About the talk
Games are widely recognised as significant cultural objects, but bringing them into university teaching remains difficult. Ludolio was built to remove the access problem by licensing commercial games to universities so staff can assign them as readings, playable on students’ own devices. This panel reflects on its first year in classrooms across media and communication, education and game-design units, discussing what changed once access stopped being the barrier, what students made of short and formally unusual games outside the commercial mainstream, and what remains difficult.
Speakers
Dr. Jen Scott Curwood
Associate Professor · University of Sydney
Jen is the co-founder and Chief Learning Officer of Ludolio, an educational games distribution platform developed at the University of Sydney that makes commercial video games accessible to university courses, libraries, and researchers. Ludolio grew out of her work co-designing curriculum for teaching with games in schools — work that was driven by a commitment to equity and access, particularly for students in under-resourced settings where technology barriers limited meaningful engagement with games-based learning.
Dr. Eduardo Velloso
Professor · University of Sydney
Eduardo's current research interests include distributed collaboration in mixed reality, human-AI interaction, and HCI theory and methodology. His work has received awards at some of the top venues in Human-Computer Interaction, including CHI, UIST, TOCHI, DIS, and TEI and has been covered by media outlets including New Scientist, Wired, and the BBC. His approach is multidisciplinary, drawing methods from Engineering, Design, and Psychology. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University and a Bachelor of Computer Engineering from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.
Dr. Marcus Carter
Professor · University of Sydney
Professor Marcus Carter is a researcher in human-computer interaction, focusing on games, virtual reality and emerging technologies, where he founded the Sydney Games and Play Lab at the University of Sydney. He holds an ARC Future Fellowship examining the monetisation of children in the digital games industry, and was named the top researcher in Human-Computer Interaction in Australia by The Australian in 2021. He is a recipient of the DiGRA Australia Distinguished Scholar Award, recognising his sustained contribution to the games research community in Australia.