About the person
Daniel Heßler teaches and researches in the fields of game design, interactive storytelling, serious games, media and humor theory.
He studied dramaturgy, modern German literature and psychology at the LMU Munich / Bayerische Theaterakademie August Everding and worked as a dramaturge, director, author and performer in the independent theater scene, at the municipal theater and at international guest performances from 2002 to 2012.
Since 2005, he has been developing and publishing games in the Action RPG, RTS, VN and TTRPG genres for Kalypso Media and Ulisses Spiele, among others. From 2015 to 2022, he taught Media Studies and Media Practice (B.A.), Computer Game Studies (M.A./M.Sc.) and Literature and Media (M.A.) at the Game Innovation Lab of the University of Bayreuth as well as gamified didactics at the Bayreuth Center for Higher Education. He was a lecturer at HMT Leipzig, HS Karlsruhe and HS Darmstadt, Creative Director of the LevelUp project at JLU Gießen and has been a juror at the German Dev Days since 2020.
In June 2024, he took up the professorship for Game Design at Fachhochschule Dortmund, where he heads the Serious Games & Digital Knowledge (B.A.) study program. He is a member of the GameLabs network at universities and a founding member of the German Society for Game Science.