Author: hevga

Aaron Trammell is a Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine with affiliations in African American Studies, Culture and Theory, Visual Studies, and Media Studies. He has written several books on how tabletop games further values of white privilege and hegemonic masculinity in geek culture. He is a founder of the journal Analog Game Studies and the series co-editor for both the Tabletop Gaming series at University of Michigan Press and the Postmillenial Pop series at NYU Press.

Aaron has also served as chair of Indiecade’s jury committee. He directs the Diana Jones Award’s Emerging Designer Program, which creates a pathway for up and coming designers to break in to the tabletop industry.

Olli Sotamaa is a Professor of Game Culture Studies at the Tampere University, Finland. He is the founder and co-lead of Tampere University Game Research Lab, and a team leader at the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies. His research explores the various forms of creative play and creative labour, and he has published widely on topics including game fandom, game heritage, modding, game development cultures and local game industries. He is the co-editor of Game Production Studies (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), a volume that provides the groundwork for critically examining game labour and game industries.

Kristine Jørgensen is professor of media studies at University of Bergen. Jørgensen is interested in player-centered perspectives and has studied player experiences with transgressive game content, player interaction with game interfaces, and player experiences of sound in games. Jørgensen also has an interest in production and industry studies and has in that context researched the Norwegian game industry.

Jørgensen’s portfolio as project manager of externally funded grants includes Games and Transgressive Aesthetics (Research Council of Norway 2015-2019) and Understanding Masculinity and Gaming (2023-2028). Jørgensen is also a principal investigator in the Norwegian Center for Excellence Center for Digital Narrative (2023-2033).

Jørgensen is the co-author of The Paradox of Transgression in Games, the author of Gameworld Interfaces and A Comprehensive Study of Sound in Computer Games: How Audio Affects Player Action, and the co-editor of Transgression in Games and Play. As of 2022, Jørgensen is also Co-Editor-In-Chief of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture.

Dr. Ashley ML Guajardo (née Brown) is an award-winning teacher, streamer, and scholar. She has dedicated her career to excellence in games scholarship since first serving as a student representative of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) in 2012. Since then, she has held positions of leadership as Vice President of the Global Game Jam (2020-1), an open seat and conference co-director of the IGDA’s Games User Research Special Interest Group (2021-2), and most recently she was elected president of DiGRA (2025-7).

In addition to these leadership roles, Dr. Guajardo’s career has been marked by a dedication to accessibility and inclusivity. Beyond her DEI work at institutions, she has pioneered the use of accessible technology in her classrooms (for which she won a distinguished teaching award) and specializes in reaching out to first-generation/ non-traditional students. She has hosted a free, educational Twitch stream weekly since December 2016 where she integrates gameplay analysis with biometric feedback to discuss game design. Since 2025, she has been the host and producer of The Research Left Behind, a bi-weekly live stream podcast which provides free educational content for learners outside of traditional academia.

Stephanie Barish is the founder and CEO of IndieCade, one of the world’s premier independent games festivals. Barish began her career bridging cinema and interactive media—working on the film Mortal Kombat, producing projects for the USC Shoah Foundation, and helping setup USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. In 2005 she launched IndieCade to champion innovation, inclusivity, and artistic risk-taking in games. Under her stewardship, the festival has grown into a globe-spanning showcase with outposts in New York, Paris, and the fully online Anywhere & Everywhere edition, giving thousands of creators their first public spotlight and shaping the trajectory of the indie-game movement.

Barish’s visionary leadership has earned her a place among Fortune’s “10 Most Powerful Women in Gaming” and praise from the Los Angeles Times as the force behind “the Sundance of video games.” She continues to mentor emerging talent, advise cultural institutions, and advocate for games as one of the defining art forms of our time.

Dr. Hartmut Koenitz is a scholar, designer, and artist. His research is concerned with the theory, practice, education and societal impact of interactive narratives and games. He is particularly concerned with the use of interactive narratives to better understand the complex world of the 21st century. His latest book “Understanding Interactive Digital Narratives. Immersive Expressions for a Complex Time” was published by Routledge in 2023 (http://understandingidn.com). Koenitz has published over 90 scholarly publications including the co-edited volume “Interactive Digital Narrative – History, Theory and Practice” (Routledge 2015).

He is a Professor in Media Technology at Södertörn University, a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam, and a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin.

Koenitz is also the president of ARDIN, the Association for Research in Digital Interactive Narratives (https://ardin.online) which organizes the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) and is partnered with the ZIP Scene conference. Koenitz is also the founding Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Interactive Narrative (https://journal.ardin.online), a pioneering academic journal specific to the topic which integrates interactive experiences within articles, published in collaboration between ETC Press and ARDIN.

Koenitz is the chair of the EU COST Action 18230 INDCOR (Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations – https://indcor.eu) and one of the editors of the upcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Interactive Digital Narrative.

He is a member of several academic and professional societies, including DIGRA (Digital Games Research Association), ACM, European Council member of HEVGA (Higher Education Video Game Alliance), RealTime Society’s Interactive Storytelling Group, ELO (Electronic Literature Organization), the International Society for the Study of Narrative and the European Narratology Network.

Koenitz holds a PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Digital Media on the theory and practice of Interactive Digital Narrative.

He is the creator of the ASAPS authoring tool, which has been used to create more than 150 works. Previously, Koenitz was the CTO of the Berlin-based startup Designnet, worked as a tech journalist writing more than 150 articles, consulted for clients like Stanford in Berlin and co-founded a tech company.

Koenitz is also a visual artist, and his works have been shown in Atlanta, Paris, Istanbul, Seoul, Copenhagen and Porto. His latest artwork, The Multiple Lives of Walter B. is a physical installation that explores virtual biographies of Walter Benjamin.

Dr. Bo Ruberg, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine and the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Ruberg’s research explores gender and sexuality in digital media with a focus on LGBTQ issues in video games. They are the author of three books: Video Games Have Always Been Queer (NYU Press, 2019); The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games (Duke University Press, 2020), for which they received the 2021 Stonewall Book Award for Non-Fiction from the American Library Association; and Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies (MIT Press, 2022), for which they received the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Ruberg is also the co-editor of multiple volumes and served as the lead organizer of the Queerness and Games Conference from 2013 to 2018.

Dr. Mitu Khandaker is a game designer, scholar, and entrepreneur. She is an Associate Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center, where she teaches game design and development. She holds a Ph.D. in designing games for immersive interfaces such as VR and AR and has a background in computer engineering. Mitu also co-founded Glow Up Games, a studio centered on telling stories about Black and brown joy, and the first-ever all-women of color-founded mobile game studio to raise over $1M in venture funding. Mitu was previously on the founding team at Spirit AI, a games AI middleware company, and has previously launched a location-based games startup. She also worked in the indie game space on titles such as the social simulation game Redshirt.

She has received a number of international accolades, including as a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit in 2013 and the Creative English Trailblazer Award in 2014. Mitu is particularly interested in encouraging diversity in game development and STEAM-related fields and has served on the advisory committee for the Advocacy Track at Game Developers’ Conference since 2014. She also served on the board of directors at Feminist Frequency and as an AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador to champion more middle school and teen girls into game development.