Philosopher, computationalist, and award-winning game designer Ian Bogost will present “Inside the Box with Ian Bogost: How to Live Playfully” at 4:30 p.m. Oct. 17 at Ohio Wesleyan University.

Bogost, Ph.D., will speak in the Benes Rooms inside OWU’s Hamilton-Williams Campus Center, 40 Rowland Ave., Delaware. His free presentation is the 2024-2025 Katherine Kearney Carpenter Lecture sponsored by the Ohio Wesleyan Department of English.

Bogost is the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences, the director of Film and Media Studies, and a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition, he is a founding partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, as well as an author or co-author of 10 books and a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

He describes his video games as being about social and political issues that cover topics as varied as airport security, consumer debt, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, pandemic flu, and tort reform. His independent game Cow Clicker is a Facebook game send-up of Facebook games.

Bogost’s games have been played by millions of people and exhibited or held in collections internationally, at venues including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Telfair Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, the Laboral Centro de Arte, and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, and his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Comparative Literature from UCLA. Learn more about Bogost at https://bogost.com.

Ohio Wesleyan’s Carpenter Lecture Series was established in 1967 with an endowment from the late O. William Carpenter in honor of his wife, Katherine Kearney Carpenter. Previous Carpenter Lecturers include Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom Carol Ann Duffy; National Book Award winners Ta-Nehisi Coates, William Stafford, Tim O’Brien, Amy Tan, and Joyce Carol Oates; 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Seamus Heaney; New York Times bestselling essayist Leslie Jamison; Nobel Prize-winning poet-playwright Derek Walcott; and former U.S. Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov. Other writers in the series have included Carlos Fuentes, Russell Banks, Tobias Wolff, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Learn more about Ohio Wesleyan’s Department of English at www.owu.edu/English.

Submitted by Ohio Wesleyan University.