Igor Mayer

Igor Mayer is a professor (lector) of Serious Games, Innovation & Society at Breda University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands. This professorship is affiliated to the Academy for Games and Media (AGM). Since January 2021, he is also an endowed professor (0.2fte) "Playful Organizations and Learning Systems" in the department of Organization Studies, faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Tilburg University.

In 2017, he was awarded a Hai Tian (Sea Sky) scholarship in Dalian University of Technology (DUT), Dalian, China. In 2019, he was awarded a scholarship by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71774024). Previously (2015-‘16), he has been a visiting professor in the School of Management and Economics of Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), China. From 1998 until January 2015, he was a senior associate professor in the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TPM) in Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, where he set up and led the policy gaming research group.

He is co-founder and has been a board member of SAGANET– the Netherlands’ Simulation and Gaming Association – as well as GaLA, the European Network of Excellence in Serious Games (2010-2014) and the European Serious Game Society (2012 -). He is an associate editor of Simulation & Gaming (SAGE, since 2005) and Water (MDPI, since 2016).

His main research and professional interests are the development, use and evaluation of gaming-simulation, serious games and more recently also virtual, mixed and augmented reality for policy analysis, organization and management. His pending research line has the title “Playful Organizations & Learning Systems”. Over the years and in various partnerships, he has initiated, managed and participated in a large number of serious gaming-related research and development projects, most recently for, and with Digishape, Zeelandia, Liander, Rijkswaterstaat (RWS), the ministry of Infrastructures & Water Management (I&W), the Next Generation Infrastructures (NGI) program, Vereniging Deltametropool, Royal Dutch Shell, the Netherlands’ Police Academy, the Dutch Council for the Judiciary, the Netherlands Office for the Public Prosecution, the Port of Rotterdam. He has been a partner in several European projects, part of FP7, H2020, Eranet, Interreg and Erasmus+ funding programs. One featured project is the MSP Challenge (www.mspchallenge.info) with pending EU / Interreg funded projects in the North Sea, Baltic, Celtic and Mediterranean regions, and invited game-play sessions around the globe.

He published more than 150 journal and conference papers (H>31, www.researchgate.net/profile/Igor_Mayer). He is the promotor of six completed PhD theses, with three ‘award winning’.