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I am Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections and Film & Media Collections in the Stanford University Libraries. You can find me in the Humanities Research Group in Green Library, the Department known for the Lane Reading Room and a wonderful group of colleagues.

Here is my curriculum vitae.

You can find more information about the History of Science & Technology Collections and Film & Media Collections on the Stanford University Libraries' website.

Since 2000, I have headed a project first funded by the Stanford Humanities Laboratory and, since the demise of SHL, continued in the Libraries: How They Got Game: The History and Culture of Interactive Simulations and Videogames. Among the results of this project are courses such as History of Computer Game Design or The Consumer as Creator in Contemporary Media. The main focus of the project is the history and preservation of digital games, virtual worlds and interactive simulations as emerging new media forms. From 2004 to 2008, I co-directed SHL with Profs. Jeffrey Schnapp (French & Italian) and Michael Shanks (Classics).

Since the beginning of 2008, I have been leading the Stanford group in a project first funded by the U.S. Library of Congress called "Preserving Virtual Worlds." We worked with the University of Illinois, University of Maryland, Rochester Institute of Technology, Linden Lab, the Internet Archive, and others on this exciting project. The final report of this first Preserving Virtual Worlds project has been completed. We have also started Preserving Virtual Worlds II with the same group of partners; this project is funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services and is currently underway.

More information about my research, writing, teaching and speaking about the history of technology and game studies is on my c.v. page. One highlight: MIT Press will be publishing The Machinima Reader, which I am co-editing with Michael Nitsche, around May 2011. It will certainly make a great gift for just about anyone.

Other accomplishments of the How They Got Game project thus far include two significant museum exhibits that took place in 2003 and 2004, featuring installations from the worlds of computer games, art and military simulation; the Machinima Archive , a digital archival repository for this new game-based medium; the 73 Easting archives at Stanford University, which documents the most important military simulation of the 1990s; and numerous panels, conferences, and publications. Currently, the project is in the second year of a three-year project with HPS Simulations to develop historical conflict simulations using HPS' new Point of Attack 2 game, funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

For some twenty years, I was editor of the "Current Bibliography in the History of Technology" of the Society for the History of Technology. This bibliography is one of the components of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine database available through the Libraries' database page.