A game designer has won one of seven prestigious chairs endowed to the University of California system by the MacArthur Foundation.

Michael Mateas, associate professor of computer science at UC Santa Cruz and director of the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UCSC, is the first holder of the MacArthur Foundation Chair at the school. The chair's endowment provides $80,000 annually for five years. 

Mateas is known for his work with Facade, an artificial intelligence-driven interactive drama. Mateas is researching ways to bring rich social interactions to serious games, whose power he says has not been fully tapped. By building a suite of game authoring tools, Mateas also hopes to make the expressive power of games available to the masses.

"I want to enable everyday people to create games about topics that are important to them," Mateas says. "We're at a threshold, just beginning to create a medium that in many ways is as broad as writing. Anything you can imagine conveying in writing or film, you can potentially do in computational media in a way that makes it amenable to a level of exploration and reflection that is not possible in those other media."

Mateas is also developing a series of emergency response games. He's already done preliminary work on a training game for rescue situations in collapsed buildings, collaborating with a team at NASA Ames Research Center to expand the number of firefighters to have access to the highly specialized training.

As Mateas points out, the award of the chair to a game developer represents a tacit acknowledgment of the importance of the medium.

"What excites me about games is their potential as a new way to communicate and to reflect on the human condition. Having the MacArthur Chair helps to legitimize this work and sends a clear message of support for the creation of this new discipline of computational media."