Jacob Habgood

Jacob is a Senior Lecturer in Game Development at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, and has spent all of his professional and academic life developing videogames. He started writing games on the ZX Spectrum at the age of 10 and had his first shareware game published on the Commodore Amiga at the age of 18. He took a degree in Computer Science and then went to work for the classic British game developer/publisher Gremlin Interactive at the beginning of the PlayStation era. He worked for Gremlin and then Infogrames/Atari for seven years leading programming teams on titles like "Hogs of War" and "MicroMachines" for the PlayStation, Xbox and GameCube. Then in 2003 he was offered a scholarship to undertake research in the field of games and learning at The Learning Sciences Research Institute (Nottingham, UK). Here, he spent three years working with children making and playing educational videogames, before returning to the games industry to work for Sumo-Digital in 2006. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 2007 for his thesis entitled "The Effective Integration of Digital Games and Learning Content". He worked at Sumo for three years as their Head of Serious Games before leaving to take up his current position at Sheffield Hallam.