Celia Pearce is an associate professor of game design in the College of Arts, Media and Design. She joined Northeastern in fall 2014, and specializes in multiplayer gaming and virtual worlds. She is also the co-founder and chair of IndieCade, an international festival for independent games. Click on the + signs to learn more.
Quilting Game
Celia is part of a Northeastern team that developed eBee, an electronics quilting game that won the Most Innovative Tabletop Game award at the 2016 Boston Festival of Indie Games. The goal of the game is to build a circuit from a central hub, through an island, and back to the hub. Players who complete a circuit will activate the illumination of an LED light. Celia said EBee, designed with former faculty member Gillian Smith, former graduate student Jeanie Choi, and undergraduate student Isaballa Carlsson, was borne out of her interests in combining quilting, electronics, and game design.
Umbrella
Celia teaches an “Experimental Game Design” course in which she asks her students to stage a “happening”—a form of spontaneous, non-linear action that revolutionized the practice of performance art. Celia said these exercises expose her students to avant-garde art movements of the 20th century. She gives her students items and artifacts—including this umbrella, disco ball, and grabber—to help them create these “happenings.”
Purple Fan
Celia, who has taught courses at Wuhan University of Technology in China, has collected a number of Chinese artifacts and decorations. Some of her students are from China, and this purple fan was a gift from one such student.
Rosie the Riveter
Celia got this Rosie the Riveter action figure as a gift. She leaves it in the box. “Armed with a rolled-up sleeve and the slogan ‘We can do it!,” she’s an icon of feminism and female empowerment,” she said.
Stuffed animal
This stuffed animal, a red and white fish, is from Celia’s time at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she taught prior to Northeastern. The fish is a callback to “Mermaids,” an underwater fantasy game that her research group developed there.
