Olli Tapio Leino is a new media scholar focusing on computer games, interactive art and contemporary media culture from the perspectives of critical ludology, philosophy of technology and existential phenomenology. He earned his PhD from the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His PhD dissertation Emotions in Play: On the constitution of emotion in solitary computer game play, supervised by Dr. Espen Aarseth, is a phenomenological analysis of the relationship between a computer game's materiality and the player's emotional experience.
Olli has presented and published in the fields of game studies, new media art and philosophy of computer games. He has been involved in consultancy and applied research projects on computer game player's experience, game design for emotions, and pervasive and mobile media. During his PhD studies he was a visiting scholar at the Play Research Group of the University of the West of England and had a 6-month residency at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol, UK.
Olli has taught game studies on postgraduate level and supervised masters theses in the Media Technology and Games programme at IT University of Copenhagen and tutored game design projects at the Danish Academy of Interactive Entertainment. He participated in developing the curriculum for the Animation and Computer Game Design undergraduate programme at University of Lapland, Finland.
In his current research Olli seeks to combine game studies with critical aesthetics and media archaeology in order to assess the role of playability at the overlaps of interactive art and computer games and to rethink the sedimented assumptions underlying the paradigm of game studies. |
