Erik Harpstead

I build games and game-based systems as research infrastructure — tools and environments that enable new forms of inquiry into human behavior, interaction, and collaboration. My work spans playful learning design and the design and deployment of games as experimental platforms, supporting a wide range of research questions across human-computer interaction, learning science, and human-AI teaming. I treat games not just as artifacts of study, but as instruments of research that can scaffold experimentation, support data collection, and foster community engagement — shared infrastructure for interdisciplinary research communities.

Ultimately, my goal is a research program that treats games as both subject and substrate: a means of understanding interaction, and a medium for shaping the future of how we study it.

I am an affiliate faculty member with CMU’s Center for Transformational Play, which brings together researchers and designers from across the university to build and study transformational games. I have taught Design of Educational Games in the HCII for the past several years (materials publicly available at edugames.design), as well as occasional classes in our Master of Science in Learning Engineering program, and I advise doctoral and undergraduate researchers across these areas. I serve on the steering committee for ACM CHI PLAY, where I was General Chair in 2025, and have chaired or served on program committees for CHI PLAY, CHI, Meaningful Play, and the Educational Data Mining conference.

You can find my full publication list on Google Scholar and ORCID, and most of my code on GitHub. My CV is available here.