Dr Mark R Johnson is a Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney. His work focuses primarily on video game live streaming on Twitch.tv, with a particular focus on live streaming labour, live streaming and mental health, and the cultures and practices of live streaming. He has written extensively in this area and is one of the most published and cited authors in live streaming research.
Alongside Twitch research, Dr Johnson also studies esports and competitive gaming, gamblification and digital gambling, procedural content generation, game design, and game AI. He has been awarded over $1m of funding to date for his research and has given many dozens of invited talks and several hundred conference presentations. He also runs a popular games blog with over 1.5m lifetime hits, co-hosts a gaming podcast, and has written on gaming for numerous commentary publications. He is also a independent game developer noted for creating the game "Ultima Ratio Regum", a judge on NYU's "Generative Design in Minecraft" AI competition, and a current board member of the Digital Games Research Association.
Since his PhD he has worked in the United Kingdom, Canada, and briefly the USA and Hong Kong, but has now settled in Australia for good.