Biography
Ashlyn Sparrow is an Assistant Professor in Media Arts Data and Design in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. A scholar and game designer, she has worked as a programmer, designer, manager, and director on projects spanning entertainment, education, and experimental media. Before joining the faculty, she served as a Senior Research Associate in Cinema Media Studies (2023 - 2026), Assistant Director of the Weston Game Lab (2019 - 2023) and Learning Technology Director at the Game Changer Chicago design lab (2013 - 2019). Her work is organized around the intersections of play, freedom, and design. She is particularly interested in dimensions of play that exceed conscious intention or representation, and in how games carry traces of cultural and historical forces while creating new possibilities for feeling, embodiment, and imagination.
Sparrow’s creative practice treats games as experiments in collaboration. As a member of Fourcast Lab, she has helped create alternate reality games including the parasite (2017), Terrarium (2019), A Labyrinth (2020), ECHO (2020), Cene (2022), and Encounter (2025). Terrarium received IndieCade’s 2020 award for Best Location Based and Live Play Design. Across these projects, she has explored how players form communities, build trust, and rely on one another in pursuit of shared goals, especially during times of crisis.
She also develops games as translational research. As project director of Hexacago Health Academy (2016–2025), a multiyear project funded by the National Institutes of Health, she worked with public health researchers to create game design and science education experiences for Chicago youth. Her other projects include Tracked (2018), a large-scale roleplaying game created for the Mozilla Festival that invited players to inhabit different positions within the internet’s data tracking economy.
Currently Playing
Resident Evil 4 Remake (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2050650/Resident_Evil_4/)
Control Resonant (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3669870/CONTROL_Resonant/)
Big Walk (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1478500/Big_Walk/)
Teaching
Autumn Quarter 2025
MADD 26210 Media Arts and Design Practice [Arts Core]
Winter Quarter 2026
MADD 22322 Introduction to Game Design
MADD 12320 Critical Videogame Studies
Previously taught:
CMST 223509/32350 Black Game Theory
Selected Publications
“Play and Being: The Interplay of Existence in Death Stranding and Huizinga’s Homo ludens.” Playthrough Poetics: Gameplay as Research Method, p. 85. Amherst College Press, 2024.
"Participatory Design and Radical Games: Mapping the Future of Tech with Queer Youth." Co-authored with Kendall Roark. The Routledge Companion to Practicing Anthropology and Design, pp. 260-273. Routledge, 2024.
“The Procedural Unconscious: Video Games and the Nonsynchronous Contemporaneity of Racial Capitalism.” Co-authored with Patrick Jagoda. ROMChip Vol. 6 No. 2: December 2024.
"Gaming Islam: A conversation with Ghenwa Hayek and Alireza Doostdar." Portable Gray 7, no. 2 (2024): 331-339.
“Transmedia Stories: Narrative Methods for Public Health and Social Justice.” Co-authored Patrick Jagoda and Ireashia Bennett. Stanford University Press, 2023.
“Pessimistic Futurism: Black Worlding and Better Games.” Co-authored with Patrick Jagoda. In Imaginable Worlds: Art, Crises, and Global Futures. 2023.