Celia Pearce is an award-winning game designer, curator, author and Professor of Game Design at Northeastern University. She is co-founder of IndieCade, the international festival of independent games, and Co-Executive Director of Playable Theatre, a nonprofit supporting creators of participatory theatrical works. Her games have appeared at the Smithsonian Museum, the Museum of Fine Art Boston, CHI and SIGGRAPH, the Incubate festival in Tilburg, Netherlands, and Boston FIG, where her game eBee, an electronic quilt-based board game created with Gillian Smith, Jeanie Choi and Isabella Carlson, received the 2016 award for Most Innovative Tabletop Game. She's written numerous papers and books, including Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (MIT Press), which appears on several list of "classic" game studies books. Her most recent book, PLAYFRAMES: How do we know we are playing? (MIT Press) is a deep dive into the social science of how we know when play activities are underway.

I specialize in game communities, with a special focus in online games, and independent game developers. I'm also known for my work on inclusiveness, and am generally credited with publishing one of the first papers about older videogame players, “The Truth About Baby Boomer Gamers,” in Games and Culture in 2008.