How Does It Feel?

As an associate professor of Digital Media and Computer Science and Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute, where she also serves as director of the school’s Social Game Lab, Katherine Isbister has for years been studying the way people interact with videogames. But although she’s a lifelong gamer—Pong and Centipede were childhood staples—it wasn’t until a job at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo that Katherine Isbister became interested in studying the medium.

“We had this exhibition called ‘Be a Red-winged Blackbird,’” says Isbister. “I didn’t really like birds very much, but there I played this simple computer game, with pretty crappy graphics, actually.” In the game, players took the role of the bird, making choices about how to build a nest, who to mate with, and where to find food. When Isbister was done playing, she found that she could relate to an animal that she hadn’t been fond of. “It was just putting myself in the position of making decisions, and having to connect myself with that bird, that made me empathize in a really different way,” she says. “It reminded me of the stuff I learned in undergrad for literature, but it was much more powerful.”