Geoffrey Long

(What follows are the bios I use for my appearances in different places. If you're looking for a bio to use for me in something, please use something from the list below. A bigger version of my headshot can be found by clicking my grinning mug to the left.)

The Short Version

Geoffrey Long is a storyteller, scholar, and consultant exploring the future of storytelling and how storyworlds and technology co-evolve. Geoffrey is an Assistant Professor in the Emerging Technology in Business and Design department at Miami University, the Director of Miami's Games and Simulation program and its Worldbuilding + Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab), and a co-editor of the Playful Thinking series for MIT Press. (65 words)

The Medium Version

Geoffrey Long is a storyteller, scholar, and consultant exploring the future of storytelling and how storyworlds and technology co-evolve. He is an Assistant Professor in the Emerging Technology in Business and Design department at Miami University, the Director of Miami's Games and Simulation program and its Worldbuilding + Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab), and a co-editor of MIT Press' Playful Thinking book series.

In his previous academic and professional lives Geoff has been a Visiting Assistant Professor in Digital Liberal Arts and Director of the Whittier Other Worlds (WOW) Lab at Whittier College; Creative Director for the World Building Media Lab at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts; Technical Director and Creative Director for the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism; cofounder of Microsoft Studios' Narrative Design Team; a member of a "future of media" think tank under Microsoft CTO/CXOs J Allard and Ray Ozzie; and a founding member of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and the Convergence Culture Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writing has appeared in The Edison Project from the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab; Durhy Kurtz and Bourdaa's The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities and Wolf's Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology, both from Routledge; and the extended online edition of Jenkins, Ford and Green's Spreadable Media from NYU Press. As a scholar and consultant Geoff has worked with Amazon Studios, BET, Cisco, the City of Los Angeles, DirecTV, Fidelity, FOX, Havas, HBO, IBM, Intel, the Los Angeles Times, MTV, Ravensburger, Turner Broadcasting, Walt Disney Imagineering and Warner Bros.

Geoff holds a BA in English and Philosophy from Kenyon College, a master's in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Media Arts + Practice from USC's School of Cinematic Arts. (300 words)

The Long Version

Geoffrey Long is a storyteller, scholar, and consultant exploring the future of storytelling and how transmedia storyworlds and technology co-evolve. He is an Assistant Professor in the Emerging Technology in Business and Design department at Miami University and Director of both Miami's Games and Simulation program and its Worldbuilding + Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab). At Miami he teaches courses on game design, UX design, writing for games and other emerging media, the senior capstone trilogy of courses creating and launching student-made video games, and his class on entrepreneurial thinking for creatives, "Storyteller as Startup." Since 2012 he has also served as a founding co-editor of the Playful Thinking series of game studies books for MIT Press.

Before joining Miami, Geoff was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Digital Liberal Arts Program, English and the Whittier Scholars Program at Whittier College, where he taught classes on comparative media studies, game design, and creative entrepreneurship, as well as directed the Whittier Other Worlds (WOW) Lab. Before that Geoff served as the Creative Director for the World Building Institute and World Building Media Lab in the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, where his projects included imagining possible futures of Nigeria, working with the Buckminster Fuller Institute to inspire students to imagine worlds based on Fuller's concept of Spaceship Earth, envisioning a world inside a human pancreatic beta cell to inspire the future of smart cities and new diabetes treatments, and assisting on the technical Emmy-nominated photogrammetric virtual reality project Wonder Buffalo. Prior to that, Geoff served as the Creative Director and a Research Fellow for the Annenberg Innovation Lab in USC's Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, where his projects included exploring storytelling with such new screens as virtual reality, augmented reality, wearables and the Internet of Things, and how new creators and makers are flourishing using a mix of these new screens, new business models and emerging platforms. Geoff has taught classes and workshops at the University of Southern California, Woodbury University, and Danube University in Krems, Austria, and he helped launch both the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and the Convergence Culture Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Geoff interweaves his academic work with time in the creative industries. After serving in a “future of media” think tank under Microsoft CTO/CXOs J Allard and Ray Ozzie, Geoff co-founded Microsoft Studios' Narrative Design Team, where his projects included HoloLens, the Xbox One, Halo, Ryse, Adera, and Quantum Break. As a scholar and/or consultant Geoff has worked with Amazon Studios, BET, Cisco, the City of Los Angeles, DirecTV, Fidelity, FOX, Havas, HBO, IBM, Intel, the Los Angeles Times, MTV, Turner Broadcasting, and Warner Bros., with his most recent consulting projects including consulting on the "Star Wars hotel" Galactic Starcruiser for Walt Disney Imagineering and on Ravensburger's collectible Disney card game Lorcana. Geoff's career has also included a decade-long stint as an indie literature, culture and technology zine creator and publisher and a shorter but still thrilling stint as an award-winning short film producer.

Geoff's writing has appeared in The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities from Routledge, co-edited by Benjamin W.L. Derhy Kurtz and Melanie Bourdaa; Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology from Routledge, edited by Mark J.P. Wolf; the extended edition of Spreadable Media from NYU Press, co-authored and co-edited by Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green and Sam Ford; The Comics Journal's Guttergeek; the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures; and he was one of the lead authors on the Annenberg Innovation Lab's book The Edison Project alongside Jon Taplin, Erin Reilly, Francesca Marie Smith and Henry Jenkins. He has served on the editorial boards of Eludamos and The Journal for Transformative Works and Cultures, as well as on the executive board of the Interstitial Arts Foundation. He is a frequent speaker at such conferences as SXSW, CES, the Game Developers Conference, the LA Film Festival, Storyworld, Transmedia Hollywood, Futures of Entertainment, SIGGRAPH, SCMS, and FuturePlay, his worldbuilding work was included in an exhibition at the 2016 Venice Biennale, and his work on reimagining preproduction processes informed the film-and-VR transmedia project Wonder Buffalo, which was showcased at both the Sundance Film Festival and South by Southwest in 2017.

Geoffrey holds a bachelor's degree in English, Philosophy and Creative Writing from Kenyon College, a master's degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, and a doctorate in Media Arts & Practice from USC's School of Cinematic Arts. (750 words)