Hello, I'm Leni!

Game designer by day, academic by night

Yes. I’ve been always interested in how people make sense of technologies and how their experience is designed, video games included. Studying it has only come naturally.

Intrigued by pop cultural phenomena like The Terminator, Short Circuit or The Matrix, I’ve been fascinated by artificial intelligence since I was a little kid.

What entices me the most is what we perceive as “believable” or “authentic” while interacting with an anthropomorphised AI, be it an avatar, robot, or NPCs in video games. As a researcher I seek to support my design work with recent findings from human-computer interaction, AI in video games, robotics, and game design more broadly.

Why video games?

Video games offer a unique way how to escape mundane things and experience something that would not be otherwise possible. I appreciate video games mainly for their interactive affordances and qualities - they allow us to be in charge of a story and co-create what’s going to happen to us as a fictitious character in a made up world.

Though I wouldn’t call myself a gamer, I do love playing video games for fun and educative purposes alike. The more games I play the better tools I have to design them. The more tools I have the more I understand what makes their design impactful. And the more I know what makes game design impactful the better games I can create, as well as make educated guesses to further pursue in my research. Win-win!

Games allow for playful, fun, and impactful experiences. As recent research shows, video games can also have an undeniable role in therapy, cognitive training and for educational purposes, making them an amazingly rich interactive medium to learn from and use.

Find me here:

If you want to check what games I play, follow me on Steam and let’s become friends there, or catch me occasionally streaming on Twitch.