GEOFFREY LONG
Director, Games and Simulation Program | Miami University
Geoffrey Long is a storyteller, scholar, and consultant exploring the future of storytelling and how storyworlds and technology co-evolve. He is an Assistant Professor in the Emerging Technology in Business and Design department at Miami University, the Director of Miami's Games and Simulation program and its Worldbuilding + Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab), and a co-editor of MIT Press' Playful Thinking book series. In his previous academic and professional lives Geoff has been a Visiting Assistant Professor in Digital Liberal Arts and Director of the Whittier Other Worlds (WOW) Lab at Whittier College; Creative Director for the World Building Media Lab at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts; Technical Director and Creative Director for the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism; cofounder of Microsoft Studios' Narrative Design Team; a member of a "future of media" think tank under Microsoft CTO/CXOs J Allard and Ray Ozzie; and a founding member of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and the Convergence Culture Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His writing has appeared in The Edison Project from the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab; Durhy Kurtz and Bourdaa's The Rise of Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities and Wolf's Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology, both from Routledge; and the extended online edition of Jenkins, Ford and Green's Spreadable Media from NYU Press. As a scholar and consultant Geoff has worked with Amazon Studios, BET, Cisco, the City of Los Angeles, DirecTV, Fidelity, FOX, Havas, HBO, IBM, Intel, the Los Angeles Times, MTV, Ravensburger, Turner Broadcasting, Walt Disney Imagineering and Warner Bros. Geoff holds a BA in English and Philosophy from Kenyon College, a master's in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Media Arts + Practice from USC's School of Cinematic Arts.
GDEX 2026 Panel: Building Storyworlds for Games, Movies, Comics and Beyond
What do Star Wars, Star Trek, Assassin's Creed, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe have in common? They all support a wide range of characters, plots and gameplay while all clearly sharing a single unified storyworld. Attendees will build their own storyworlds from scratch using a world-centric narrative design method, including how to mix genres, how to identify unique verbs, and how to create compelling plots with engaging characters. Bring writing materials or a laptop!
