Oguz Buruk

Hey, I'm Oz. I am an Assistant Professor of Gameful Experience and completed my PhD at Koç University - Arçelik Research Center for Creative Industries (KUAR) in Design, Technology and Society Program, Interaction Design Track. I currently work at Tampere University an affiliated with Gamification Group of Juho Hamari .

My current main research interest is designing games & play for a posthuman era. Both transhuman/cyborg experiences (convergence of humans and machines) and more-than-human perspectives (sharing the center stage with other beings) are in my scope and I aim to understand how game will be shaped by posthuman technologies such as brain-machine interfaces, robotic companions, bodily implant or space habitation technologies. I also look ito how designing the games of future can inform us about future societies and societal structures.   

Another pillar of my work is the prioritization of gameful experience. Before anything else, games should be fun and entertaining. This is why I focus on new player experiences that can bring novel approaches to different game genres. Games can target other benefits only after they do their own job which is making people spend pleasurable time "willingly."

Other than games & play for posthumans, my research interests vary from wearables for gaming, computational fashion, human-nature-machine interaction or extended reality. I also mainly conduct research through design projects, with a heavy focus on speculative and critical design, and design fiction.  

- Research through Design

- Interactive Prototyping

- Design Fiction

- Speculative and Critical Design

- Design Research 

10. Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk, Ella Dagan, Katherine Isbister, Elena Márquez Segura and Theresa Jean Tanenbaum. 2024. Playful Wearables: Understanding the Design Space of Wearables for Games and Related Experiences. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546911/playful-wearables/

9. Ferran Altarriba Bertran, Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk, Jordi Márquez Puig and Juho Hamari. 2025. How Can Interactive Technology Help Us to Experience Joy With(in) the Forest? Towards a Taxonomy of Tech for Joyful Human-Forest Interactions. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 742, 21 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713151

8. Velvet Spors, Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk and Juho Hamari. 2025. Human-Nature Relationships through Video Games: An Exploration of Players' Sense-Making. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 772, 17 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713207

7. Velvet Spors, Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk and Juho Hamari. 2024. Ecological In/Congruence: Becoming Sensitised to Nature in Video Games through Humanistic First-Person Research. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 522, 16 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642659

6. Çağlar Genç, Velvet Spors, Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk, Mattia Thibault, Leland Masek and Juho Hamari. 2024. Envisioning Transhuman Communication Research: Speculative Human Augmentation Technologies and Fictional Abstracts. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 42, 14 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3623509.3633390

5. Eshtiak Ahmed, Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk and Juho Hamari. 2024. Human-Robot Companionship: Current Trends and Future Agenda. International Journal of Social Robotics: 1-52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-024-01160-y

4. Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk, Louise Petersen Matjeka and Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller. 2023. Towards Designing Playful Bodily Extensions: Learning from Expert Interviews. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 233, 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581165

3. Laura D. Cosio, Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk, Daniel Fernández Galeote, Isak De Villiers Bosman and Juho Hamari. 2023. Virtual and Augmented Reality for Environmental Sustainability: A Systematic Review. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 6, 23 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581147

2. Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk and Ahmet Börütecene. 2024. PingPonGPT: Write Your Next Paper while Playing Table Tennis with the Help of AI. In Companion Proceedings of the 2024 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY Companion '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 269–271. https://doi.org/10.1145/3665463.3678864

1. Isak de Villiers Bosman, Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk, Kristine Jørgensen and Juho Hamari. 2023. The effect of audio on the experience in virtual reality: a scoping review. Behaviour & Information Technology: 1-35. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2022.2158371