Professor Vered Pnueli, Head of the Master’s Degree in Digital Game Design and Development at Shenkar, Senior Lecturer and Head of the Kedar Game Center, Israel.

Vered Pnueli is a pioneer in the development of the academic field of digital games in Israel. As part of her doctoral dissertation at Brunel University in London, she researched the emergence of a unique aesthetic language for digital games and wrote about the ways in which games can evoke social and ideological change. In 2009, Prof. Vered established the Digital Game Design Program at Shenkar College. Prof. Vered’s activities are characterized by entrepreneurship and research. She has established the first academic program for digital games in Israel and serves as the head of the Master’s Degree in Digital Game Design and Development at Shenkar. Co-founder and director of the 2015 Purposeful Games Summer School, a cooperation between the MIT University and Shenkar. Co-founder of PlayLab, an incubation program for game designers at Shenkar in cooperation with the GKL group. Recently, Prof. Vered has co-founded a program in co-operation with the ‘Games for Change’ foundation working in the Middle East and North Africa. She is the director of a teacher training program focused on training teachers in schools in America, Israel, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, to develop digital games as tools for learning.
Main areas of research: The history of digital games, Regional Game Studies, Gamification and the implementation of digital games in therapeutic processes, Playfulness, and the Aesthetic self.