Madej looks at imaginative engagement with the world, offers a new perspective of how knowledge grows in the mind, and provides insight into why children engage with narrative games. Imagination is the source of flexibility and invention in human thinking and provides for the ability to think beyond the actual to what is possible.

As ours is a peculiarly languaged understanding of the world – the development of imagination is based in acquiring culturally embedded strategies that are language based. Educational theorist Kieran Egan suggests five distinct kinds of “imaginative understanding”– somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophic, and ironic. Constant across these understandings are foundational capacities, such as grasping detail, that we have trained and shaped over the millennia, and that help us order and understand reality. Madej elaborates on these in so much as they help to provide insight into how children (and youth) engage with game narratives.

Krystina Madej is Visiting Assistant Professor at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech and Adjunct Professor with the School for Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. Her research links print and digital narrative experience and looks at how narrative is mediated by technology and creates meaning for us. She is particularly interested in providing games developers with an understanding of narrative that encourages the use of a wide range of story-types. She co-edited with Dr. Kieran Egan, SFU’s Canada Chair for Education, the book “Engaging Imagination and Developing Creativity in Education." More recently she collaborated with Newton Lee, founding editor of ACM’s Computers in Entertainment journal and site, on “Disney Stories: Getting to Digital” published by Springer in Spring 2012. Prior to returning to academia in 1999 she oversaw the successful implementation of corporate communications and design initiatives for government, business and industry, and the non-profit sector such as museums. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia in Montreal, an MA in Professional Writing from Kennesaw State, and a PhD in Digital Narrative from Simon Fraser University.