Jordan Magnuson is a game designer and media artist whose work explores how videogames can express human experience in poetic and culturally resonant ways. For over fifteen years, he has created award-winning independent games, "game poems," and other interactive works.
In 2005, he founded The Independent Gaming Source (TIGSource), a community that helped launch a generation of landmark indie titles including Fez, Spelunky, Papers, Please, and Minecraft. His own games, such as Loneliness, Ishmael, and Freedom Bridge, have been showcased at festivals and galleries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, archived by the British Library, nominated for honours including the IndieCade Grand Jury Award and the New Media Writing Prize, and featured in publications including Wired, PC Gamer, and Le Monde.
Jordan regularly speaks at leading games industry events and game design programmes worldwide, including GDC, IndieCade, Google, USC, and MIT, and collaborates with artists, poets, and researchers to explore the cultural and emotional possibilities of games. He is the author of Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice (Amherst College Press, 2023), and leads the Game Poets Discord community, connecting creators from games, poetry,and the visual arts around the topics of human and poetic game design.
Jordan currently serves as Senior Lecturer in Games and Media Art at the University of Southampton and was 2024–25 Fulbright Fellow in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen.