Theresa Jean Tanenbaum
“Tess”
Associate Professor
Department of Informatics
Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
University of California, Irvine
I am a mixture of researcher, scholar, teacher, designer, artist, tinker, maker, and activist. I see these practices as fundamentally interconnected. My work uses a diverse range of technologies and media to better understand the emerging possibilities for digital storytelling as a tool for expanding people’s experiential and phenomenological horizons. I am interested in the poetics of these experiences: how do we create participatory narrative experiences to produce a compelling sense of immersion, agency, and transformation? What aspects of a mediated experience change how their players/viewers see the world and their own place in it? How do we develop and evaluate new poetics for what I call Transformative Play?
I am generally fascinated by systems that give people a chance to experience a sense of identity transformation, perspective taking, and role play. My lab is multidisciplinary, combining design research methods, close readings of games, and artistic practice and production. My design work often bridges digital and physical systems: I use interactive tangible user interfaces, computationally augmented costumes, and responsive physical environments to create prototype interactive narrative experiences that explore my theoretical ideas. I have a background in theater and music, and so I draw on techniques from method actor training and the performing arts in addition to current theory and practice in human computer interaction (HCI) and digital interactive narrative (DIN) studies. Lately I have been describing my work as the design and study of playful XR1 experiences at the intersection of theater, games, storytelling, and design. The purpose of my research is to understand how experiences of identity transformation and role-play within mediated experiences can empower people to envision and realize better futures for themselves and the world.
By designing and studying digital storytelling systems that produce experiences of role-taking and identity shift, my work aspires to create possibilities for social and individual change. I know all too well how the identities that we inhabit in the world are contingent and negotiated. Transformative play uses techniques from games, theater, and human computer interaction to carve out moments for personal transformation, empowerment, and change. These experiences of transformative theatrical play have a profound power to create possibility models that are emancipatory. When we inhabit new identities, we create possibilities where there were none before. We restory our lives into new configurations that allow us to reclaim lost power.
My aspiration for transformative play is as a mechanism for the radical empowerment of marginalized and oppressed peoples. It has taken years of exploration, tinkering, reflection, collaboration, and creation to move transformative play from a purely theoretical idea to a robust research and design practice, capable of being brought to bear on the hard problems of inequity, discrimination, and oppression that our society is struggling with. Transformative play is a “big idea” that I will spend a lifetime trying to pin down, but it is also a simple idea: that people need to be able to imagine themselves into better futures before they are able to create those futures. That participating in digital storytelling experiences can help people to transform their perspective and create new narratives that have the power to bring about positive change in the world.
Dr. Theresa Jean Tanenbaum (“Tess”) is a game designer, artist, maker, and associate professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California-Irvine where she is a founding member of the Transformative Play Lab. She received her PhD from the School of Interactive Arts + Technology at Simon Fraser University.
Dr. Tanenbaum’s work is engaged with issues of gender, identity, and narrative. It is Tanenbaum’s work is playful, provocative, and interdisciplinary, frequently straddling the line between art, design, and research. Her doctoral research examined identity transformation and empathy in digital narratives and games, drawing on theories and methodologies from the performing arts and human-computer-interaction. Her research draws on insights from digital interactive narrative, digital games, social justice, design fiction, futures studies, and extended reality theater. Her ongoing work on “Transformative Play” draws on techniques from theater practice to create and explore playful experiences that communicate different perspectives on the world, encouraging players to viscerally inhabit new identities and experiences.
Her first book, edited in collaboration with Magy Seif El-Nasr and Michael Nixon, entitled Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Worlds: Understanding and Designing Expressive Characters was released in early 2014 by Carnegie Mellon Universities ETC Press. She also served as a consulting researcher at the Nokia Chief Technology Office’s Advanced Engineering group where she advised on matters of storytelling and wearable technology for the Internet of Things.
An experienced game designer, Tess’s work incorporates physical objects, wearable technology, and interactive tabletops to explore embodied interactions with digital games and stories. She has developed new gaming technologies that push the boundaries of personal fabrication, using 3D printers and laser cutters as platforms for hybrid digital/physical games. Her recent game, Magia Transformo: The Dance of Transformation, was an official selection of IndieCade: the largest festival of independent games in the world. It uses costumes and movement to help players adopt the personas of witches and warlocks to uncover the secret magical history of the world. Tess is also a “Steampunk” artist, and maker, whose work on DiY culture appears in the book Vintage Tomorrows and the documentary film of the same name.
Her recent design work explores the intersection of live performance and MR/AR/VR technologies. Collaborating with Tim Kashani of Apples and Oranges Arts, she has mentored students in experimental designs for VR theater experiences, including a student team that took second place in the 2018 Butterworth Product development competition. She is currently developing Virtual Reality systems that transform how we think about creative practice in the performing arts. These include ShadowCast, a VR networked theatrical performance platform (created in collaboration with Tim Kashani), and VirDAW, a VR digital audio workstation (created in collaboration with UCI Drama Professor Vincent Olivieri). She is the recipient of an Epic MegaGrant along with collaborator’s Tawny Schlieski of Shovels + Whiskey, Juliette Levy of UC Riverside, and Thomas Winsor and Pip Brignal of Reality Check Productions to develop a new location based interactive storytelling platform called alt: inspired by the idea of exploring the material record of alternate realities.
Much of my service to the field is related to issues of diversity and inclusion. I am one of fourteen founding members appointed to SIGCHI CARES, a volunteer group that serves as a resource for those who experience discrimination and/or harassment while participating in Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI) events, activities, and publications. CHI is the largest special interest group (SIG) in my main field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and the CARES committee serves as a listening body and first response group for any member of the community in need of a confidential and supportive ear. CARES members were selected for our reputations as champions of diversity and inclusivity and our visibility within the community. Our role is to first to listen and provide support and, as needed, to help victims of discrimination and harassment access and navigate the appropriate resources for seeking a remedy within the ACM organization.
I also serve on the board of the QueerHCI SIG, where I focus on identifying policy challenges around LGBTQ+ identities within the ACM and SIGCHI organizations and developing remedies. In this capacity I have been working on advocating for more trans inclusive policies within the ACM. When a transgender scholar changes their name, they are often faced with an impossible choice: to abandon their previous scholarship, or to forever be haunted by their pre-transition identity. I refused to accept this situation. I joined an ACM working group in June of 2019 to help develop a trans inclusive name change policy for the ACM Digital Library. Working with two other volunteers, I led the writing and revision process of a new policy that was adopted by the ACM in November of 2019. This policy, the first of its kind to be adopted by a major publisher, allows transgender authors to correct their names on previously published work. Since the adoption of this policy, I have continued to serve on an implementation committee working to solve the practical and logistical challenges around support these requests while helping the ACM meet their legal obligations as the largest publisher of computing research in the world.
The experience I have gained advocating for trans rights within the ACM has given me a platform for pushing for more trans inclusive policies worldwide. I have been advising the director of Journals, Policy, & Strategy at Springer in the creation of an inclusive name change policy for their entire publishing catalog, and I recently published a worldview article in Nature advocating for these policies in the academic publishing world. I was also interviewed in The Scientist about the work I have done at ACM on name change policies. These articles helped advance the conversation within the publishing world, resulting in multiple editorial boards expressing their intention to adopt such policies. Recently, I founded a cross-disciplinary Trans Inclusive Name Change Policy Working Group to coordinate our efforts. Many of us have joined a working group at the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) where we are currently working to issue guidance to the almost 13,000 member publishers and journals who look to this body for rulings on issues of integrity, fairness, and ethics in publishing practices. My working group has also released a white paper that documents the common arguments and objections faced by transgender scholars when we seek to correct our scholarly records and roadmaps how to respond to them, so that other trans people working in academia have a resource for their own advocacy.
I also serve on the board of the Association of Research into Digital Interactive Narrative (ARDIN), where I am the Diversity and Inclusion Chair, working to develop policies to support our diverse community of scholars and creators at the conferences that ARDIN organizes.
Books
Alharthi, S., Toups, Z., Alsaedi, O., Tanenbaum, T. J., & Hammer, T. J. (2018). The Pleasure of Playing Less: A Study of Incremental Games through the Lens of Kittens. Well Played: Single. ETC Press, Pittsburgh, PA. (57 Pages)
Tanenbaum, T. J., Seif El-Nasr, M., Nixon, M. (Eds.) (2014) Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Worlds: Understanding and Designing Expressive Characters. ETC Press, Pittsburgh, PA. (383 Pages)
Book Chapters
Tanenbaum, T. J., Tanenbaum, K. (2018) Steampunk, Survivalism, and Sex Toys: An Exploration of How and Why HCI Studies Peripheral Practices. In Flimowicz, M. & Tzankova, V. (eds) New Directions in 3rd Wave HCI: Volume 2 – Methodologies. Springer
Tanenbaum, T. J. & Tanenbaum, K. (Forthcoming 2021) Consuming the Database: The Reading Glove as a Case Study of Combinatorial Narrative. In O’Sullivan, T. J. & Grigar, D. (eds.) Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, and Practices, Bloomsbury, pp 143-150
Jackson, T. J., Tanenbaum, T. J., Tanenbaum, K., Cowling, M., Walter., M. (2017) Making Plastic Printing Sustainable and Playful. In Allahyari, M. & Rourke, D. (eds.) The 3D Additivist Cookbook, 3 pages
Tanenbaum T. J., Tanenbaum K., (2015) Fabricating Futures: Envisioning Scenarios for Home Fabrication Technology. In Zagalo, N. & Branca, P. (eds.). Creativity in the Digital Age Springer-Verlag, London. pp 193-221
Tanenbaum, T. J., Seif El-Nasr, M., & Nixon, M. (2014) Challenges and Opportunities for the Ongoing Study of Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Worlds. In Tanenbaum, T. J., Seif El-Nasr, & M., Nixon, M. (Eds.) Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Worlds: Understanding and Designing Expressive Characters. ETC Press, Pittsburgh, PA. pp 355-361.
Tanenbaum, T. J., Nixon, M., & Seif El-Nasr, M. (2014) Basics of Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Worlds. In Tanenbaum, T. J., Seif El-Nasr, & M., Nixon, M. (Eds.) Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Worlds: Understanding and Designing Expressive Characters. ETC Press, Pittsburgh, PA. pp 33-43.
Tanenbaum, T. J., Nixon, M., & Seif El-Nasr, M. (2014) Basics of Nonverbal Communication in the Physical World. In Tanenbaum, T. J., Seif El-Nasr, & M., Nixon, M. (Eds.) Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Worlds: Understanding and Designing Expressive Characters. ETC Press, Pittsburgh, PA. pp 17-31.
Tanenbaum, T. J. (2014) Introduction to this Collection. In Tanenbaum, T. J., Seif El-Nasr, & M., Nixon, M. (Eds.) Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Worlds: Understanding and Designing Expressive Characters. ETC Press, Pittsburgh, PA. pp 1-3.
Antle, A.N., Tanenbaum, T. J., Macaranas, A. (2014) Games for change: Looking at models of persuasion through the lens of design. In. Nijholt, A. (ed.) Playful User Interfaces: Interfaces that Invite Social and Physical Interaction, Springer, pp 163-184.
Tanenbaum, T. J. (2014). Embracing and Understanding Subversive Play in Digital Narratives. In Dark Magic: Entertainment in the Era of Big Data, by Tawny Schilieski. Intel Corporation pp 205-221
Williams, A., Tanenbaum, T. J. (2012) Palettes, Punchcards, and Politics: Beyond Practicality and Hedonism. In G. Hertz (Ed.), Critical Making: Terms (pp.1-8).
Bizzocchi, T. J. & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2011). Well Read: Applying Close Reading Techniques to Gameplay Experiences. In D. Davidson (Ed.), Well Played 3.0: Video Games, Value, and Meaning (pp. 262 – 290). Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA: ETC-Press.
Tanenbaum, T. J., Gardner, D., & Cowling, M. (2017). Chalk, Props, And Costumes: Two Exercises for Teaching Pervasive Game Design. Analog Game Studies, 4(4), ETC Press. pp 232 – 248
Pargman, D., Eriksson, E., Höök, M., Tanenbaum, T. J., Pufal, M., Wangel, T. J. (2017) What if there had only been half the oil? Rewriting history to envision the consequences of peak oil. Energy Research & Social Science September 2017, Vol 31 pp 170-178
Tanenbaum, T. J. (2015) Hermeneutic Inquiry for Digital Games Research. The Computer Games Journal. Springer, June 2015, Vol 4, no.1, pp 59-80
Tanenbaum, K., Hatala, M., Tanenbaum, T. J., Wakkary, R., & Antle, A. N. (2013). A Case Study of Intended Versus Actual Experience of Adaptivity in a Tangible Storytelling System. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction (UMUAI). Vol 24, no.3, pp 175-217.
Bizzocchi, T. J., Tanenbaum, T. J. (2012). Mass Effect 2: A Case Study in the Design of Game Narrative. The Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. October 2012, vol. 32 no. 5 393-404.
Tanenbaum, T. J., & Tanenbaum, K. (2012). Getting Your Hands on Electronic Literature: Exploring Tactile Fictions with the Reading Glove. International Digital Media Association Journal (iDMAa). Fall 2011 edition, vol 8 no.2 46 -57
Bizzocchi, T. J., Lin, B., & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2011). Games, Narrative, and the Design of Interface. International Journal of Art and Technology (IJART) 4(4), 460-479.
Tanenbaum, K. & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2010) Agency as Commitment to Meaning: Communicative Competence in Games. Digital Creativity, v. 21 No. 1, 2010, pp. 13-19.
Tanenbaum, T. J., & Bizzocchi, T. J. (2008). Close Reading Oblivion: Character Believability and Intelligent Personalization in Games. Loading…The Journal of the Canadian Games Studies Association, 3(4). 20 pages.
Tanenbaum, T. J. & Tomizu, A. (2008). Narrative Meaning Creation in Interactive Storytelling. International Journal of Computational Science, 2(1), 3-20.
Baumer, E.P.S., Blythe, M., & Tanenbaum, T.J. (2020). Evaluating Design Fiction: The Right Tool for the Job. Presented at Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’20). July 6-20, 2020. Eindhoven, The Netherlands (held virtually) pp 1901 – 1913 [Best Paper Honorable Mention]
Tanenbaum, T.J., & Olivieri, V. (2020) Transforming the Creative Practices of Composers and Sound Designers with VirDAW, the Virtual Reality Digital Audio Workstation. Presented at United States Institute for Theater Technology Conference (USITT’20), April 16, 2020. 6 pages
Tanenbaum, T. J., Hartoonian, N., & Bryan, J. (2020). “How do I make this thing smile?”: An Inventory of Expressive Nonverbal Communication in Commercial Social Virtual Reality Platforms. Presented at CHI’20. April 25-30, 2020, Honolulu Hawai’i, USA, 13 pages
Gupta, S. Tanenbaum, T. J., Muralikumar, M., & Maranthe, A. (2020). Investigating Roleplaying and Identity Transformation in a Virtual Reality Narrative Experience. Presented at CHI’20. April 25-30, 2020, Honolulu Hawai’i, USA, 13 pages
Spiel, K., Alharthi, S., Cen, A., Hammer, T. J., Nacke, L., Toups, Z., & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2019) “It Started as a Joke”: On the Design of Idle Games. Presented at CHI Play 2019. September 22-25, 2019, Barcelona, Spain, pp 495 – 508 [Best Paper Honorable Mention]
Bryan, T. J. & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2019) Adapting the Empty Orchestra: The Performance of Play in Karaoke. Presented at Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA’19) August 6-10, 2019. Kyoto, Japan. 16 Pages
Burak, O, Isbister, K., & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2019) A Design Framework for Playful Wearables. Presented at Foundations of Digital Games (FDG’19) August 26-30. San Luis Obispo, CA, USA. 12 Pages
Gupta, S. & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2019) Evaluating the Pleasures of Agency in Shiva’s Rangoli, a Tangible Storytelling Installation. Presented at Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’19) June 23-28, 2019. San Diego, CA, USA
Gupta, S., Tanenbaum, T. J., & Tanenbaum, K. (2019) Shiva’s Rangoli: Tangible Storytelling through Diegetic Interfaces in Ambient Environments. Presented at Conference on Tangible and Embedded/Embodied Interaction (TEI’19) March 17-20, 2019. Tempe, AZ, USA
Gardner, D., & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2018). Dynamic Demographics: Lessons from a Large-Scale Census of Performative Possibilities in Games. Presented at CHI’18. April 21-26, 2018, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 12 Pages
Alharthi, S., Alsaedi, O., Toups, Z., Tanenbaum, T. J., & Hammer, T. J. (2018). Playing to Wait: A Taxonomy of Idle Games. Presented at CHI’18. April 21-26, 2018, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 15 Pages
Tanenbaum, T. J., Gardner, D., & Cowling, M. (2017) Teaching Pervasive Game Design in a Zombie Apocalypse. Presented at ACM CHI Play, 2017, October 15-18, Amsterdam, Netherlands. pp 165 – 176
Tanenbaum, T. J., Tanenbaum, K., & Cowling, M. (2017) Designing Hybrid Games for Playful Fabrication: Augmentation, Accumulation, & Idleness. Presented at ACM CHI Play, 2017, October 15-18, Amsterdam, Netherlands. pp 413 – 419
Jing, K., Nygaard, N., & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2017) Magia Transformo: Designing for Mixed Reality Transformative Play. Presented at ACM CHI Play, 2017, October 15-18, Amsterdam, Netherlands. pp 421 – 429
Rickman, T. J. & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2016) GeoPoetry: Designing Location-Based Combinatorial Electronic Literature Soundtracks for Roadtrips. Presented at the 9th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) 2016, November 15-18, Los Angeles, California, USA. pp 85-96
Tanenbaum, K., & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2016) Playful Fabrication: Speculative Game Designs for 3D Printers. Presented at the first joint conference of Foundations of Digital Games & Digital Games Research Association (FDG/DiGRA), 2016, August 1-6, Dundee, Scotland. 2 Pages
Tanenbaum, T. J., Crenshaw, N., & Tanenbaum, K. (2016) “Its’a Me, Mario!”: Costumed Gaming’s Effects on Character Identification. Presented at the first joint conference of Foundations of Digital Games & Digital Games Research Association (FDG/DiGRA), 2016, August 1-6, Dundee, Scotland. 2 Pages
Pufal, M., & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2016) Surviving Fallout 4: A Design Fiction. Presented at the first joint conference of Foundations of Digital Games & Digital Games Research Association (FDG/DiGRA), 2016, August 1-6, Dundee, Scotland. 2 Pages
Tanenbaum, T. J., Pufal, M., & Tanenbaum, K. (2016) The Limits of Our Imagination: Design Fiction as a Strategy for Engaging with Dystopian Futures. Presented at the Second Workshop on Computing Within Limits (LIMITS) 2016, June 9-10, Irvine, CA, USA. 9 Pages
Lazar, A., Koehler, C., Tanenbaum, T. J., & Nguyen, D. (2015) Why We Use and Abandon Smart Devices. Ubicomp, 2015, September 7-11, Osaka, Japan. pp 635 – 646 [Best Paper Honorable Mention]
Tanenbaum, T. J., & Tanenbaum, K. (2015) Envisioning the Future of Wearable Play: Conceptual Models for Props and Costumes as Game Controllers. Presented at Foundations of Digital Games, 2015. June 22-25, Pacific Grove, CA, USA. 5 Pages
Tanenbaum T. J., & Tanenbaum, K. (2015) Empathy and Identity in Digital Games: Towards a New Theory of Transformative Play. Presented at Foundations of Digital Games, 2015. June 22-25, Pacific Grove, CA, USA. 9 Pages
Chu, S.L, Quek, F., and Tanenbaum, T. J. (2013) Performative Authoring: Nurturing Storytelling in Children through Imaginative Enactment. Presented at International Conference for Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS), November 6-9, 2013. Istanbul, Turkey [27.4% Acceptance Rate] [Best Paper Award]
Tanenbaum, T. J. (2013) – How I learned to stop worrying and love the Gamer: Reframing Subversive Play in Story-Based Games. Presented at DiGRA 2013. Atlanta, GA, USA.
Chu, S.L., Quek, F., Gusukuma, L., Tanenbaum, T. J. (2013) – The Effects of Physicality on the Child’s Imagination. Presented at Creativity and Cognition 2013. Sydney Australia. 93 – 102
Tanenbaum T. J., Antle, A., Robinson, T. J. (2013) Three Perspectives on Behavior Change for Serious Games. Presented at CHI 2013, Paris, France. 3389 – 3392.
Tanenbaum T. J., Williams, A., Desjardins, A., and Tanenbaum, K. (2013) Democratizing Technology: Pleasure, Utility and Expressiveness in DIY and Maker Practice. Presented at CHI 2013, Paris, France. 2603 – 2612.
Tanenbaum, T. J., Tanenbaum, K., & Wakkary, R. (2012). Steampunk as Design Fiction. Presented at CHI 2012, Austin, TX, USA. 1583 – 1592 [Best Paper Honorable Mention]
Tanenbaum, T. J. (2011). Being in the Story: Readerly Pleasure, Acting Theory, and Performing a Role. In M. Si, D. Thue, E. André, T. J. Lester, T. J. Tanenbaum & V. Zammitto (Eds.), Interactive Storytelling (Vol. 7069, pp. 55-66): Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.
Tanenbaum, T. J. (2011). Imagining New Design Spaces for Interactive Digital Storytelling. In M. Si, D. Thue, E. André, T. J. Lester, T. J. Tanenbaum & V. Zammitto (Eds.), Interactive Storytelling (Vol. 7069, pp. 261-271): Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.
Tanenbaum, T. J., Antle, A. N., & Robinson, T. J. (2011). Procedural Rhetoric Meets Emergent Dialogue: Interdisciplinary perspectives on persuasion and behavior change in serious games for sustainability. Presented at the 12th Annual Association of Internet Researchers Conference (IR’12).
Antle, A., Tanenbaum, T. J., Tanenbaum, K., Bevans, A., Wang, S., & Seaborn, K. (2011) Balancing act: Enabling public engagement with sustainability issues through a multi-touch tabletop collaborative game. Presented at INTERACT, (Lisbon, Portugal, Sept 5- 9, 2011), pp. 194-211
Tanenbaum, K., Hatala, M., & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2011). User Perceptions of Adaptivity in an Interactive Narrative. Presented at the International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP ’11).
Tanenbaum, K., Tanenbaum, T. J., Antle, A., Bizzocchi, T. J., Seif El-Nasr, M., & Hatala, M. (2011) Experiencing the Reading Glove. Presented at Conference on Tangibles and Embedded Interaction (TEI’11), ACM Press, Portugal. pp. 137 – 144.
Antle, A., Bevans, A., Tanenbaum, T. J., Seaborn, K., & Wang, S. (2011) Futura: Design for collaborative learning and game play on a multi-touch digital tabletop. Presented at Conference on Tangibles and Embedded Interaction (TEI’11), ACM Press, Portugal. pp. 93 – 100.
Tanenbaum, T. J., Tanenbaum, K., Seif El-Nasr, M., & Hatala, M. (2010) Authoring Tangible Interactive Narratives Using Cognitive Hyperlinks, 3rd Workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies (INT3) at Foundations of Digital Games Conference (FDG 2010), June 18, 2010, Monterey, California. 8 pages.
Tanenbaum, T. J., Tanenbaum, K., & Antle, A., (2010) The Reading Glove: designing interactions for object-based tangible storytelling. Presented at the 1st Augmented Human International Conference. Megeve, France, April 2-3. pp. 132-140.
Tanenbaum, K. & Tanenbaum, T. J. (2009) Commitment to Meaning: A Reframing of Agency in Games. Presented at 8th Conference on Digital Arts and Culture (DAC). December 12-15, Irvine, USA, 9 pages.
Tanenbaum, T. J. & Bizzocchi, T. J. (2009) Rock Band: A Case Study in the Design of Embodied Interface Experience. Presented at ACM SIGGRAPH 2009. August 4-8, New Orleans, USA, ACM Press, p.127-134.
Tanenbaum, T. J. & Tanenbaum, K.(2008) Improvisation and Performance as Models for Interacting with Stories, in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Interactive Storytelling, Ulrike Spierling & Nicolas Szilas (Eds), v. 5334, pp. 250 – 263. Berlin: Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.
Tanenbaum, T. J. & Tomizu, A. (2007). Affective Interaction Design and Narrative Presentation. Presented at AAAI Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technology. November 9 – 11, Arlington, USA, p. 150-157.