Henry Lowood is curator for history of science & technology collections and film & media collections at Stanford Libraries. After being trained in the history of science and technology and receiving his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, over a period of more than thirty-five years he has combined interests in history, technological innovation and the history of digital games and simulations to head several long-term projects at Stanford, including How They Got Game: The History and Culture of Interactive Simulations and Videogames in the Stanford Humanities Lab and Stanford Libraries, the Silicon Valley Archives in the Stanford Libraries and the Machinima Archives and Archiving Virtual Worlds collections hosted by the Internet Archive. He led Stanford’s work on game and virtual world preservation in the Preserving Virtual Worlds project funded by the U.S. Library of Congress and the Institute for Museum and Library services and the Game Citation Project also funded by IMLS.
He is also the author of numerous articles and essays on the history of Silicon Valley and the development of digital game technology and culture. With Michael Nitsche, he co-edited The Machinima Reader (2011) and, with Raiford Guins, Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon (2016), both for MIT Press. With Guins, he also co-edits the book series, Game Histories, for MIT Press.
Brenda Laurel has worked in interactive media since 1976—in the computer game industry from Atari to Activision, and in research labs at Atari, Interval Research, and as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Labs. At the Banff Centre, she co-designed and produced the ground-breaking VR piece, Placeholder. She researched gender and technology at Interval and she co-founded Purple Moon—interactive media for girls—in 1996. She designed and chaired the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design (2001-2006) and the Graduate Design Program at California College of the Arts (2006-2012). She also served as an adjunct Professor in the Games and Palayble Media Program at UC Santa Cruz (2013-2015). In 2015 she received the Trailblazer Award from Indiecade. She was awarded the Nextant Prize from the Virtual World Society in 2016. She serves on the boards of the Interaction Design Association, the Virtual World Society, and the Communication Research Institute (Australia). Her books include The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004), and Computers as Theatre, Second Edition (2014). Her recent papers include “What Is Virtual Reality?” (Medium) and “AR and VR: Cultivating the Garden” (MIT Press Journal Presence). She earned her MFA in acting and directing and her PhD in drama theory and criticism from The Ohio State University. Her thesis was the first to propose and examine the dramatic structure of what would come to be known as virtual reality. She currently works as an independent scholar and consultant.
Frank Lantz is the Director of the NYU Game Center. He has taught game design for over 15 years at NYU, SVA, and Parsons and his writings on games, technology and culture have appeared in a variety of publications.
Eric Klopfer is Professor and Director of The Education Arcade and Scheller Teacher Education Program at MIT. Klopfer’s research focuses on the development and use of computer games and simulations for building understanding of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The games that he works on are designed to build understanding of scientific practices and concepts as well as critical knowledge, using both mobile and web-delivered game platforms. In the realm of simulations, Klopfer’s work focuses on students understanding complex systems through, and connecting computer programming with scientific practice, critical thinking, and real-world issues.
Jesper Juul is an influential video game theorist and occasional video game developer. He has been working with video game research since the late 1990’s. He is an Associate Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts – School of Design and a Visiting Associate Professor at MIT.
Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California and the founder and former director of the Comparative Media Studies graduate Program at MIT. He is the author and editor of more than 17 books, including From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. He was a founder of the Education Arcade and the GAMBIT Singapore-MIT Games Lab. He blogs twice a week at henryjenkins.org.
Robin Hunicke is the Co-Founder & CEO of the independent game studio Funomena, which creates experimental games for Console, PC, VR & AR platforms in the heart of downtown San Francisco. A game designer and producer by training, she has a background in Computer Science, Art and applied Game Studies. She has been designing, making and teaching about games for over 12 years (Journey, Boom Blox, MySims, TheSims2).
Ian Horswill is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University, where he was the co-founder of Northwestern’s Animate Arts Program. His research interests include interactive entertainment technologies and cognitive modeling for virtual characters, particularly modeling of emotion and personality. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993.
“I design and study cybermeditation and teach foundations of serious games and human-centered experience design courses.
James Paul Gee is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Fifth Edition 2015) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the “New Literacy Studies”, an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Fourth Edition 2014) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. Professor Gee’s most recent books deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. Women as Gamers: The Sims and 21st-Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital Age (2011), both written with Elisabeth Hayes, have continued his earlier work on games and learning. His most recent books are: The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning (2013); Unified Discourse Analysis: Language, Reality, Virtual Worlds, and Video Games (2014); Literacy and Education (2014); The Essential James Gee: An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (2015); and Teaching, Learning, Literacy in Our High-Risk High-Tech World: A Framework for Becoming Human (2017). Professor Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.