The 'Official' Bio:

Lisa Galarneau is a doctoral candidate in New Zealand's University of Waikato Screen and Media Studies department and a researcher in the University's post-graduate games research lab. Leveraging her previous academic work in education and socio-cultural anthropology, as well as extensive professional experience in online learning design and development, her research is looking at social learning associated with virtual worlds. In addition, Lisa is an award-winning new media producer, has lectured in Mass Communication at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and acted as consultant and advisor to various commercial and non-profit organisations. She currently works part-time at Microsoft Games User Research while completing her dissertation, due for completion in late 2007.

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The Less Official, More Complete Bio:

I played my first video games in the early 1980s, growing up in Northern California.  My mother had an Atari 2600 in her bedroom that she seldom let me play, so I had to sneak down to my friend Billy's house to play on his Commodore 64. (little did she know that denying me access to her videogames had me sneaking to boys' houses!)

After a year as an exchange student in South America and a short, cold-war stint as a Russian linguist in the US Army, I attended UC Berkeley and graduated with a degree in socio-cultural anthropology in 1993.  As an undergraduate, I was already fascinated by the technology-mediated culture of BBS/Usenet communities (though I was rejected when I proposed a study of them for one of my anthropology classes!). I also played my fair share of videogames, mainly of the adventure, strategy and role-playing variety, though in typical closet-gamer fashion, I seldom mentioned it to anyone.  It was the year I graduated from Berkeley that I first experienced the graphical WWW and the beginnings of the subsequent dot-com boom. So just like all of my Bay Area friends with liberal arts degrees, I spent the next several years in a variety of technical jobs -- technical support, help desk, system administration, usability/user experience and technical project management.  Along the way, I also led web-based communities at Hungry Minds (Fashion History, Internet Culture) and About.com (Historical Reenactment), as well as working on a range of projects that reflected the optimism and variety of the dot.com era.

In 2000, I was lucky to be nominated for a Webby award my work as producer and content developer on a web-based project called Solemates: the Century in Shoes, a project designed to teach people a bit about the history of the 20th century through the eyes of shoes.  As a result of this experience, I began to focus my efforts on interactive usability and content development.  I designed learning games for the California Secretary of State, applications for community-based portals, numerous websites, and led a redesign of the user experience during my two years at Towerrecords.com. I then decided I was interested in the educational possibilities for interactive media, and left my job to go back to school for a Master of Science degree in education, completed in 2003. In the meantime, I still played as many games as I could manage.  By this point, online games had come to my attention and fascinated me with their richness and social complexity.

In 2003, I moved to New Zealand and began work for a training and education consultancy that was doing some interesting work in the area of games and simulations for learning.  It was a great space to be in, but I soon realised that the opportunity with games and learning was much greater than the direct transfer of information from game to learner that so many of our clients were focused on. In my mind, it is the culture of learning surrounding games, along with the structures that make knowledge sharing seamless and integrated, that is the really interesting bit.  If our learning is indeed rooted in our socio-cultural context , then we really have something to learn from a phenomenon where this flourished naturally.  So in 2004, I began work designing doctoral research on social learning in virtual worlds. This feels like the natural place for me, merging twenty years of interest in interactive technology, videogames, community, culture and learning. 

I have also taught part-time in mass communication at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand and in 2005, completed an around-the-world trip to study the social habits of gamers. In 2006, I re-located back to the U.S. where I am now working part-time at Microsoft Game Studios doing games research.

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Contact: lisa [AT] socialstudygames [DOT] com