Faculty

Globally, digital games of all types and persuasions are big business. Industry experts report in 2023 that approximately 3.38 billion people worldwide play games. The global market for the gaming industry in 2023 was expected to reach $187.7 billion in revenue, according to Newzoo. To place this in perspective, movies worldwide generated $26 billion in revenue, and streaming services revenue was approximately $1.1 billion in 2023, according to Grand View Research. In order of their size, China, the U.S., and Japan are the top markets for the gaming industry.

“We’ve seen a growing difference between the size of the gaming and film industries,” said Patrick Jagoda, the William Rainey Harper Professor in the Departments of English Language and Literature, Cinema and Media Studies, and Obstetrics and Gynecology, and faculty director of the Weston Game Lab and the Media, Arts, and Design major at UChicago.

In November 2023, Jagoda traveled to Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and Beijing in China to deliver several lectures about game studies and game design for climate change, host a creative worldbuilding workshop with local peers, and give several interviews to the prominent Chinese news outlets.

Originally starting her career as a South Asian historian of gender, Prof. Rochona Majumdar has expanded her research to encompass Indian cinema. She recently received the 2023 Chidananda Dasgupta Award for Best Writing on Cinema for her book, "Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony" (2021).

In the Award’s citation from the Chidananda Dasgupta Memorial Trust, Majumdar’s book is recognized for not only its discussion of film practice and film societies in Bengal, but for its intriguing questions about how art cinema offered new insights into postcolonial Indian culture, history, and politics.

“With her detailed background in South Asian 20th-century culture, Rochona Majumdar has a particular insight into the role cinema has had, not only in social change, but in creating social networks,” said Tom Gunning, professor emeritus in the Departments of Cinema and Media Studies, Art History, and the College at UChicago.