Michael Christel

Michael Christel is a Teaching Professor in the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He teaches full semester project-based courses in the Master of Entertainment Technology program, and is also affiliated with CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute and CMU's Center for Transformational Play. Working with the HCII and CTP, Dr. Christel is interested in improving playtesting for game and experience design projects within the ETC, CMU, and beyond. He sees the value of playcentric design and iterative development informed by playtesting with stakeholders, and runs playtesting workshops at the ETC, launched through an early CMU Simon Initiative grant.

Michael Christel joined Carnegie Mellon in 1987, conducting numerous multimedia information processing and interface research efforts. He received his PhD from Georgia Tech in 1991 with a thesis examining dynamically generated digital video interfaces in a game teaching about code inspections. Dr. Christel joined the ETC Faculty in 2008, where he broadened his research from multimedia for information search and retrieval, to multimedia for information engagement.

At the ETC, Dr. Christel is particularly interested in transformational games, i.e., those that change the player in a positive way. Conferences and workshops devoted to games for education and for health are focus areas, with ETC projects at times conducted jointly with other departments at CMU. Dr. Christel has brought Informedia digital video library (IDVL) work to the ETC, leading to the development of tools for The HistoryMakers and others. He is currently very interested in the use of entertainment technologies, text analytics, and digital video processing to empower digital humanities scholarship through resources like the 150,000 African American stories in The HistoryMakers Digital Archive.