Category: Bio

Eric Zimmerman is a veteran game designer with more than 2 decades of industry experience. For nine years, he ran his own award-winning studio Gamelab, which helped invent casual games with hit titles like Diner Dash, as well as make innovative games like Gamestar Mechanic, an online community that lets players create games. Pre-Gamelab titles include the PC title Gearheads and the indie pioneer SiSSYFiGHT 2000. In recent years, Eric has created game installations with Nathalie Pozzi, principal of Nakworks, for museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. He designs tabletop games like the card game Metagame (with Local No. 12) and the strategy boardgame Quantum. Eric is the co-author of Rules of Play and the Game Design Reader and co-founded The Institute of Play, a nonprofit that opened a school in NYC based on games and play as the model for learning. He is a founding faculty and Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center.

R. Michael Young is a Professor in the School of Computing and Deputy Director of the Entertainment Arts and Engineering Program at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, UT, where he directs the Liquid Narrative research group. Together with students and research staff, he works to develop computational models of interactive narrative with applications to computer games, educational and training systems and virtual environments. He is actively engaged in leadership activities with games industry professional and trade organizations at the national, state and local levels. Michael has published more than 145 scientific papers in the venues including leading conferences and journals in computer games, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, autonomous agents and intelligent user interfaces. He has served to co-found and build several of the leading conferences in the area of computer games research (the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment, the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games) and has served as program committee member or program or conference chair of more than 50 leading conferences across the areas of computer games, artificial intelligence, and virtual worlds. He serves as vice-president and is a founding board member of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games (SASDG), a scientific society leading the community of scholars and practitioners advancing games research. Michael served as editor-in-chief for the Journal of Game Development and serves or has served as a member of the editorial board of the leading journals in the area of games and AI research, including ACM Transactions on Intelligent Interactive Systems, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI Games, the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations and Advances in Cognitive Systems

Michael joined the University of Utah in May of 2016 after working 16 years at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. At NC State, Young was a professor of Computer Science and University Faculty Scholar. He was a GlaxoSmithKline Faculty Fellow in Public Policy and Public Engagement in 2010. That year, his work with the North Carolina Department of Commerce and the state legislature contributed to the establishment of financial incentives in the state budget in support of the digital media industry. He is an an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a senior member of both the Associate for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the IEEE. He is a member of the International Game Developers’ Association (IGDA), and he served for four years on the board of the IGDA’s North Carolina Triangle chapter. He is a founding board member of the Triangle Games Initiative, a trade organization promoting the NC Triangle games industry.

Jim Whitehead is Professor of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Within computer games, his research interests include procedural content generation and tools where humans and computer generators work collaboratively. Jim is the Founding President of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games (SASDG) which operates the yearly Foundations of Digital Games conference. Jim helped launch the UC Santa Cruz computer games program in 2006. Additionally, Jim was a founding organizer of the Procedural Content Generation workshop series, and the Games and Software Engineering workshop series. Jim received his PhD from the University of California, Irvine in Information and Computer Science in 2000, under his advisor, Richard N. Taylor. He has been a Professor at Univ. of California, Santa Cruz since July, 2000, in Computer Science until 2014, and was Chair of Computer Science 2010-2014. He is a founding member of the Department of Computational Media.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a Professor of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

With Michael Mateas he directs the Expressive Intelligence Studio, a technical and cultural research group that creates experimental games such as Prom Week (2012), The Ice-Bound Concordance (2016), and Bad News (2016).

With Pat Harrigan, he edited a series of books that contributed to the development of game studies — First Person (2004), Second Person (2007), and Third Person (2009). Other books include The New Media Reader (2003), edited with Nick Montfort, and Expressive Processing (2009).

He led the design of three interdisciplinary graduate programs, including the PhD in Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz, which welcomed its first students in Fall 2017.

He holds a B.A. from the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands, an M.A. from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, an M.F.A. from the Literary Arts program of Brown University, and a Ph.D. in Special Graduate Study, also from Brown.

Annika Waern, Professor 2011, Docent 2007, PhD 1996, Ph. Lic. 1992, MSc 1986. Employed as professor at dept. of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University.

Annika is a ‘research by design’ academic with a background in computer science and Human-Computer Interaction, who has dedicated the latest ten years of her life to understanding games and play, and more specifically, pervasive games. These are games that are played in the physical world, often but not necessarily with the aid of mobile and ubiquitous technology. During 2004-2008, she acted as the coordinator of IPerG, Integrated Project on Pervasive Games, an EU-funded project with a total budget of 10 M Euro and nine partners spread around Europe. Together with colleagues she co-authored the book Pervasive Games: Theory and design. In 2007-2013 she was one of four research leaders of the Mobile Life Excellence Centre at Stockholm University. From April 2012 – March 2013 she acted as Centre director, ending the position to take up the professorship at Uppsala University.

Annika acted as editor in chief for ToDIGRA, transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, from its inauguration until 2016. She was program chair for the international conference on Digital Games (DiGRA) in 2011, 2014 and 2015. She frequently participates in programme committees for scientific conferences in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Game studies and is on the editorial and review boards for journals in game studies and HCI.

Kurt Squire’s research focuses on the design of game-based learning environments. He is the author or editor of 3 books, over 100 scholarly publications, and directed several award-winning game-based learning projects. Squire’s research has been funded by private and public partners ranging from Microsoft Games to the National Science Foundation. Squire’s students have gone on to create ARIS, Filament Games, and dozens of projects and companies.

Katie Salen Tekinbas is a game designer, co-founder and Chief Designer of Connected Camps, an online learning platform powered by youth Minecraft experts. She is founding Executive Director of Institute of Play, an education nonprofit organization focused on games and learning, and has held tenured faculty positions at Parsons the New School for Design, University of Texas at Austin, and most recently, DePaul University where she taught game design and development. Katie led the team that founded Quest to Learn in 2009, a 6-12th grade public school in New York City. She has published widely and is co-author of Rules of Play, The Game Design Reader, Quest to Learn: Growing a School for Digital Kids, and editor of The Ecology of Games, all from MIT Press. She has worked as a game designer for over 12 years and is a former co-editor of The International Journal of Learning and Media. Katie was an early advocate of the then-hidden world of machinima and continues to be interested in connections between game design, learning, and the transformational power of play.

Salen Tekinbas has received grants from the Gates foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, the Margulf Foundation, and Intel, and has given keynotes and featured talks at conferences and business events around the globe. Her non-profit ran an afterschool program focused on immersing middle school youth in game design, technology, and global collaborations via physical and mobile computing expertise, and she once co-designed a karaoke ice cream truck driven by a squirrel. Katie has been involved in the design of slow games, online games, mobile games, and big games in both the commercial and independent games sectors.

T.L. Taylor is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She is a qualitative sociologist (Brandeis University, 2000) who has focused on internet and game studies for over two decades. Her research explores the interrelations between culture, social practice, and technology in online leisure environments.

Her book Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (MIT Press, 2012) chronicles the rise of e-sports and professional computer gaming. She is also the author of Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006) which used her multi-year ethnography of EverQuest to explore issues related to massively multiplayer online games. Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method, her co-authored book on doing ethnographic research in online multi-user worlds, was published by Princeton University Press (2012). She is currently at work on a book about game live-streaming (under contract with Princeton University Press).

Dr. Taylor also serves as Director of Research for AnyKey, an organization dedicated to supporting and developing fair and inclusive esports.

Miguel Sicart is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. He is the author of The Ethics of Computer Games, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay, and Play Matters (The MIT Press, 2009, 2013, 2014). Miguel teaches game and play design, and researches on the philosophy and design of digital playthings.