Congratulations to Kari Kraus on Indiecade 2017 Selection

September 13, 2017 English | Center for Literary and Comparative Studies

The Tessera--the NSF-funded game Kari Kraus and her collaborators launched last spring--will be showcased as an Indiecade 2017 Official Selection at this year's festival (press release here).

Wikipedia describes Indiecade as "the videogame industry's Sundance Festival": it is the premiere international venue for independent games. This is an incredibly competitive arena: this year, the festival received approximately 1000 submissions, with less than 10 percent selected for first-round exhibition. As part of the juried process, Kari and her team set up a special player account for the judges, produced a 10-minute video, and answered a series of essay questions.

Kari and June Ahn funded multiple talented students on this project in both the iSchool and English, most notably Elizabeth Bonsignore (iSchool), Anthony Pellicone (iSchool), Katie Kaczmarek (English), Skylar Hoffman (Undergraduate, English), and Carlea Holl-Jensen, who started out as a student in the English Department's MFA program and is now the program coordinator for the HCI Master's program in the iSchool. Many of Kari's undergraduate English students also worked on The Tessera as part of a class project and are recognized in the credits to the game.

Last fall, they received a CHI Play Honorable Mention Award for research on this NSF-funded grant, and this fall they will be honored at the festival for artistic achievement.

This is an extraordinary accomplishment and a wonderful example of collaboration between the sciences and the arts & humanities. Please join me in congratulating Kari and all those who worked on Tessera!

If you'd like to get a sense of what the Tessera is all about, the 10-minute video is here.