Where are you from?
Madrid, Spain.
Where do you live now?
I just moved to New York. I came from Spain to MIT to get my Masters and then I went to Georgia Tech to do my PhD.
What have you been doing since you graduated?
When I graduated, I was a postdoc researcher in the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, which I had been part of from the beginning until it closed. While I was there, I also taught courses in game studies, game writing, and game design. I was leading teams in making games for research. I also taught game development during the summers in the lab. I did that until September 2012, and then last year before moving to New York, I was a visiting scholar at Trope Tank Lab at MIT where I worked with Nick Montfort.
What is your current job?
I recently got a job as an associate arts professor at NYU where I work in the Tisch School of the Arts with the Game Center faculty.
Can you tell us about a recent project you’ve worked on that you were really excited about?
Right now, I’m finishing a book on game analysis called Intro to Game Analysis. It’s a text book to get people from the humanities to analyze games like they would with novels or films, extending the humanistic analysis of media to games.
How do you think the program helped prepare you for your life after Georgia Tech?
When I applied to the Digital Media program, it was perfect for my background because I came from the humanities, and professors like Dr. Murray and Dr. Bolter had similar backgrounds. It was easy to talk to them, and that helped me a lot to think about digital media. They’re the reason why I went to the program. My favorite part of the program was teaching a course on my own as part of my PhD. It was the most useful thing for my later career because it was a bit scary to be dropped into that situation and hit the ground running, but it was a great experience because you really have to learn and master the things that you’re teaching.
I also think that the Digital Media program’s model of bringing together theory and practice is very good. There are a lot of places that focus on either one or the other, but that balance of exploring the readings and then having to develop projects is a great model for what I’ve done afterwards. Being able to juggle humanities and computer science is unusual and rare from what I’ve seen, and it’s a fantastic model to learn from.
Do you have any advice or words of wisdom you would like impart to current or future Digital Media students?
One thing that I wish I had done more was collaborate and learn from other people because that’s where I learned the most. There’s only so much that professors can do, and the variety of students that the Digital Media program gets is really incredible. Everybody brings a different skillset and a different background and that’s where you can learn the most. So collaborate and learn from your classmates and have a knowledge exchange.
