She studied Product Design and Media Art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, where she developed an early focus on game design and interactive systems. After completing her pre-diploma, she became Head of GameLab Karlsruhe, where she was responsible for curriculum development and taught courses in game design. During this period, she gained industry experience through an internship at Topware Interactive and subsequently worked there as a producer.

In 2011, she completed a guest semester at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Poland. She finished her diploma in 2014 and subsequently taught Game Design and Gamification at several universities, including Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Karlshochschule International University, Reykjavík University, and Macromedia University of Applied Sciences.

Alongside her academic work, she has been active as a lecturer and freelance game designer, publishing award-winning educational games such as Müll AG, InvestNuts, and Uuugh – False Play as well as independent games such as Punzel – Chapter 1 and LICH – the Deck Dealing Game. She also worked as a UX designer for industry and cultural institutions including Bosch, Union Investment, the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). This professional practice informs her teaching, with a strong emphasis on applied design, systems thinking, and indie-based production workflows.

In 2015, she continued her academic career as a Ph.D. candidate at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), within the Department of Economics at the Institute for Information Systems and Marketing (IISM) and completed her Ph.D. in July 2022.

Since February 2023, she has been Professor of Game Design at Cologne GameLab (CGL), TH Köln.

Overarching Teaching Principle: The Game of University

The following is a proposal to think of an academic institution from a lens of an open-world-game: A structure in which various intrinsically motivated entities engage with the problems and challenges it offers. It’s participants are agents as well as system designers.

Derivations:

Students = Agents/Players
Within this game, students are meant to play with/within it to grow into capable agents, able to confidently navigate in various real-world systems.

University = Collaborator Pool
One intended outcome of the universitarial structure is to ensure that its participants build strong interdisciplinary and cross-strata networks.
This is ensured through collaborative projects that are aimed towards that outcome (cross-cohort collaborative projects, open/public game jams, collaborative projects with other institutions)

Professors = System Architects
Professors are in charge of designing a lot of the specific scaffolding that shapes the day-to-day teaching interaction of their part of this larger game.
The underlying structure most often preexistits within an already running system. Thus, approaching course design from a game design (aka system architecture) perspective means constant reflection/assessment and willingness to integrate and iterate.

Professors = Quest Designers
Within the space that the university offers, professors provide enough scaffolding for their participating agents in the form of interesting and meaningful challenges while allowing enough freedom (Spielraum) for them to find their own approach to overcome them.

Professors = Biome Designers
Professors scope out topic domains that bring their agents into contact with as broad areas of human interest as possible but also necessary for them to solve not only immediate problems but also problems 10-20 years down the road. For User Interface Design this might include topics of psychology, for Multiplayer Games basic mechanisms of sociology or for level design foundations in geography, geology, and architecture.

Professors = Enablers
Professors create spaces and formats in which students can safely emulate future real-world facets of their job by taking on active roles of responsibility.
Such formats are initially fostered by the professors in the short term but meant to be taken over by students (such as Broken Paternoster Games – a student led publishing label in which students help each other to publish on platforms like Steam, itch, Android or iOS and organize participation in exhibitions like A MAZE, Gamescom, Dokomi; or Forum Ludorum – a student-led presentation space where students hold regular lectures on topics they have expertize in).
This ensures learning outcomes on additional skills like responsibility, organizational skills, management and marketing and strongly enhances student’s long-term employability.

Apart from this more structural work, Professors also serve gameful roles in the “day to day”

Professor = Quest giver
Professors serve as the designer as well as the facilitator of the specific challenges studentic agents are asked to overcome

Professors = “Ghost-Agents”
They can provide additional guidance by offering solution paths based on own solution examples (based on their own “playthrough” paths)

Professors = UI/Feedback System
Finally, professors, through feedback and commented grading offer system-feedback to the agents post interaction.

Originating from a background in design and media art, her approach to game research was fundamentally shaped by game theory and philosophical perspectives. During her Ph.D. in economics, her research focus shifted toward facilitating knowledge transfer between game research and economic domains. Central to this work was the development of a structured ontology of game design elements to support gamification and gameful design beyond entertainment contexts. This work resulted in a curated dataset of 591 game design elements, enriched with descriptive, categorical, and bibliographic metadata. Complementary datasets on playing motivators (n = 239) and human needs (n = 92) were connected through algorithmic matching to form an integrated graph of gameful design knowledge. To make this body of work accessible, she designed an open-source web-based exploration tool released in 2020, which received the IDEENSTARK 2020 award.

Her second research focus examines the effects of game design elements in learning contexts. Successful educational games must reconcile their pedagogical objectives with the user expectations that are shaped by the current trends of entertainment media. In her dissertation, she empirically evaluated the impact of learning-oriented design elements through field studies and laboratory experiments. This work gained recognition within the information systems community and was grounded in an educational game that achieved broad public uptake, exceeding 100,000 downloads and receiving multiple awards and media coverage.

Tying back to her original background in design and philosophy, her current research revisits philosophical inquiry of Spiel through an iconographic visualization lens. Under the approach of “Visualized Philosophy”, she develops stencil-based infographics that function as visual concept condensations situated between symbolic systems and design wireframes. These stencils are used to explore foundational notions such as game, play, and playspace and map these to adjacent concepts of education, architecture, media consumption. Such pattern exploration is framed under the term Mmetanautics. In particular, her work on the metanautical pyramid frames game design as a navigational map structuring the metaspace into layers of depth, reconnecting philosophical theories with contemporary design research.

Hoffmann, G.; Bittner, J.; Hoffmann, U.; Fegert, J. M. (2026), “Uuugh – False Play” – a Serious Game to Teach Detection and Prevention of Perpetrator Strategies. Book chapter. doi:10.1007/978-3-032-11043-5_32

Cakmak, D.; Maghsudi, S.; Perez Liebana, D.; Spronck, P.; Hoffmann, G. (2024), Computational Creativity for Game Development (Dagstuhl Seminar 24261). Report. doi:10.4230/DAGREP.14.6.130

Carnovalini, F.; Hoffmann, G.; Hu, C.; Kallabis, L.; Müller-Brockhausen, M.; Preuß, M. (2024), Meaningful Acoustics for Board Games. Report, Computational Creativity for Game Development.

Hoffmann, G.; Cunha, J. M.; Hu, C.; Kallabis, L.; Spronck, P. (2024), Personal AcCompanion AI. Report.

Hoffmann, G. (2022), Design and Instantiation of an Interactive Multidimensional Ontology for Game Design Elements – a Design and Behavioral Approach. Journal article, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT). doi:10.5445/IR/1000149775

Hoffmann, G.; Pfeiffer, J. (2022), Gameful Learning for a More Sustainable World. Business & Information Systems Engineering. doi:10.1007/s12599-021-00731-x

Pfeiffer, J.; Fegert, J.; Greif-Winzrieth, A.; Hoffmann, G.; Peukert, C. (2021), Can Immersive Systems Help Address Sustainability Goals? Insights from Research in Information Systems. Book chapter, Market Engineering. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-66661-3_8

Hoffmann, G.; Matysiak, L. (2019), Exploring Game Design for the Financial Education of Millennials. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications (VS-Games). doi:10.1109/VS-Games.2019.8864517

Hoffmann, G.; Martin, R.; Weinhardt, C. (2019), Perfectionism in Games – Analyzing Playing Behaviors in an Educational Game. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications (VS-Games). doi:10.1109/VS-Games.2019.8864542

Clocher, B.; Hoffmann, G. (2018), Incentivizing Correct Waste Sorting by Game Design. Proceedings of DiGRA 2018 – The Game Is the Message.

Zentek, T.; Hoffmann, G. (2016), Analyse von Gamification Anreizmechanismen für Crowd Worker in Participatory Sensing. Conference proceedings. doi:10.18420/MUC2016-MCI-0232