Before coming to HKU University of the Arts utrecht, Hartmut Koenitz was an Assistant Professor in Mass Media Arts at the University of Georgia, researching Interactive Digital Narrative and Video Games. He is also an artist (his work was exhibited in Atlanta, Paris, Seoul, Istanbul and Copenhagen) and sometimes a car mechanic. His areas of interest center around new expressive forms using digital technology. This includes narrative in video games as well as interactive art pieces and installations. He is the creator of the authoring tool ASAPS. He has taught many classes connected to digital media, including interactive narrative, game programming, video production, and web design. From 2017 Koeniz has joined the Advisory Board of the Euregio-project “RheijnLand.Xperiences”, in which four musea in the Niederrhein-region (Germany) en four musea in de region Arnhem-Nijmegen will develop narratives on the basis of their collections.
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William Huber is a researcher, lecturer and writer focusing on the aesthetics of games, media, and software. He has published several articles and book chapters analyzing and interpreting games and game culture. Currently head of the Centre for Excellence in Game Education at Abertay University, Huber promotes efforts to advance game education at Abertay and create a vibrant international centre for the intellectual and artistic exploration of digital games and interactive media. Before coming to Scotland, he spent five years teaching courses on videogame theory, design and history in the Interactive Media and Games Division of the School for Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.
Dr. Jussi Holopainen is a senior lecturer in games computing at the University of Lincoln, UK, teaching game design and game studies. His current research interests include experimental game design, empirical studies of game design practices, and aesthetics of gameplay. He has authored or co-authored several pieces on game design, most notably “Patterns in Game Design” (Charles River Media, 2004), and he has been an active member of Digital Games Research Association since 2003.
Susanna Pollack is the President of Games for Change, the leading global advocate for the power of games as drivers of social impact. In her role there, she produces the annual Games for Change Festival, the largest gaming event in New York, dubbed by national media as “the Sundance of video games.” In 2017, Susanna launched XR for Change Summit as a part of the Festival to explore how VR/AR/MR technologies are offering radical new ways to create social impact. Susanna works closely with organizations that are actively pursuing digital games to further their public or CSR mission. On behalf of clients including American Express Foundation, United Nations, Women’s Sports Foundation, Autodesk, Carnegie Foundation, Ad Council, Smithsonian Museum and McKinsey Social, she has initiated dozens of programs to advance the games for good sector. Susanna’s passion and commitment to Learning and Education led her to develop the G4C Student Challenge with the NYC Department of Education in 2015. The NYC pilot attracted world class partners including the New York Times, NYC Mayors Office, ACLU, X Prize, and Unity Technologies to bring a games design challenge to middle and high school students across the city. Under Susanna’s leadership, the program expanded nationally and currently runs in NYC, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Atlanta. Also in her role at G4C, Susanna launched the Games for Learning Summit with collaboration from the US Department of Education and the Entertainment Software Association. Now an annual event, the gathering attracts educators, policy makers, game studios and publishers to explore how games can be more effectively used in the classroom. Prior to joining Games for Change, Susanna worked across both the commercial and public sector. Over a 12 year period, Susanna held various senior level positions at BBC Worldwide Americas, most recently as SVP of the TV distribution division for the US where she led a team of 20 to raise $50m annually from co-production and sales of BBC’s award winning documentaries and scripted content.
Mark DeLoura is a fun-focused technologist who served as Senior Advisor for Digital Media in the Obama White House. Mark has worked in leadership positions at companies such as Sony, Nintendo, Google, Ubisoft, and THQ. With a passion for utilizing games for change and broadening K-12 computer science education, Mark strives to use engagement as a tool for digital literacy. Now living in Seattle, he works with city and state leaders on technology and education initiatives, and always has way too many personal maker projects in progress!
Kate Edwards is the Executive Director of Global Game Jam, a consultancy for content culturalization, a Board Member of Take This, and is the former Executive Director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) from 2012 to 2017. In addition to being an outspoken advocate and a 25+ year veteran of the game industry, she is also a geographer, writer, and corporate strategist. Following 13 years at Microsoft, she has consulted on many game and non-game projects for BioWare, Google, Amazon and many, many other companies. Fortune magazine named her as one of the “10 most powerful women” in the game industry and she was also named by GamesIndustry.biz as one of their six People of the Year. In April 2018, she was honored with Reboot Develop’s annual Hero Award.
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
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.