gallery in New York City, the Center for Contemporary Arts in Grenoble, France, and the Bellevue Museum in Seattle.

Eric is a published author on the topic of interactive entertainment, with recent articles and chapters appearing in publications like 21C, Merge, Zed, If/Then, Allworth Press' Art and Allure of Graphic Design, and I.D. Magazine, where he has also served on the Interactive Design Awards Jury.

Before helping to create Flat, a New York-based game developer and interactive design studio, Eric worked for three years as Senior Game Designer at R/GA Interactive where he directed the development of a number of interactive entertainment titles, including the award-winning CD-ROM game Gearheads (published by Philips Media, 1996) and the edutainment title The Robot Club (Published by Southpeak Interactive, 1998).

He currently holds Adjunct Professorships at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and Parsons School of the Arts' Digital Design Program, where he teaches Game Design and Interactive Narrative Design. Eric has lectured widely on these topics, recently at MIT, University of Jyvaskyla (Finland), the Association of Multimedia Professionals (Portugal), Doors of Perception 5 (Amsterdam), University of Malmo (Sweden), Banff Center for the Arts, Emily Carr University (Vancouver), University of Chicago, Carnegie Melon University, Emily Carr University, AIGA, UCLA, USC, Brown University, ISEA, The Learning Annex, and Interactive Frictions 1999 in LA.