Carly A. Kocurek

  • Professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies
  • Director of Game Design and Experiential Media
  • Associate Dean of Academic Programs in Lewis College of Science and Letters
  • Humanities Graduate Program Director

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Carly A. Kocurek is a cultural historian specializing in the study of new media technologies and video gaming whose research has been funded by the National Science Foundation. She is the author of two books,Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minnesota, 2015); and Brenda Laurel: Pioneering Games for Girls (Bloomsbury, 2017); co-author of Ultima and World-Building in the Computer Role-Playing Game (Amherst, 2024); and co-editor of Historiographies of Game Studies: What it Has Been, What it Could Be (Punctum, 2025). Her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including Game Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, Technical Communication Quarterly, and Visual Studies, among others. With Jennifer deWinter, she co-founded and co-edits the Influential Game Designers book series for Bloomsbury.

Her games have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Paste Magazine called her game Choice: Texas “one of the best games of 2014.” She has won awards from the Golden Cobra Challenge and Indiecade Climate Jam and successfully crowdfunded multiple games and creative projects, including the solo tabletop role-playing game Golden Mart.

At Illinois Tech, she teaches courses on digital culture, interactive storytelling, game design, and media history. She also works with both undergraduate and graduate students on collaborative research and design projects and founded the gamebIITes annual festival of student games.

Seeking Ph.D. students with interests in:

Understanding games as a cultural form, including in particular the intersections of games and gaming practices with gender, socioeconomic status, and other facets of identity

Understanding the role of play and games in daily life

Designing and developing games for serious or educational purposes, particularly games that address complex or uncomfortable topics or that aim to intervene in social problems

Interviewing people and/or studying media (Previous experience is useful, but isn’t necessarily essential)

Education

Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin, American Studies
M.A., The University of Texas at Austin, American Studies
B.A., Rice University, English and History

Research Interests

Digital culture; Game design; Media studies; History of video gaming; Video games and gender; Video game violence

Professional Affiliations & Memberships

Learning Games Initiative
Popular Culture Association
Society for Cinema and Media Studies

Awards

Indiecade Climate Jam Positive Impact Award, 2020

IIT Sigma Xi-Junior Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, 2016

Invitee to First White House Summit on LGBT Technical Innovation, 2014

Publications

Select Publications

Kocurek, Carly A., and Matthew Payne. Ultima and Worldbuilding in the Computer Role-Playing Game. Amherst College Press, 2024: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/vh53wz85d

Hapner, Bridget, and Carly A. Kocurek. “(Re) Discovering the Rich History of Games User Research: An “Undisciplined” Approach.” In Game Usability, pp. 413-426. CRC Press, 2022.

Kocurek, Carly A. “Sparklier Worlds: Understanding Games for Girls as Style Intervention.” In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, pp. 1-8. 2022: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3555858.3555872

Kocurek, Carly A. “The man with the gun is a boy who plays games: Video games, white innocence, and mass shootings in the US.” Journal of Games Criticism 5, no. A (2022): https://gamescriticism.org/2023/07/26/the-man-with-the-gun-is-a-boy-who-plays-games-video-games-white-innocence-and-mass-shootings-in-the-u-s/

Carly A. Kocurek, editor, special issue of Feminist Media Histories on “Video Game History,” 6, no. 1 (Winter 2020). https://fmh.ucpress.edu/content/6/1

Kocurek, Carly A. Brenda Laurel: Pioneering games for girls. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2017.

Kocurek, Carly A. “Ronnie, Millie, Lila—Women’s History for Games: A Manifesto and a Way Forward, ”The American Journal of Play 10, no. 1 (2017). pp. 52-70.

Kocurek, Carly A. “Who hearkens to the monster’s scream? Death, violence and the veil of the monstrous in video games.” Visual Studies 30, no. 1 (2015): 79-89.

Kocurek, Carly A. Coin-operated Americans: Rebooting boyhood at the video game arcade. U of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Kocurek, Carly A. “The agony and the Exidy: a history of video game violence and the legacy of Death Race.” Game Studies 12, no. 1 (2012).

Projects

She is currently completing work on a co-edited volume, Historiographies of Game Studies: What it Has Been, What it Could Be (Punctum, 2025), exploring the history of smart glasses, and developing a dollhouse-based game based on “The Six Swans.”

Expertise

Kocurek is an expert on the history of video games and media technology with a focus on gender.

Additional Info

Grants and Fellowships

Games for Girls: Informing the Future (PI), National Science Foundation ($145,965) 2019

Visiting Scholar, University of North Carolina-Wilmington ($15,000), 2019

Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellowship (fellow), Coleman Foundation ($5,000), 2016

Game for Early Childhood Language Acquisition (joint-PI with Jennifer Miller), Nayar Prize Phase I Proposal ($100,000), 2015

Brenda Laurel: Pioneering Games for Girls (PI), Dean’s Research Fund Grant ($1,100), 2015

Coin-Operated Americans (fellow), Strong Museum of Play Research Fellowship ($1,000), 2014

Media Appearances

Video Game Historian Carly Kocurek Discusses ‘GTA 6’ Trailer, Featuring First Female Protagonist of Series

Trending Now

“It’s definitely interesting to see this series moving toward having a woman protagonist,” said Professor Carly Kocurek, a historian of video games and new media technologies. “There’s been controversy, in particular there’s been a lot of representation of sex workers that isn’t particularly thoughtful or particularly nuanced. There’s fewer women leads in these kinds of story in general, and so it’s interesting. We’ll see what they do.”

Despite GTA Hype and Great Releases This Year, Video Game Industry Suffers Layoffs, Says Professor Carly Kocurek

NBC News

“So we’re seeing this kind of, like, really banner year for releases and for attention from the media and critical acclaim,” said Carly Kocurek, a professor of digital humanities and media studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology. “At the same time, we’re seeing people who are the people that made those games kind of get thrown out on their tails over and over again.”

Game Design Professor Carly Kocurek Analyzes Viral NPC Trend

Endless Thread

“The Sims ready pose, right? Where the Sim is just kind of standing there doing this weird wavy dance, waiting to do things? How many of us feel like we spend huge chunks of our life weirdly waiting for things to happen? Where it's like, I'm waiting for a call. I'm waiting for the doctor's office. I'm waiting for the traffic light. I'm waiting for the mail. Almost like you're in this liminality all the time in day-to-day life because we don't have as much control over our own time as most of us would like. And yeah, it feels like you're in a weird little micro-limbo between activities,” said Professor Carly Kocurek, who teaches in Illinois Tech's Game Design and Experiential Media program.