The New Media Reader (Edited with Nick Montfort)


Blog-Based Peer Review (Created with Ben Vershbow, Jeremy Douglass, and Doug Sery)


Screen (Created with Josh Carroll, Robert Coover, Shawn Greenlee, Andrew McClain, and Benji Shine)


Regime Change & News Reader (Created with David Durand, Brion Moss, and Elaine Froehlich)


Talking Cure (Created with Camille Utterback, Clilly Castiglia, and Nathan Wardrip-Fruin)


The Impermanence Agent (Created with Adam Chapman, Brion Moss, and Duane Whitehurst)


Gray Matters (Created with Michael Crumpton, Chris Spain, and Kirstin Allio)

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a Professor of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His collaborative, interdisciplinary research ranges across game studies, software studies, electronic literature, interactive narrative, social simulation, game generation, and game scholarship tools — resulting in more than 100 co-authored, peer-reviewed publications. His collaborative computational media works have been shown by institutions ranging from the Whitney Museum of American Art to the IndieCade Festival. He has published six books with the MIT Press, including How Pac-Man Eats (2020). His most recent book is Animal Crossing: New Horizons — Can a Game Take Care of Us? (University of Chicago Press, 2025). With Michael Mateas, he co-directed the Expressive Intelligence Studio (a technical and cultural research group) from 2008 to 2025. The studio graduated more than 40 PhD and MFA students, many of whom are active in creative production, scholarly research, and teaching students of their own. He is a HEVGA Fellow and co-edits the Software Studies series from the MIT Press.

Noah holds a BA from the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands, an MA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, an MFA from the Literary Arts program at Brown University, and a self-designed PhD through the Special Graduate Study mechanism at Brown (committee: Wendy Chun, Robert Coover, David Durand, George Landow, and Andy van Dam). He is also a father and husband, a Quaker, a Henson/Muppet fan, and disabled.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin