About Me

In Academia

Bogost is the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he holds faculty positions in the School of Arts & Sciences (Film & Media Studies), the McKelvey School of Engineering (Computer Science & Engineering), and the Sam Fox School of Art & Design (Art, Design, & Architecture).

At WashU, Bogost is also an Assistant Vice Provost, in which role he serves as the founder and Co-Executive Director of the Office of Public Scholarship and a Provost’s Fellow in Interdisciplinary Initiatives, focused on the university's AI + Design effort.

Prior to joining Washington University, Bogost spent almost 20 years on the faculty of Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was appointed in the colleges of liberal arts, computing, design, and business. He has also served as a graduate program director, a center director, and a department chair.

Bogost holds a Bachelors degree in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, and a Masters and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA.

In the Technology, Entertainment, and Media Industries

In addition to his academic and writing life, Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio and design consultancy, and a Contributing Writer at The Atlantic, the American magazine. Before becoming a professor, Bogost worked in the dot-com technology industry, in advertising, and in Hollywood.

As an Author, Editor, and Publisher

Bogost is the author or co-author of 11 books, including Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing, and Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games. His latest book, which will be published in summer 2026, is The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life.

Beyond his own books, Bogost is also the co-editor of the Platform Studies book series about how computer hardware and software design influences culture, published by MIT Press, and the Object Lessons book series about the secret life of things, published by Bloomsbury.

In the early 2000s, Bogost co-founded a publishing company, Open Texture, that produced educational books, audiobooks, and course materials. Among other things, Open Texture produced a popular ancient Greek course for children, Elementary Greek. The company was successfully sold in the early 2010s to a larger educational publisher.

As a Game Designer and Artist

Bogost’s games about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, consumer debt, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, pandemic flu, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited or held in collections internationally, at venues including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Telfair Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, the Laboral Centro de Arte, and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

His independent games include Cow Clicker, a Facebook-game send-up of Facebook games that was the subject of a Wired magazine feature, and A Slow Year, a collection of videogame poems for Atari VCS (2600), Windows, and Mac, which won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at the IndieCade Festival and was an Independent Game Festival finalist.

Short Bio

Dr. Ian Bogost is a writer, designer, and scholar of media and technology. He is the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor and Assistant Vice Provost at Washington University in St. Louis. At WashU, he is appointed in three colleges and the co-executive director of the Office of Public Scholarship.

Bogost is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the founding partner of Persuasive Games LLC, a game and design studio. He is the author of 11 books, most recently The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. Bogost's award-winning games and artworks, which include Cow Clicker and A Slow Year have been played by millions of people and exhibited or collected internationally, including at the Smithsonian.

Curriculum Vitae

You can find Bogost's recent CV here (updated approximately once per quarter).