ABOUT BIG GAME LAB
BGL was started by Subalekha Udayasankar and LeAnne Wagner, who are both recent graduates of the MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York. They combined forces after working as research assistants at Parsons for PETLab, a game-based exploratory learning lab and Wakatta!, an initiative to establsih a youth learning network with educational institutions in New York that encourage digital media literacy, both research iniatives were funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Subalekha and LeAnne have worked closely with area/code, an industry leader in the big bame genre, and have created games or the Come Out and Play Festival and Conflux.
On top of her degree from Parsons, Subalekha holds a master’s in computer science. She is the technical brains behind BGL. Her thesis research explored big games being the new media for communication between people living in different cities. She also teaches game design for 7th and 8th graders at the Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School. She has conducted a workshops on “Prototyping Play” at the Fun and Games Conference ’08 at Eindhoven and Games Learning and Society '09. She has a dog named Panther and they both love living in New York. She is a trained bharathanatyam dancer and a bad singer. Her dream is to make her own hot air balloon and fly 1000 kilometers in it.
In addition to her MFA, LeAnne has a degree in graphic design. Her personal research explores new mechanics and motivations in the genre of big urban games in attempt to expose the potential that these games have to facilitate situated learning and community engagement. She has recently been working to create new versions of a big game called Re:Activism in Beijing, St. Paul and Boston. She has presented work at the Meaningful Play Conference and Cumulus Conference in Saint-Etienne. She currently resides in Cincinnati, Ohio where she teaches design and works as a freelancer.
