Faculty Mentor: Katie Salen Tekinbaş  

www.katiesalen.me

Contact info: ksalen@uci.edu
Twitter: katieatplay

Keywords: game design, online affinity groups, peer mentoring, play, game-like learning

Games I love: Rez, Space Channel 5, Minecraft, Starcraft 2, and all things Pokémon

I am a designer, educator, and gamer interested in the aesthetics of interactivity and the transformative potential of play. My pronouns are she/her.

Currently I am a Professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine, as well as Chief Designer and co-founder of Connected Camps, an online learning platform powered by youth Minecraft experts. I am the founding Executive Director of Institute of Play and a member of the Connected Learning Lab. Much of my work for the past 10 years has focused on meeting kids where they are at in order to design engaging, hands-on experiences that have the potential to transform youth futures. My current work has a strong emphasis on the design of sustainable and equitable online communities, and I am on a mission to help make the internet more kid-friendly. I have been involved in the design of slow games, online games, mobile games, and big games in both the commercial and independent games sectors, and once co-designed a karaoke ice cream truck driven by a squirrel.

Current Work

 

 

 

 

…Publication List

 

Select Publications

Thomas D Grace, Christie Abel, and Katie Salen. 2023. Child-Centered Design in the Digital World: Investigating the Implications of the Age-Appropriate Design Code for Interactive Digital Media. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 289–297. https://doi.org/10.1145/3585088.3589370

Thomas D. Grace, Ian Larson, and Katie Salen. 2022. Policies of Misconduct: A Content Analysis of Codes of Conduct for Online Multiplayer Games. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CHI PLAY, Article 250 (October 2022), 23 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3549513 

Krithika Jagannath and Katie Salen. 2022. Beyond Just Rules: Server Rules for Shaping Positive Experiences in an Online Play Community for Youth. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact, 6, CHI PLAY, Article 222 (October 2022), 28 pages (forthcoming publication https://doi.org/10.1145/3549485) 

Katie Salen Tekinbaş, Krithika Jagannath, Ulrik Lyngs, and Petr Slovák. 2021. Designing for Youth-Centered Moderation and Community Governance in Minecraft. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 28, 4, Article 24 20 (May 2021), 40 pages.

Du, Yao; Grace, Thomas D.; Jagannath, Krithika; Salen-Tekinbas, Katie. 2021. “Connected Play in Virtual Worlds: Communication and Control Mechanisms in Virtual Worlds for Children and Adolescents” Multimodal Technol. Interact. 5, no. 5: 27.

Kalinowski, R., Xu, Y., & Salen Tekinbaş, K. (2021) “The Ecological Context of Preschool-Aged Children’s Selection of Media Content,” CHI 2021.

Krithika Jagannath, Katie Salen Tekinbas, Petr Slovak. “(We) Can Talk It Out…”: Designing for Promoting Conflict-Resolution Skills in Youth on a Moderated Minecraft Server. ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, May 28, 2020.

Du, Y., Sheng, L., & Tekinbas, K. S. (2020). “Try your best”: parent behaviors during the administration of an online language assessment tool for bilingual Mandarin-English children. In Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference (pp. 409-420).

Krithika Jagannath, Katie Salen Tekinbaş, Petr Slovak. 2019. Designing Healthier Youth-Led Online Communities: Toward a Conceptual Framework. Proceedings of the 2019 Connected Learning Summit (Vol. 1). Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press.

“Mediating Conflicts in Minecraft: Empowering Learning in Online Multiplayer Games.” Slovak, Petr & Salen, Katie & Ta, Stephanie & Fitzpatrick, Geraldine. (2018). CHI. 

“Designing a Place Called School,” in Transforming Design Matters. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. Carlos Teixiera, Guest Editor. Tongji University Press. Volume 3, Issue 1, August 2017.

“Afraid to roam: The unlevel playing field of Pokémon Go,”  in Mobile Media & Communication. Larissa Hjorth, editor. Sage Journals. December 2016.

White papers

Salen Tekinbaş, Katie, Madison E. Taylor, Andre Adame, Stephen M. Schueller, and F. Ria Khan. 2023. Youth, Mental Health, and the Metaverse: Reviewing the Literature. Irvine, CA: Connected Learning Alliance.

Salen Tekinbaş , K. 2020. “Raising Good Gamers: Envisioning an Agenda for Diversity, Inclusion, and Fair Play.” Irvine, CA: Connected Learning Alliance, 2020.

The Connected Learning Research Network: Reflections on a decade of engaged scholarship. Irvine, CA: Connected Learning Alliance. Ito, M., Arum, R., Conley, D., Guttiérez, K., Kirshner, B., Livingstone, S., … Watkins, S.C. (2020). 

“Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design.” By Mizuko Ito, Kris Gutierrez, Sonia Livingstone, Bill Penuel, Jean Rhodes, Katie Salen, Juliet Schor, Julian Sefton-Green, and S. Craig Watkins. Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, 1 edition , January 14, 2013.

Blog posts

Krithika Jagannath, Remy Cross and Katie Salen Tekinbaş. “When the Clubhouse Doors Close: Discord Opens New Spaces to Create and Connect,” CLL Blog May 19, 2021. 

Katie Salen Tekinbaş and Jin Ha Lee. “Taming Tilt: Exploring Esports as Context to Support Youth Wellbeing.” CLL Blog April 2021. 

Katie Salen Tekinbaş. “5 ways to identify a child in need during virtual learning.” eschool News, November 11, 2020.

Katie Salen Tekinbaş. “How Esports Taps the Power of Near-Peer Mentorship.” Tech & Learning, February 18, 2021.

Books

Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning. NYU Press, Connect Youth and Digital Futures series. December 2018. Ito, M., Martin, C., Cody Pfister, R., Rafalow, M. H., Salen, K., Wortman, A.   

Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. MIT Press. October 2003. 

The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. MIT Press. November 2005.

Interconnections, MIT Press 2014.

  • Gaming the System. Designing with Gamestar Mechanic. Katie Salen Tekinbaş, Melissa Gresalfi, Kylie Peppler and Rafi Santo. MIT Press; Cambridge, 2014.
  • Short Circuits. Crafting e-Puppets with DIY Electronics. Kylie Peppler, Melissa Gresalfi, Katie Salen Tekinbaş and Rafi Santo. MIT Press; Cambridge, 2014.
  • Soft Circuits. Crafting e-Fashion with DIY Electronics. Kylie Peppler, Melissa Gresalfi, Katie Salen Tekinbaş and Rafi Santo. MIT Press; Cambridge, 2014.
  • Script Changers. Digital Storytelling with Scratch. Kylie Peppler, Rafi Santo, Melissa Gresalfi and Katie Salen Tekinbaş. MIT Press; Cambridge, 2014.

Quest to Learn: Growing the School for Digital Kids. Katie Salen, Robert Torres, Arana Shapiro, Rebecca Rufo-Tepper, Loretta Wolozin. MIT Press. September 2010.

The Ecology of Games. Connecting Youth, Games and Learning. Katie Salen, editor. MIT Press. November 2007.

Research reports 

“Welcome to Sackboy Planet: Connected Learning Among LittleBigPlanet 2 Players.” By Matthew H. Rafalow, Katie Salen Tekinbaş. Connected Learning Research Network series, 2014.

“Crafting the Metagame: Connected Learning in the Starcraft II Community.” By Yong Ming Kow and Katie Salen Tekinbaş. Connected Learning Research Network series, 2014.

Articles and book chapters

Salen Tekinbaş, K., Jagannath, K. “Minecraft and Socially Situated Student Centered Learning,” Teaching in the Game-Based Classroom. Practical Strategies for Grades 6-12. D. Seelow, Editor. Routledge, 2021, p.33-40.

“Online Affinity Networks as Contexts for Connected Learning,” The Cambridge Handbook of Motivation and Learning. K. Ann Renninger and Suzanne E. Hidi, editors. Cambridge University Press, 2019, p. 291-311. Ito, M., Martin, C., Rafalow, M., Salen Tekinbaş, K., Wortman, A., Cody Pfister, R.

“Game Development.” In Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon. Edited by Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.

“Game-like Learning: Leveraging the Qualities of Game Design and Play.” Postsecondary Play: The Role of Games and Social Media in Higher Education. Edited by William G. Tierney, Zoë B. Corwin, Tracy Fullerton, and Gisele Ragusa. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

“Arrested Development: Why Machinima Can’t (or Shouldn’t) Grow Up.” The Machinima Reader, Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche, eds. MIT Press, 2009.

“Gaming Literacies: What Kids Learn Through Design.” Educational Gaming, a Special Edition for Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia (JEMH), 2007.