Gail Cayetano

Tracy Fullerton

Tracy Fullerton, M.F.A., is a game designer, educator and writer with fifteen years of professional experience. She is currently an assistant professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she serves as co-director of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab. Tracy is the author of Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping and Playtesting Games, a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide. Recent credits include faculty advisor for the award-winning student game, Cloud, and game designer for The Night Journey, a unique game/art project with media artist Bill Viola.

Prior to joining the USC faculty, she was president and founder of the interactive television game developer, Spiderdance, Inc. Spiderdance's games included NBC's Weakest Link, MTV's webRIOT, The WB's No Boundaries, History Channel's History IQ, Sony Game Show Network's Inquizition, and TBS's Cyber Bond. Before starting Spiderdance, Tracy was a founding member of the New York design firm R/GA Interactive. As a producer and creative director, she created games and interactive products for clients including Sony, Intel, Microsoft, AdAge, Ticketmaster, Compaq, and Warner Bros. among many others. Notable projects include Sony's Multiplayer Jeopardy!, Multiplayer Wheel of Fortune, and MSN's NetWits, the first multiplayer casual game. Additionally, Tracy was creative director at the interactive film studio, Interfilm, where she wrote and co-directed the "cinematic game" Ride for Your Life, starring Adam West and Matthew Lillard. She began her career as a designer at Bob Abel's company, Synapse, where she worked on the interactive documentary Columbus: Encounter, Discovery and Beyond, and other early interactive projects.

Tracy's work has received numerous industry honors including an Emmy nomination for interactive television, Best Family/Board Game from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, ID Magazine's Interactive Design Review, Communication Arts Interactive Design Annual, several New Media Invision awards, iMix Best of Show, the Digital Coast Innovation Award, IBC's Nombre D'Or, Time Magazine's Best of the Web and the Hollywood Reporter's Women in Entertainment Power 100.

Megan Gaiser

As Chief Creative Strategy Officer and former CEO of Her Interactive, Megan Gaiser sets creative direction, brand and portfolio expansion and cultivates strategic partnerships. Under her stewardship, Her Interactive (HI) has grown from a boutique company to an emerging competitor with the globally-loved Nancy Drew franchise games sales topping 9 million units world-wide. The Nancy Drew PC franchise is the #1 in the U.S. six years running. Her Interactive has garnered 24 consecutive Parents' Choice Awards. Megan has been named one of the "Game Industry's 100 Most Influential Women" by Next Generation and "Top 10 Most Influential Women of the Decade" by Gaming Angels. She also received the 2010 Microsoft Women in Games award and the 2011 IndieCade Honorary Trailblazer Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Prior to Her Interactive in 1997, Ms. Gaiser spent 11 years producing award-winning film documentaries, winning many awards, including 15 Cine Golden Eagle awards, three New York festival awards, and the International Documentary Milano Award. She also spent time on the Microsoft team as a Producer.

Carl Goodman

Carl is deputy director and director of Digital Media at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York, where he oversees all public programmatic aspects of the Museum and supervises its use and study of computer-based media and technologies. For the Museum of Moving Image, Carl produced many online projects intended for audiences with broadband internet connections, including The Living Room Candidate (2004), which presents and interprets hundreds of presidential campaign television commercials from 1952-2004; and Sloan Science Cinematheque (2005), which is devoted to uses of science & mathematics-related themes in film and television narrative entertainment, and made possible by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins (John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities) is the director of the Comparative Media Studies graduate program. His books include Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, a study of gender, narrative and video games, The Children's Culture Reader, and Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. His current research interests center around digital aesthetics, media convergence, transmedia storytelling, computer games, and youth culture. He discusses these and many other topics relating to the intersection of culture and technology through his column, "The Digital Renaissance," featured each month in Technology Review.

Hal Josephson

Hal Josephson is president of MediaSense, Inc., a San Francisco firm specializing in strategic marketing planning, international business development consultation and project management services for high-tech industries. MediaSense clients have included: Apple, Motorola, IDG, KPMG, Ontario Media Development Corporation, InternetWire, Hypermedia Communications, Digital Club Network, Ivistra, TradeNZ, ReedMidem, Creekside Ventures, Infotech Canada, WebMedia, Basex, SpiritUp!, Business Image Group, Virtual Spectator, Australasian Access, and The Banff New Media Institute.

From 1997-2000, Mr. Josephson was executive director for the NewMedia INVISION Festival, the largest North American program honoring creators of digital content in all media, including CD-ROMs, web sites, games and business applications. During this period, Mr. Josephson was also the primary US business consultant and Silicon Valley liaison for Australian Multimedia Enterprise (AME), a $55M AU new media venture fund based in Sydney.

Prior to this, Mr. Josephson was vice president of Infotainment World, producers of the highly successful Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). Before this position, Hal spent two years as president and executive producer of the Motorola sponsored Interactive Media Festival, a $3.7M corporate event showcasing thirty-five of the best digital media art and technology projects from four continents, plus commissioned new media performances by Blue Man Group, Herbie Hancock, and Merce Cunningham.

For four years, during the early nineties, Mr. Josephson was the director of Worldwide Business Development and Industry Relations for The 3DO Company. During the eighties, Mr. Josephson was a Boulder, Colorado entrepreneur as co-founder of two IT-related public companies, TeleMedia International, a teleconferencing production and human factors training business, and StarCom Inc., a satellite delivered entertainment and communications company. Hal has IT industry experience in teleconferencing, computer gaming, software licensing, satellite communications, and cable TV broadcasting as well as specific expertise in international business development and strategic marketing. In addition, Hal has a second career in large-scale event design, development, planning and production management.

Hal has been North American chairman of The EMMA Foundation, past president of the International Interactive Communications Society, (IICS) a co-founder of the International Teleconferencing Assn. (ITS), and a former vice-chair of the Interactive Multimedia Assn. (IMA). Hal has served on the Board of Directors of the Australian-American Chamber of Commerce, been an advisor to New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, and is currently an advisor to ArtSFest, The Banff Institute, and an active member of Anzatechnet.

Hal was a founding instructor of San Francisco State University's Multimedia Studies Program, and is co-author of the book, Careers in Multimedia: Roles and Resources. In addition, Hal has authored a variety of articles in diverse publications including Digital Media, New Scientist, NewMedia, New Zealand Business, and Australia's Metro Magazine.

Hal has keynoted more than fifty industry events during his career, both nationally and internationally, and has appeared as a guest speaker at the World Congress for Information Technology, in Adelaide, Australia, at Unitec's New Zealand Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Canadian Trade Office's International Marketing Seminar Series. Hal's presentations include: "Doing Effective Business Development in a Shifting World Marketplace", "Smart Marketing for Entrepreneurial Businesses," and "Business Development by Design: Strategies that Generate Results".

Robert Khoo

Robert Khoo is the President of Operations and Business Development for Penny Arcade, one of the largest independent content providers with over 3.5 million readers worldwide. Khoo has spent the past nine years in online marketing and market strategy, with the last five running the business side of Penny Arcade.

In addition, Khoo is the show director for the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), the largest gaming festival in the Western Hemisphere drawing nearly 40,000 attendees in 2007, and the managing director for Child’s Play, the largest community based charity in the game industry, raising millions of dollars each year for children’s hospitals worldwide.

Richard Lemarchand

Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School, and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman professor of law at Harvard Law School, and a professor at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, and for Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

Professor Lessig represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. He has won numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation's Freedom Award, and was named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing "against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online."

Professor Lessig is the author of Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). He chairs the Creative Commons project, and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge. He is also a columnist for Wired Magazine.

Professor Lessig earned a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.

Professor Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, and the law of cyberspace.

Frans Mäyrä

Frans Mäyrä, PhD, is a professor at the Hypermedia Laboratory at the University of Tampere, Finland. He has studied the relationship of culture and technology from the early nineties, particularly advocating academic study of games. Professor Mäyrä has specialized in the conflicting and heterogeneous elements in culture, and published widely on topics that range from role-playing games to science fiction, fantasy and demonic tradition in cultural history. He is currently teaching and researching the development of new media and digital culture, and is responsible leader of the Experience Design Research area, where the cultural potentials and processes of significance related to digital games and online interaction are key research areas. He is currently heading, or otherwise actively engaged with several research and publication projects. He is also the president of the international Digital Games Research Association, DiGRA. Selected publications: Koneihminen (ed., 1997; The Man-Machine), Demonic Texts and Textual Demons (1999), Johdatus digitaaliseen kulttuuriin (ed., 1999; Introduction to the Digital Culture), Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings (ed., 2002).

Dr. Janet H. Murray

Professor Janet H. Murray is an internationally recognized interactive designer, the director of Georgia Tech's Masters Degree Program in Information Design and Technology and Ph.D. in Digital Media, and a member of Georgia Tech's interdisciplinary GVU Center. She is the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Free Press, 1997; MIT Press 1998), which has been translated into 5 languages, and is widely used as a roadmap to the coming broadband art, information, and entertainment environments. She is currently working on a textbook for MIT Press, Inventing the Medium: A Principled Approach to Interactive Design, and on a digital edition of the Warner Brother's classic, Casablanca, funded by NEH and in collaboration with the American Film Institute. In addition, she directs an eTV Prototyping Group, which has worked on interactive television applications for PBS, ABC, and other networks. She is also a member Georgia Tech's Experimental Game Lab.

Murray has played an active role in the development of two new degree programs at Georgia Tech, both of which were launched in Fall 2004: the Ph.D. in Digital Media, and the B.S. in Computational Media.

In spring 2000, Janet Murray was named a Trustee of the American Film Institute, where she has also served as a mentor in the Enhanced TV Workshop, a program of the AFI Digital Content Lab. She holds a PhD in English from Harvard University, and before coming to Georgia Tech in 1999, she taught humanities and led advanced interactive design projects at MIT.

Murray's primary fields of interest are digital media curricula, interactive narrative, story/games, interactive television, and large-scale multimedia information spaces. Her projects have been funded by IBM, Apple Computer, the Annenberg-CPB Project, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Robert Nashak

Robert Nashak is currently Executive Vice President of Digital Entertainment at BBC Worldwide. Prior to that Nashak was at Electronic Arts and joined Yahoo! in 2006 as general manager of Y! Games. Nashak has extensive experience in video games, online games, and mobile entertainment. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Nashak lead production and creative development at Glu Mobile, the worldwide leading independent mobile games publisher of acclaimed titles such as Driver3, Project Gotham Racing and Monopoly. Prior to Glu, Nashak was vice president of product development at Acclaim Entertainment, whose franchises included AllStar Baseball, Turok, and Legends of Wrestling. Nashak was a producer at Disney Online at its launch, and during his tenure as executive producer at Vivendi Games, Nashak served as an adjunct professor in interactive design at University of Southern California School of Cinema and Television. Nashak is a former Fulbright scholar.

Dave Perry

David Perry was the president and founder of Shiny Entertainment. With David at the helm, Shiny earned both critical and commercial success, forging a reputation as a forward-looking, innovative force that's constantly pushing the boundries in the gaming world.

Perry launched his career at just 15 years of age, when he started writing computer game programming books in his native Ireland. Since then, David has developed 35 games (serving as lead programmer on 24 of them), totaling 101 individual retail titles across 23 video game platforms. All told, Perry's games have totaled more than $500 million in sales.

In early 2006, Atari announced it wanted to sell certain development divisions, including Shiny. Perry left the company as he was part of the Atari management, and wanted to find a buyer independently.

In May 2006, he founded the consultancy company GameConsultants.com, to provide advice and support for investors, hardware manufacturers, foreign development teams, and publishers looking to secure funding and create a presence in the US interactive entertainment market, with additional services including game prototype and development team capacity reviews.

In August 2006, it was announced that David Perry would be directing 2Moons, a MMORPG by the newly-formed Acclaim Games.

Carolyn Rauch

Carolyn Rauch recently joined IDG World Expo, the leading producer of world-class tradeshows and events as vice president, Event Development. In this role, Rauch will be responsible for business development initiatives and cultivating new events for IDG World Expo, with an emphasis on strategic planning and branding across all events.

Prior to joining IDG World Expo, Rauch served as senior vice president of the Entertainment Software Association where she managed the association's new E3 Media & Business Summit, as well as public relations, research, aspects of the E3 Expo trade show, grassroots campaigns, and other programs for the organization. Prior to joining the ESA, Ms. Rauch was a vice president at Robinson Lake Sawyer Miller, a strategic communications firm specializing in entertainment industry public relations. Her clients included MTV, Nickelodeon, and Comcast, to name a few. Ms. Rauch has also served in several political roles, including deputy national press secretary to U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey's 1992 presidential campaign, deputy press secretary to former U.S. Senator and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Jim Sasser, and New Hampshire press secretary and scheduler for former Governor Bruce Babbitt's 1988 presidential campaign.

Kellee Santiago

As President and Co-Founder of thatgamecompany over the last six years, Kellee Santiago developed one of the most prominent brands in independent and innovative game development, pushing the communicative possibilities of video games as a medium. She is currently a partner in IndieFund, which aims to support the growth of games as a medium by helping indie developers get, and stay, financially independent.

Kellee graduated from the MFA Interactive Media program at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts where she teamed up with fellow student Jenova Chen on the student-created game, “Cloud.” The game went on to become critically acclaimed, and landed the two a three game deal with Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc. to develop downloadable games for the PlayStation Network. The three titles, “flOw”, “Flower,” and most recently, “Journey,” were each record-breaking commercial successes, and award-winning titles.

Kellee speaks around the world at video game, business, and entertainment conferences on innovation in games, entrepreneurship, and better methods for video game development. In 2010 she became a TEDFellow, and was recognized as one of The Ten Most Influential Women in Games of the Decade. Kellee has also received the 2011 Microsoft Top Women in Gaming award for Business.

Genevieve Gaiser Tremblay

Genevieve is a creative catalyst who places herself at the convergence of the arts, emerging technology and the urban environment. As principal and co-founder of Cultural Entrepreneurs, she provides strategic vision, planning and program development to innovative community ventures.

Genevieve has spent the last 10 years developing cultural programs and resources that leverage the synergy between artists, designers, scholars, technologists and industry professionals. Her teaching and curatorial efforts are focused on nurturing trailblazing artists, designers and innovators who are redefining culture, community and the urban landscape through the creative application of digital and interactive technologies.

Her creative work over the past 25 years has included a wide range of mediums including digital and interactive media, photography, painting, video and film. Genevieve was fortunate to work for two of her early mentors, new media pioneers, Jenny Holzer and Dara Birnbaum. She programmed electronic LED signage systems in retail environments throughout Boston for Holzer’s citywide installation, “Signs”, and assisted Dara Birnbaum on the documentation of early video installation work in public venues around New York City. These first hand experiences with pushing the boundaries of technology and moving art from formalized spaces into the public realm have continued to inform her work.

As Bellevue Arts Commissioner, Genevieve is currently engaged in the City’s public art and urban development efforts. She is working to drive the development of cultural assets and civic engagement through social, mobile, locative and gaming technologies for wayfinding, environmental and public art initiatives.

Genevieve has an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art (Studio for Interrelated Media) and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University (Intermedia).

Will Wright

Will Wright is an american computer game designer and co-founder of the game development company, Maxis. He is best known as the original designer of computer games such as SimCity, The Sims and Spore.

Following on the success of SimCity, Wright designed SimEarth (1990) and SimAnt (1991). He co-designed SimCity 2000 (1993) with Fred Haslam and SimCopter (1996). Maxis went public in 1995 with revenue of USD $38 million. Electronic Arts bought Maxis in June 1997.

Wright was given a "Lifetime Achievement Award" at the Game Developer's Choice Awards in 2001. In 2002, he became the fifth person to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame. Until 2006, he was the only person to have been honored this way by both of these industry organizations.

He has been called one of the most important people in gaming, technology, and entertainment by publications such as Entertainment Weekly, Time, PC Gamer, Discover and GameSpy. For bringing simulations to the mass market, Wright was awarded the PC Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award in January 2005.

Eric Zimmerman

Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and academic, exploring the theory and practice of game design. Eric's diverse activities have made him one of the New York Observers' "Power Punks," one of Interview Magazine's "30 To Watch," and also one of International Design Magazine's ID 40 (40 influential designers). He has been working in the game industry since 1994.

Eric is the co-founder and CEO of Gamelab, a game development company based in New York City that was recently named one of 5 "Rising Star" design firms by HOW Magazine. Gamelab's games, which include Diner Dash, Subway Scramble, BLiX, LOOP, LEGO Junkbot, FLUID, and Arcadia, have won awards from the Independent Games Festival, ID Magazine, Art Directors Club, ARS Electronica, and others, as well as finalist nominations in the Webby Awards and the IGDA Developer's Choice Awards.

Gamelab was co-founded with Peter Lee in 2000. The company is known for creating experimental games for a broad audience of non-gamers. Most of Gamelab's work consists of singleplayer and multiplayer online games, although gameLab has created games in other media both on and off the computer. Gamelab has worked with clients and publishers including LEGO, HBO, Microsoft, Ragdoll, Mattel, and PBS. Eric's game design work prior to Gamelab includes the critically acclaimed SiSSYFiGHT 2000, as well as the PC games Gearheads and The Robot Club.

Eric is the director of RE:PLAY, a series of events on game design and game culture that included an online conference and real-world conference in 1999, and book published in fall 2003 by Peter Lang Press. Eric is also the co-author of Life in the Garden, an interactive paper book he created with Nancy Nowacek. Eric has exhibited non-computer game projects in gallery and museum spaces including Artists Space and the Sara Meltzer Gallery in New York City, the Center for Contemporary Arts in Grenoble, France, and the Bellevue Museum in Seattle. He has also created several non-computer social games played by hundreds or thousands of players at conferences and events.

Eric is a published author on the topic of interactive entertainment, with recent articles and chapters appearing in publications like 21C, Merge, Zed, If/Then, Allworth Press' Art and Allure of Graphic Design, and I.D. Magazine, where he has also served on the Interactive Design Awards Jury. Eric is the co-author of Rules of Play (with Katie Salen), published my MIT Press in 2003. He has chapters appearing in books like Design Research (MIT Press 2004) and First Person (MIT Press 2003). The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, co-edited with Katie Salen, will be published later this year.

Eric has taught game design, interactive narrative design, and related courses at MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program, New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, Parsons School of Design's MFA in Digital Technologies Program, and School of Visual Arts' Design as Author MFA Program. He has lectured widely on these subjects in the US and abroad.

Dr. Milton Chen

Dr. Milton Chen is executive director of The George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF), a nonprofit operating foundation founded by the filmmaker in 1991. GLEF utilizes media, especially its multimedia website, a new magazine, Edutopia: The New World of Learning, and documentary films, to tell inspiring stories of how interactive technologies are transforming America's schools.

Prior to joining GLEF in 1998, Dr. Chen was the founding director of the KQED Center for Education & Lifelong Learning (PBS) in San Francisco. For 10 years, he directed KQED's educational TV programming and outreach services, including workshops, publications, and web content for schools, families, and the community.

Dr. Chen is a frequent speaker and media commentator on issues of education and the media. In 1996, he served as executive editor and co-host of the one-hour public TV special, The Smart Parents Guide to TV Violence, with guest experts including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. He was a guest host for KQED-FM's Forum talk show and continues to host GLEF's weekly Internet radio series with educational leaders.

From 1976 to 1980, he worked in the research department at Sesame Workshop in New York on program development and audience research for Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and 3-2-1 Contact. From 1985 to 1987, he was an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaching and conducting research on educational technology.

Dr. Chen is the author of more than 30 books, chapters, and articles on educational media, including The Smart Parents Guide to Kids TV (KQED Books, 1994). He was executive editor of GLEF's book and CD-ROM, Edutopia: Success Stories for Learning in the Digital Age (Jossey-Bass, 2002).

Dr. Chen currently serves as chair of the advisory council for the new Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media at St. Vincent College. He has chaired NHK's Japan Prize jury for the best educational TV productions, co-chaired the U. S. Department of Educations Technology Expert Panel, and served as an advisor to educational agencies in South Africa, Australia, and Hungary. His work has been honored by the Congressional Black Caucus, Sesame Workshop, Parents' Choice, and PBS. In 2005, he will receive the Fred Rogers Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for contributions to educational media.

Dr. Chen received an A.B. in social studies from Harvard College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in communication research from Stanford University. He lives with his wife and teenage daughter in San Francisco.

Dr. Carolina Cruz-Niera

Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira is the executive director and chief scientist of the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE). She is also an endowed chair in the College of Engineering at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Until 2005, Dr. Cruz was the stanley chair in Interdisciplinary Engineering, and the associate director and co-founder of the Virtual Reality Applications Center at Iowa State University (ISU). In 2002, she co-founded and co-directed the Human-Computer Interaction graduate program at ISU. Dr. Cruz-Neira's work in VR started with her Ph.D. dissertation, the design of the CAVE Virtual Reality Environment, the CAVE Library software specifications and implementation, and preliminary research on CAVE Supercomputing integration. She shares the recognition of the invention of the CAVE with Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin. Since then, her research has been driven by providing applicability and simplicity to VR technology focusing on software engineering for VR, applications of VR technology and usability studies of virtual environments. She spearheaded the open-source VR API movement with the development of VR Juggler, and has been an advocate of best practices on how to build and run VR facilities and applications.

Among her many achievements, Cruz received the 200 Iowa State Foundation Award for Early Achievement in Research. In June 2001, she received the Boeing A.D. Welliver Award. In 2002, she was named Eminent Engineer by the Tau Beta Pi Honors Society. In, 2003 she was inducted as a Computer Graphics Pioneer by the ACM SIGGRAPH organization, and in 2007, she was the recipient of the Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC).

Dr. Cruz has a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) (1995) and a Master's degree in EECS at UIC (1991). She graduated cum laude in Systems Engineering at the Universidad Metropolitana at Caracas, Venezuela in 1987.

Noah Falstein

Noah Falstein is the president of The Inspiracy, a consulting firm specializing in game design and production. With over 25 years designing and managing entertainment and educational software for companies such as Williams Electronics, LucasArts Entertainment, The 3DO Company, and Dreamworks Interactive, Falstein has worked on everything from toys, to CD-ROM games, to arcade titles, to location-based entertainment. His serious game projects run the gamut from medical titles designed to help kids with problems with nutrition, ADD, and cancer, to NASA science education, mental exercise games, and historical simulations. The Inspiracy does original design and design review for both established game companies and those looking to apply game design technique to education and corporate training.

Andy Gavin

Bio pending.

John Hight

John Hight is the director of production, external development for Sony Computer Entertainment of America. In 1991, John built his first game, Battleship, for the Philips CDi player. Since that time, he has worked on over 30 games and 9 educational products on various platforms. He's been fortunate to serve many different development roles: programmer, artist, designer, writer, producer, and studio executive.

Hight oversees external production for Sony in Santa Monica. His team produced BlastFactor, one of the first downloadable games on Sony's Network Platform, and flOw, the first indie game published on PlayStation 3.

Prior to joining Sony, John held management and creative positions with Atari, Electronic Arts, Westwood Studios, and 3DO. While executive producer at Atari, John brought Wizards of the Coast, BioWare, and Obsidian together to develop Neverwinter Nights 2. In his role as executive producer and director of design for Electronic Arts, John led the design and creative production of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, Yuri's Revenge, and Nox.

John holds a B.S.E. in Computer Science from the University of New Mexico, and an M.B.A. from U.S.C.'s Marshall School of Business. He teaches Anatomy of a Game at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. John is also the lead author of Game Development Essentials: Game Project Management published by Thomson Delmar Learning.

Shahril Ibrahim

Shahril Ibrahim is an expert in social networking, online gaming, and development infrastructures. His technological background spans computer-generated imagery and effects for feature films, artificial intelligence, networks, and collaborative virtual environments. He founded Media SuperCollider Inc., a developer of multi-user online games with venture capital backing, where he designed and championed OnChat, a pioneering multi-player Avatar-based virtual environment that registered more than one million members and logged more than 30 million minutes of use per month. He designed the first multi-player Internet fighting game developed in the Mortal Kombat genre, Fighting Verge. He has worked for NASA Ames, for USC, and in the entertainment industry, where he designed software and systems for digital F/X that became precursors to the AVID. As R&D head at BOSS Films, he developed the digital studio infrastructure and pioneered key techniques for the integration of live and synthetic imagery, real-time visualization, and motion capture for feature films. His film credits include IMAX Hawaii: Born in Paradise, Silver Surfer, True Lies, Fantastiks, Desperate Measures, Outbreak, Drop Zone, Turbulence, Multiplicity, Air Force One, and Species. This past year, Ibrahim was invited to join the prestigious Malaysian governmental advisory board to develop Malaysia's industrial creative sector, and stayed on as a key development strategy consultant.

Dr. Larry Johnson

Dr. Larry Johnson is chief executive officer of the New Media Consortium (NMC), an international consortium of colleges, universities, museums and technology companies dedicated to using new technologies to inspire, energize, stimulate, and support learning and creative expression.

He is an acknowledged expert on the effective application of information technology in higher education, and has authored a number of books, monographs, and articles on that topic, as well as on the related areas of distance learning, strategic planning, and institutional effectiveness. Dr. Johnson has more than 25 years of experience in higher education. His service includes roles as faculty, dean, senior executive, and president.

Douglas Lowenstein

Douglas Lowenstein is the founder and former president of the Entertainment Software Association. He resigned on February 12, 2007 to head up the newly formed Private Equity Council.

Doug became the first president of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), then called the Interactive Digital Software Association (IDSA), in June 1994. Creator and owner of the E3 Tradeshow, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, and the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, the ESA is the only association exclusively dedicated to serving the business and public affairs' needs of companies that publish video and computer games, for video game consoles, personal computers, and the Internet. As president, Lowenstein was responsible for the association's operations, and for sector-wide initiatives that affect the nation's fastest growing entertainment industry.

Doug worked cooperatively with parallel industry trade associations including the VSDA and IEMA to defeat hundreds of anti-games legislation across the United States. He was the industry's go-to person in Washington D.C. on all legislative matters ranging from piracy to censorship, and was frequently called upon as the trade's spokesperson, representing the software publisher's perspective.

Lowenstein was a very public figure in his service of the games business, along with Patricia Vance, ESRB head, and Hal Halpin, IEMA boss, and as such had both his supporters and detractors in the industry and media. Critics were vocal about his passivity with regard to anti-games advocates, most notably Jack Thompson, who repeatedly attacked Lowenstein personally and professionally, even going so far as to liken him to "Hitler". Doug did, however, deliver a very pointed speech in his final days in the job which drew the ire of many in the interactive entertainment business.

Prior to joining the staff of the ESA, Lowenstein was an executive vice president in the Washington, D.C. and New York strategic communications firm Robinson Lake Sawyer Miller, Inc. From 1986 to 1991, Lowenstein was a principal in National Strategies, Inc., a Washington, D.C. public policy consulting firm. In 1982, he began a five year-stint in the office of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), including two as legislative director. From 1976 to 1982, Lowenstein was a Washington, D.C. correspondent in the Cox Newspapers Washington bureau. Lowenstein is also the author of "Lowenstein: Acts of Courage and Belief," about his late uncle, political and civil rights activist and former congressman, Allard Lowenstein.

Hideo Mabuchi

Hideo Mabuchi has worked in optical and atomic physics, using a combination of experimental and theoretical approaches to study the behavior of quantum-mechanical systems under continuous observation. His continuing research focuses on the use of real-time feedback for active control of quantum systems, and on clarifying the transition from quantum to classical behavior. Developing new interests include the application of mathematical methods from control theory to analyze and design complex physical systems, quantum optics with nanostructures, molecular biophysics, and quantum metrology.

Mabuchi is currently an Associate Professor of Physics and Control & Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology. Mabuchi received his A.B. (1992) from Princeton University and Ph.D. (1998) from Caltech; selected honors include an A. P. Sloan Research Fellowship, an ONR Young Investigator Award and a Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Jamil Moledina

Jamil works in service of the game industry. At Electronic Arts, he is the Outreach Director, Business Development, for EA Partners, connecting the best independent visionary game creators with the industry-leading production and commercial power of EA. Previously, he was the Executive Director of the Game Developers Conference, the world's largest professionals-only event in the game industry, where he managed the financial and creative direction of this essential learning/inspiring/networking show. Prior to that, he was Editor-in-Chief of Game Developer magazine, the leading B2B publication in the game space.

Jamil is currently serving on the Board of Directors for the charity organization One Big Game and the International Game Developers Association, as well as various game industry advisory boards. He is also a writer in his spare time.

Panu Mustonen

Panu Mustonen works as mobile strategist in Satama Interactive, one of the leading mobile service design houses in Europe. In the past, he has been an executive in mobile entertainment companies like Springtoys and Codetoys, as well as consultant for both tech and content companies in the mobile area.

Panu Mustonen is also an evangelist for Finnish Neogames Center for the game industry, as well as speaker and commentator on fields of mobile business, entertainment and marketing.

Josh Resnick

Josh Resnick is president and co-founder of Pandemic Studios. Over the past 9 years, Josh and his partners have built Pandemic into a company of over 300 highly skilled programmers, designers, and artists working on a wide variety of high-profile titles for consoles and PCs at their offices in California and Australia.

Josh's creativity, strong business background and professional approach have formed the foundation for what has become one of the largest and most stable independent developers in the world.

Before founding Pandemic, Josh spent four years at Activision, Inc., serving as producer on the 1995 mega-hit Mechwarrior 2, director of the RTS favorite Dark Reign, and later as director of production for the Strategy Division of Activision's internal studio.

Josh earned his M.B.A. from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993, and his B.A. from Pomona College in 1989.

Katie Salen

Katie Salen is the executive director of the Gamelab Institute of Play, and associate professor in the Design and Technology at Parsons the New School for Design. Co-author of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, a textbook on game design, as well as the Game Design Reader, both from MIT Press, she is currently working as lead designer on a digital game designed to teach game design to middle school and high school youth. She recently served as editor for the volume The Ecology of Games for the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning, set for publication in 2007. She writes extensively on game design, design education, and game culture, including authoring some of the first dispatches from the previously hidden world of machinima. Katie was a contributing writer for RES magazine, and worked as an animator on Richard Linklater's critically acclaimed animated feature Waking Life. In 2003-04, she partnered with screenwriter and director Hampton Fancher (Minus Man; Bladerunner) on a project for the XEN division of Microsoft to develop an animated storytelling experience distributed through Xbox Live. She teaches and lectures widely, and has helped curate programs at the Lincoln Center, Cinematexas, ZKM, Exploding Cinema, and the Walker Art Center on machinima, the practice of creating animated films using game engines.

Ellen Sandor

Ellen Sandor is an internationally recognized multimedia artist and pioneer in digital media. She is the founding artist and director of (art)n. Throughout the 1970's, she created mixed media environments and sculptures, and received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her passion for photography, technology, and outsider art inspired her to invent a new methodology for producing art, and a new medium of expression for the digital age.

In 1981, she created a unique large-scale three-dimensional photographic mural commissioned by a private collector. This immersive installation combined photography and sculpture with the visual illusion of holography and other Op-Art forms. From the success of this project, Sandor formed a collaborative group of artists in 1983 with her peers from The School of the Art Institute called (art)n. The first project they produced, called PHSCologram 83, is an early example of a virtual reality environment in an artistic context, and opened a dialogue with other artists working in digital media.

Since the early 1980's, a large body of work has been produced under Sandor's direction by the (art)n collective and numerous collaborators. From early tributes to artists, to virtual portraits, science as art, visual history, video game culture and recent works with Chicago Imagists, these large ensemble projects have been shown worldwide in galleries, museums, symposia, and in the media, and have been collected by private individuals as well as distinguished institutions.

Sandor and (art)n's works are in the permanent collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, International Center of Photography in New York, Fred Jones Jr. Museum at the University of Oklahoma, and others. Commissioned projects include the Battle of Midway Memorial at Chicago's Midway Airport for the Public Art Program and City of Chicago, and unique installations for the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Smithsonian Institution, Cranbrook Institute of Science, and Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Sandor has co-authored published papers for Computers & Graphics, IEEE and other publications, and has lectured by invitation in Europe, Canada and the United States. She is a collaborator/associate professor at the Department of Art and Design at the College of Design, Iowa State University, co-founder of The Sandor Family Collection, and a former adjunct associate professor at the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Sandor remains an active member of the Chicago community and is the chair of the Advisory Committee of the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is on the Board of Directors for INTUIT (Society for Outsider, Intuitive and Visionary Art), OXBOW, Lawyers for the Creative Arts, and the Board of Governors for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Keita Takahashi

Keita Takahashi is a game director, whose most notable titles include Katamari Damacy, and its sequel, We Love Katamari. The original Katamari game was a surprise hit and was praised for its quirkiness, simplicity and charm. Takahashi has stated in numerous interviews that he had no desire for Katamari to be touted as innovative or creative. He simply set out to bring the concept of simple, silly fun back into video gaming. Trained as a sculpture graduate, Takahashi brings an art school sensibility to games, unashamed to proclaim that they should have the power to change the world, or at least the people in it.

Neil Young

Neil Young is the CEO and a co‐founder of ng:moco:) a developer and publisher of games for the iPhone and beyond.

Prior to founding ng:moco:), Neil held various positions at Electronic Arts, most recently as the Group General Manager of the EA|Blueprint Studio group that included Maxis (creators of Spore & The Sims) & EA's collaborative partnership with Steven Spielberg.

Prior to EA|Blueprint, Neil served both as Vice President and General Manager of EA Los Angeles (EALA) and EA Maxis, where he oversaw all aspects of the studios responsible for the blockbuster franchises, Medal of HonorTM, Command & Conquer, The Lord of the Rings & TheSims. In 2002 and 2003, Young also led the development of the first The Lord of the Rings games at EA Redwood Shores ‐ The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers and The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King

Neil joined Electronic Arts, from Virgin Games, in 1997 as the General Manager of EA's Origin Systems subsidiary where he supervised the launch of the world's first Massively Multiplayer Online Role‐Playing game, Ultima Online. In addition to his other producing and management credits he was also the creator and driving force behind Majestic, the first Alternate Reality Game (ARG) and a pioneering internet experience that blurred the line between fiction and reality by engaging players through non‐traditional gaming media.