Sebastian Deterding, M. A.

Associate Researcher of the Hans Bredow Institute

Sebastian Deterding, M.A., studied Comparative Literature, Communication, Psychology, and Philosophy at the Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster and Brown University, Providence, USA. After finishing his studies, he worked several years as program manager and online editor-in-chief at the multimedia department of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Germany. He was the product manager of the e-democracy application "Wahl-O-Mat", project lead of a social networking site for civic youth engagement, and edited several online dossiers on topics including open source, copyright and video games. His stay at the Federal Agency was interrupted by a short commission to the Information Society Division of UNESCO, Paris, where he worked on information policy and internet governance.

Subsequently, Sebastian became a research associate at the GATE Game Research for Training and Entertainment Project at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, where he developed design guidelines for persuasive games, before moving on to become a user experience designer at the publishing company Gruner+Jahr AG & Co KG in Hamburg, where he was UX project lead for the redesign of a major news site.

From October 2009 through March 2010, Sebastian has been a junior researcher at the Hans Bredow Institute and has been working on re-search projects at the intersection of code, governance, persuasion and game design. Since April 2010 he has done his PhD with a scholarship granted by the Hamburg Excellence Initiative at the Graduate School “Media and Communication”, the interdisciplinary PhD Programme of the Research Center for Media and Communication (RCMC) in Hamburg. He is still related to the Institute as a staff member of the Research and Transfer Centre “Digital Games and Online Worlds”.

His research interests include the persuasive design of games and digital media, new media governance, fictional transmedia worlds and their communities, and Goffmanian frame analysis as a theoretical approach to fiction and video games.

Personal web site: http://codingconduct.cc