Pedro Pinto Neves is an Auxiliary Professor at Lusófona University in Lisbon, where he teaches Game Design and Interactive Storytelling, and is an integrated member of the HEI-Lab (Digital Human-environment Research Lab) research centre. Pedro Neves was the Principal Investigator of the PlayersAll: media agency and empowerment (EXPL/COM-OUT/0882/2021) exploratory project, financed by the FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia), which aimed to contribute to a new understanding of agency in games through a media ethnography and action-research study of how occupational therapy patients feel 'seen' by the development of an upper-limb rehabilitation VR game. Pedro is also part of the GameIn Games Inclusion Lab: Participatory Media Creation Processes for Accessibility project (2022.07939.PTDC), financed by the FCT. Pedro Neves is the co-director of the Masters in Game Design and Playable Media at Lusófona University, which he helped design. He holds a PhD in Media and Communication (thesis on Game Design and Agency in games, Universidade do Minho, 2017), as well as a Master in Arts in Digital Game Design from the University College for the Creative Arts at Farnham, UK. His research interests are game design research, serious games, communication, and agency in games, namely how the design of agency positions players relative to game development. Pedro Neves was a co-chair for the Foundations of Digital Games 2023 Conference ( held in Lisbon in April 2023) and has helped organize Summer Schools for training young researchers ("Verão com Ciência" initiative of the FCT). Pedro Neves has also been a member of the scientific committee and reviewer on a peer-reviewed journal, and worked as a guest-editor for special issue of an indexed journal dedicated to game design. Pedro has taken part and continues to be involved in multiple funding applications for projects related to game design, education, and inclusion. Through these projects at HEI-Lab and Lusófona University, Pedro Neves does research and publishes on Game Design, both as fundamental research, and from the standpoint of applications for serious games.
