Christopher W. Totten

Chris Totten is an Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of the Animation Game Design program at Kent State University.

Chris is an award-winning independent game designer, artist, and animator. His current project is the hand-animated Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends, which uses the process of game art direction to explore the legacy of animation and comics pioneer Winsor McCay. His previous works include La Mancha - a storytelling card game based on Cervantes' Don Quixote; Lissitzky's Revenge - an arcade action game exploring Russian Constructivist and Bauhaus artworks; and Kudzu - a Game Boy game about invasive plants, which was also ported to the Nintendo Switch. He holds a master’s degree in architecture (M.Arch) with a concentration in digital media from the Catholic University of America. Chris is a co-founder of the Smithsonian American Art Museum Arcade and a lifetime member and former Washington, DC Chapter Chair of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). He is on the Board of Directors for the Chicago-based Video Game Art (VGA) Gallery and his work has been shown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Art Institute Chicago, Cleveland Institute of Art Reinberger Gallery, and the Chicago GameSpace. 

He was a member of the inaugural class for the IndieCade Horizons Faculty Excellence Awards, winning the Innovation Award for his work building an appreciation for games in the context of the arts. He has written multiple books on design, including An Architectural Approach to Level Design (which is an industry best-seller and has also been translated to Japanese and Chinese) and World Design in 2D Action-Adventures. He is also the editor of the collected volume, Level Design: Processes and Experiences and the Level Design Practices series. He was previously the Game Artist in Residence at American University in Washington, DC, and an Assistant Professor of Game Design in the School of Art at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA.