About

Judd Ruggill is a faculty member at The University of Arizona's College of Humanities. His research focuses on video game studies, exploring the complexities and dynamics of the game industry, including the business of game making, production practices, corporate structures, consumer markets, and technological innovation. Ruggill's work addresses the challenges of understanding games, their play, and the cultures that arise from them by examining how games are made and their historical and cultural contexts. He has contributed to the field through books such as "Inside the Video Game Industry: Game Developers Talk About the Business of Play," co-authored with Randy Nichols, and the "Landmark Video Games" book series, which provides in-depth studies of historically significant and influential video games, analyzing their design, genre, form, content, meanings, and impact on video game history and popular culture. Additionally, Ruggill has explored the intersections of humanities and entrepreneurship, particularly through internship programs that foster creative, interpersonal, and intercultural skills essential for materializing new ideas. His scholarship also includes analysis of the relationship between video games and film, investigating how video and computer games are altering film's role in the media economy and reshaping film business, production, and aesthetics through the concept of game cinematization.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Business
• Social psychology
• Software engineering
• Advertising
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• Ken S. McAllister

  Punctum Books · 2025-07-24

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this interview, game studies pioneer Ken S. McAllister recounts coming to study games for a living, and how a career-threatening technology failure that wiped out a book project on miniaturization was actually a gift, creating the opportunity for him to write the first English-language book on the rhetoric of video games. In so doing, he recalls the inhospitable institutional and professional culture game studies scholars often encountered in the early days of the field, and the ways in which that culture provoked praxical and occasionally outlandish experiments in response. One of McAllister’s signature experiments from that era is the Learning Games Initiative, a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group he co-founded in 1999 to study, teach with, and build games. McAllister shares the origins of the group and highlights its longest running project, the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive. The Archive has since become one of the largest working collections of video game-related artifacts in the world and a laboratory for the theory and practice of electronic game collection, preservation, and conservation. McAllister draws on the collaborative, collegial, and international approaches he has explored through the Initiative and its Archive to speak to current and future game researchers.

  PublisherDOI

• Strategic Legibility

  Routledge eBooks · 2024 · 1 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Computer Science

  This chapter considers three publicly engaged humanities projects connected to the Department of Public & Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona: LitLabs, Drag Story Hour, and the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive. The projects serve as case studies for a discussion of how publicly engaged humanities scholarship produces multiple meanings for those within and beyond academia, meanings that can be leveraged as different currencies at specific moments and over time. The chapter emphasizes the concept of strategic legibility, and explores the opportunities and challenges for thinking through publicly engaged humanities work as part of the everyday humanities experience in both higher education and community contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Palgrave games in context · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Vector Graphics

  Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games · 2024-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Interstellar Competence

  2023-07-07

  book-chapter

  This chapter draws on a set of assumptions about language, then builds away from them to outline a practical approach to alien communication. Several essential components of the xenolinguistic complex are considered: establishing and maintaining regular contact; the ways in which the constraints of remote contact sketch a roadmap toward the development of an adaptive process of learning, understanding, and communication; and designing a working plan for bridging pre-physical and physical contact communication scenarios. Drawing on work from several interrelated fields, the chapter offers an approach to a (highly probable) hyper-asynchronous, physically removed, first-contact scenario.

  PublisherDOI

• The Humanities at Work

  2023-05-17

  book-chapterSenior author

  In this chapter, McAllister and Ruggill argue that the creative, interpersonal, and intercultural intelligences at the heart of the humanities make for an excellent entrepreneurial foundation. They examine humanities internship programs specifically, and the ways they are able to vivify the act of bringing ideas into being. Their case studies are two internship programs at the University of Arizona: one is part of the core curriculum of the Department of Public & Applied Humanities, and the other has helped build the Learning Games Initiative. The authors conclude that it is the liminal space of the internship—interns are not exactly students or employees, falling somewhere in between—that enables the humanities in particular to shine: humanities interns are able to draw on their understanding of the human condition to see, design, and advocate for institutional, interpersonal, and cultural change.

  PublisherDOI

• Preservation

  2023-04-28

  book-chapterSenior author

  Video game preservation requires an enormously complex combination of hands-on skill, technical knowledge, and an awareness of an ever-changing set of organizational practices that are all designed to accomplish one goal: the safeguarding of video games and their attendant technical and cultural dependencies for posterity. In this chapter, we focus on the acts (e.g., preservation as a set of material and perspectival practices), agents (e.g., the people and organizations who undertake game preservation), and subjects (e.g., game software and hardware) of video game preservation and propose that the many challenges that amateur and professional preservationists face are almost always also valuable opportunities for discovery and innovation within the field of game studies.

  PublisherDOI

• Sustaining Software Preservation Efforts Through Use and Communities of Practice

  International Journal of Digital Curation · 2020 · 1 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • World Wide Web

  The brief history of software preservation efforts illustrates one phenomenon repeatedly: not unlike spinning a plate on a broomstick, it is easy to get things going, but difficult to keep them stable and moving. Within the context of video games and other forms of cultural heritage (where most software preservation efforts have lately been focused), this challenge has several characteristic expressions, some technical (e.g., the difficulty of capturing and emulating protected binary files and proprietary hardware), and some legal (e.g., providing archive users with access to preserved games in the face of variously threatening end user licence agreements). In other contexts, such as the preservation of research-oriented software, there can be additional challenges, including insufficient awareness and training on unusual (or even unique) software and hardware systems, as well as a general lack of incentive for preserving “old data.” We believe that in both contexts, there is a relatively accessible solution: the fostering of communities of practice. Such groups are designed to bring together like-minded individuals to discuss, share, teach, implement, and sustain special interest groups—in this case, groups engaged in software preservation.
 In this paper, we present two approaches to sustaining software preservation efforts via community. The first is emphasizing within the community of practice the importance of “preservation through use,” that is, preserving software heritage by staying familiar with how it feels, looks, and works. The second approach for sustaining software preservation efforts is to convene direct and adjacent expertise to facilitate knowledge exchange across domain barriers to help address local needs; a sufficiently diverse community will be able (and eager) to provide these types of expertise on an as-needed basis. We outline here these sustainability mechanisms, then show how the networking of various domain-specific preservation efforts can be converted into a cohesive, transdisciplinary, and highly collaborative software preservation team.
 [This paper is a conference pre-print presented at IDCC 2020 after lightweight peer review.]

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• In praise of stupid

  Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  • Psychology
  • Social psychology

  The concept and the application of the smart city are increasingly being critiqued for their underlying neoliberal ideology, which privileges efficiency in capital accumulation and management over the subjectivity and necessities of everyday human life. There are similar concerns being expressed about smart games’ ‘invisible hand’, controlling rather than creating felicity and salubrity. In this chapter, we unpack these underlying and interlocking ideologies where they converge: in gamified smart city technologies. We are especially interested in the ways such technologies are used to solicit public participation or instead to create tokenised and disempowered forms of cooperation rather than foster deep democratic engagement. We argue for an appreciation of the ‘stupid’ in cities, games and politics, a prizing of the slow, the reflective and the critical as essential components of a just, humane and enjoyable world.

  PublisherDOI

• 39. Tempest

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ken S. McAllister

  37 shared

• Randy Nichols

  3 shared

• Monique Lassere

  Harvard University Press

  2 shared

• Zach Vowell

  2 shared

• Fernando Rios

  2 shared

• Rolf F. Nohr

  University of Arts

  2 shared

• Jennifer deWinter

  Illinois Institute of Technology

  2 shared

• Kevin Moberly

  2 shared