Session Information

John Sharp is a designer, art historian, curator and educator with thirty years of involvement in the creation and study of art and design. John's current design work focuses on cultural games, artgames and non-digital games. His current research addresses game aesthetics, the processes of creativity, and the intersections of aesthetics and ethics. He is an associate professor at Parsons The New School for Design. Along with Colleen Macklin, John co-directs PETLab (Prototyping, Education and Technology Lab), a research group focused on games and their design as a form of social discourse. John is also a member of the game design collective Local No. 12 along with Colleen Macklin (Associate Professor, Design & Technology, Parsons School of Design at The New School) and Eric Zimmerman (Arts Professor, New York University Game Center), a company focused on finding play in cultural practices. John's writing includes Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Games and Art (MIT Press, 2015), Games, Design, and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design (co-author Colleen Macklin, Addison-Wesley, 2016), Fun, Taste, & Games: An Aesthetics for the Idle, Unproductive, and Otherwise Playful (co-author David Thomas, MIT Press, 2018), and Iterate: Ten Perspectives on Creativity and Failure (co-author Colleen Macklin, MIT Press, 2019). John was the curator of "Spacewar!: Videogames Blast Off" (2012) and "A Whole Different Ball Game: Playing Through 60 Years of Sports Video Games" (2018, co-curator Jason Eppink) at the Museum of the Moving Image and co-curator of "XYZ: Alternative Voices in Game Design" (2013) at the Museum of Design-Atlanta. John's Games include The Metagame (2015) and Losswords (2019).