Dr. Evie Powell will visit Blackburn College on Thursday, April 6, to give a guest lecture entitled “Games We Can All Live With: How We Should be Thinking About Our Next Generation of Games.” The lecture will be held in Olin Lecture Hall at 7 p.m.
Powell is a game designer from Seattle, Washington. She holds a doctorate in pervasive game design from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Pervasive games blend the real world with the virtual – think “Pokemon Go.” Powell notes on her website, experience in pervasive gaming “primed me for a career of forward thinking in gameplay design and development.” Powell is the president and creative director of the independent game studio Verge of Brilliance in Seattle.
Professor of computer science Dr. Joshua Gross said via email that Powell was his first choice for this event because she “helps audiences understand her work in game design and research, and she is out in the world…so her work is more interesting and has more immediate impact than researchers in academia.”
Powell is an African-American woman, which Gross said is important because, “Many people have a narrow picture of what a computer scientist looks like, and they think they don’t belong in the field. We hope that Dr. Powell will get students excited about computing and see that they can accomplish amazing things regardless of their race or gender. Differences make computing a stronger and more interesting field.”