Professor Anders Drachen

Head of Unit, Professor

Professor Drachen is Head of the SDU Metaverse Lab, CCO for the think-tank the Digital Observatory and co-director at consulting firm Agora Informatics.
He is recognized as one of the world’s most influential scientists and innovators working with creative technologies. Professor Drachen’s multi-award-winning research focuses on harnessing creative technologies for the improvement of society and is regularly covered by international media.

Harnessing creative technologies for the improvement of society

Every day, billions of people interact with creative technologies such as games and social media, and yet we have very little data available about the trillions of hours we spend yearly with such technologies.

This is a great roadblock towards protecting users, emphasizing the positive effects of our interaction with creative technologies, and also towards informing public policy in this space.

Professor Drachen is leading cross-disciplinary, international efforts towards establishing the evidence needed to make decisions about our future relationship with creative technologies, and how to harness their societal potential.

Professor Drachen’s work has assisted major international game publishers, as well as SMEs, in making better decisions based on their data. He works with policymakers on defining public policy for societal benefit and is a leading voice for public well-being in interacting with technology.

Field-defining author on Data-usages in Creative Technologies

As a prolific author, Professor Drachen has authored hundreds of articles and is the editor and author of three field-defining books on Creative Technologies: Game Analytics – Maximizing the Value of Player Data, read by over 200,000 people, Games User Research, a standard work of reference in the games industry, and Game Data Science, the first textbook on the use of data in the creative technologies.

Professor Drachen is involved with multiple organizations and societies. For example, he is an Honorary Professor at the School of Computer Science, University of York; and co-director for the Arena Research Cluster, an international research network focused on innovation in esports and sports, and is adjunct faculty at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

He forms part of the steering committee of the International Game Development Association’s Special Interest Group on Game Analytics.
He is a member of Turing Institute Special Interest Group on Data Visualization and the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing in the United Kingdom.

Leading cross-disciplinary efforts to understand the impact of Games

He collaborates with international networks of colleagues in academia and industry and works with students worldwide on research projects.
He has been part of the leadership teams of research projects with a combined value of over 250 million DKK, generating societal, economics and cultural impact.
He is a strong proponent for work-integrated learning and an active partner for the Creative Industries in matchmaking students for internships and careers.

Having lived and worked on four different continents, Professor Drachen has had the mixed pleasure of fending off three shark attacks in Africa and Australia.
He is also the youngest Dane in history to publish a cooking book – dedicated to ice cream. In his spare time, he writes books for children about technology and economics.

Partnerships and collaborations

Books

Courses

Interaction Design introduces students to interaction design as an aspect of creating a user-centered design process and the importance of usability and how to evaluate it in your designs.

Project Organization and Management: introduces technical students to project management across the project management life cycle, with a strong focus on communication, planning and execution.

Research Interests

  • Data science
  • Games
  • User Research
  • Digital Behavior
  • AI
  • Metaverse

Supervision topics

  • Data-Driven Storytelling in Games & Esports
  • Scalable Educational Resources for 21st Century Skills / Improving Data Literacy
  • Game Monetization & Game Economies