Stephen Jacobs is a Professor in the School of Interactive Games and Media at RIT. He is a faculty affiliate with the Center for Media, Art, Games, Interaction and Creativity (MAGIC) and the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences Program. He serves as a Visiting Scholar for the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong National Museum of Play, where he contributed to the design of the eGameRevolution permanent exhibit and the Rockets, Robots and Ray Guns and Force at Play exhibits mounted during the summer of 2016. He founded the Jewish Play Project to support the study of the role of Jewish designers, engineers and inventors, in toys, games, coin-op and video games.
He has been a game and/or narrative designer on the serious game efforts Flip for History, Martha Madison’s Marvelous Machines, MindGamers In School, Just Press Play, Picture the Impossible, and the Mental Health gameful app Repitition Rebellion currently in development. He has consulted on game design and narrative for Second Avenue Learning, and Ratatoskr Entertainment,Inc . He was one of the founders of the IGDA Learning, Education and Games SIG and has served on the Executive Committees for The IGDA Writers and Educators SIGs and presented numerous times at GDC summits and roundtables, most recently in 2015. He became involved in the Open Source community when he had his students make educational games for the One Laptop per Child/Sugar platform. His work there led to a collaboration with other professors to create the first academic minor in open source and free culture and an early stage effort at a FOSS games SIG for the IGDA.
He has been a free-lance writer for over twenty years for magazines, television, radio and web pubs. His resume also includes stints as: bench technician for Crazy Eddie’s, sign language interpreter for Deaf street gangs and Paramount Pictures’ Children of a Lesser God, educational filmmaker, and technology journalist.