Interactive virtual environments, games and social media, are emerging as platforms used for entertainment, education, training, crowdsourcing, as well as environments to measure and understand human behavior. Dr. Seif El-Nasr’s work is focused on two goals (a) developing automated tools and techniques for authoring, adapting, and personalizing virtual environments, and (b) developing data science approaches to measure human behavior to evaluate the effectiveness of game environments in making an impact in health and learning. She recently published the first book on the subject of ‘game analytics’, called Game Analytics: Maximizing the Value of Player Data. Her work is internationally known. Notably, she received several best paper awards, including two Best Paper Awards at Foundations of Digital Games 2015. Dr. Seif El-Nasr has chaired and co-chaired several conferences, including Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) 2012 (Chair), International Conference on Entertainment Computing (ICEC) 2011 (Co-Chair), Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE) 2009 (Program Co-Chair). She is also on several editorial boards, including IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. She served in several NSF panels. She also served on several SIGs, including as an ACM Representative for TC14 IFIP on Entertainment Computing.
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Jesse Schell is the CEO of Schell Games, a team of one hundred people who strive to make the world’s greatest educational and transformational games, including Yale Medical’s PlayForward: Elm City Stories, Water Bears VR, SuperChem VR, the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood games, and Happy Atoms. Schell Games also creates pure entertainment content, such as the award-winning VR game, I Expect You To Die, and the comedy space game Orion Trail. Jesse also serves as Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. Jesse has worked on a wide variety of innovative game and simulation projects for both entertainment and education, but he is best known for his award-winning book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses and his predictions about the future of gaming technology. He is a previous chair of the International Game Developers Association, and former Creative Director of the Disney Virtual Reality Studio.
Brenda Romero is an award-winning game designer, artist and Fulbright scholar who entered the video game industry in 1981. As a designer, she has contributed to many seminal titles, including the Wizardry and Jagged Alliance series and titles in the Ghost Recon and Dungeons & Dragons franchises. Away from the machine, her analog series of six games, The Mechanic is the Message, has drawn national and international acclaim, particularly Train and Síochán Leat (The Irish Game) which is presently housed in the National Museum of Play. In 2015, she won the coveted Ambassador’s Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards. In 2014, she received a Fulbright award to study Ireland’s game industry, academic and government policies. In 2013, she was named one of the top 10 game developers by Gamasutra.com and Develop magazine listed her among the 25 people who changed games in 2013. Romero co-owns Romero Games based in Galway.
Zoran Popovic is a Professor and Director of Center for Game Science at University of Washington. Trained as a computer scientist his research focus is on creating interactive engaging environments for learning and scientific discovery. His laboratory created Foldit, a biochemistry game that produced three Nature publications in just two years, an a set of award-winning math learning games played by over eight million learners worldwide. He is currently focusing on engaging methods that can rapidly develop experts in arbitrary domains ranging from K-12 to world-class domain experts. His game-based Algebra Challenges conducted in Washington, Minnesota, and Norway, have shown that more than 96% of all children even in elementary school can learn key algebra concepts in just 1.5 hours. His contributions to the field of interactive computer graphics have been recognized by a number of awards including the NSF CAREER Award, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award.
Celia Pearce is a game designer, artist, researcher, teacher and curator. She currently holds a position as an Associate Professor of Game Design at Boston’s Northeastern University. Formerly she worked at Georgia Tech where she ran the Experimental Game Lab and the Emergent Game Group. Her research focuses on play communities and gender and games, and she is the author or co-author of a number of papers and books including Communities of Play (MIT 2009), and Ethnography and Virtual Worlds (co-authored, Princeton University Press.) Her games have been featured at Different Games, Incubate Arcade, DiGRA Blank Arcade, Smithsonian Indie Arcade, CHI, SIGGRAPH, IndieCade Game Tastings, and Boston Festival of Independent Games, where her electronic quilt game eBee (developed with Gillian Smith) received the award for Most Innovative Tabletop Game of 2016. She is also co-founder and Festival Chair of IndieCade.
Randy Pausch (October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was a professor of computer science, human-computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University. Randy was a virtual reality pioneer, co-founder of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center, and creator of the Alice software project. In 2006, Randy learned he had terminal pancreatic cancer and was given 3-6 months to live. He is widely known for “The Last Lecture”, a lecture given following a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer. He co-authored a book of the same name, which became a New York Times best-seller.
Scot Osterweil is Creative Director of the Education Arcade and the Game Lab in the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He has designed games in both academic and commercial environments. Designs include the acclaimed Zoombinis series (math and logic), Vanished: The MIT/Smithsonian Game (environmental science), Labyrinth (math), Kids Survey Network (data and statistics), Caduceus (medicine), and iCue (history). He is a founder and Creative Director of Learning Games Network (www.learninggamesnetwork.org) where he led the Gates Foundation’s Language Learning Initiative (ESL), and where he designed Quandary, named Game of the Year at the 2013 Games for Change festival.
Janet H. Murray is the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997; updated edition 2017) and Inventing the Medium: Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (2011). She taught the world’s first course in interactive narrative at MIT in 1991 and one of the first humanities-based courses in Game Design at Georgia Tech in 2002, where she joined the faculty in 1999 after almost 20 years as a humanist interaction designer at MIT. She is currently Associate Dean for Research in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech, and a Professor in the Graduate Program in Digital Media where she is director of the eTV lab which has recently expanded to VR storytelling.
Nick Montfort is professor of digital media at MIT and and director of The Trope Tank, a lab/studio dealing with creative computing. He has developed numerous digital projects, including games, atypical demoscene productions, and several print books of computer-generated poetry. His academic books include one on interactive fiction, one that is a 10-author project about a one-line Commodore 64 program, a co-authored book on the Atari VCS, and a book to teach exploratory programming to artists and humanists. He lives in New York and Boston.
Frans Mäyrä is the Professor of Information Studies and Interactive Media, with specialization in digital culture and game studies in the University of Tampere, Finland. He is the founder and head of University of Tampere Game Research Lab. Frans Mäyrä has studied the relationship of culture and technology from the early nineties and he has specialised in the cultural analysis of technology, particularly on the ambiguous, conflicting and heterogeneous elements in this relationship. He has also served as the founding President of Digital Games Research Association, DiGRA, and published widely on topics that range from games and play to information technologies, science fiction and fantasy. He is recipient of multiple grants and has acted as leader in 45 externally funded games research project and an author of over 160 scientific publications (as of February 2017).’