Assistant Professor, Department of Design and Computation Arts, Concordia University. Visiting Senior Lecturer, Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta.
Pippin Barr is a videogame maker, educator, and critic who lives and works in Montréal. He is the Associate Director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Lab, Canada’s premier games research centre and part of the Milieux Institute for Art, Culture and Technology and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University where he teaches courses in programming, videogame design and expressive uses of web technologies. Pippin is a prolific maker of videogames, producing work addressing everything from airplane safety instructions to contemporary art to the nature of videogames and videogame technologies. He has collaborated with diverse figures such as performance artist Marina Abramović, Twitter personality @seinfeld2000, and the International Federation for Human Rights. Pippin holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand with a dissertation that examined the presence and mediation of values in videogames. Pippin is a well-known figure in the independent and artistic videogame scenes, maintains a process of radically transparent videogame design and development via his presence on GitHub, and his book, How to Play a Video Game, introduces the uninitiated and culturally curious to the world of video games. Pippin’s website, www.pippinbarr.com, organises his diverse activities into a central location.