Erin Reynolds
www.flyingmollusk.com
Erin Reynolds is the Founder and Creative Director of Flying Mollusk. An award-winning game designer, her career of 15 years includes having worked at a variety of high-profile companies, such as Disney and Zynga, and having led many projects, including “Trainer” (which won the two top awards for Michelle Obama’s Apps for Healthy Kids competition) and the critically acclaimed biofeedback-enhanced thriller game, “Nevermind.”
Erin is passionate about the potential games have to empower, educate, and inspire players of all kinds and to make the world a better, more playful place. To this end, as Chief Mollusk of Flying Mollusk, Erin is dedicated to continuing to create edgy games and interactive art that leave a lasting positive impact on the user and world.
Drew Davidson
https://waxebb.com/
Drew Davidson is a professor, producer and player of interactive media. His background spans academic, industry and professional worlds and he is interested in stories and transformational experiences across texts, comics, games and other media. He explores the art, design and science of making media that matters, working to expand our notions of what media are capable of doing, and what we are capable of doing with media. He is the Director of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University and the Founding Editor of ETC Press and its Well Played series and journal.
Jamie Antonisse
Jamie Antonisse is an award-winning designer and writer whose work focuses on creating powerful and novel interactions between story and play. His games, including Spectre, Hush, and The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom, have been showcased at IndieCade, Games for Change, Meaningful Play and the IGF. He holds an MFA from USC’s Interactive Media Department. In 2016 he left his day job as a managing game designer at Disney to co-found Sirvo Studios along with Asher Vollmer and Ryan Sullivan. Their first game, Guildlings, was released in fall 2019.
Celia Pearce
Dr. Celia Pearce is an award-winning game designer, artist, curator, author, teacher, and serial instigator. She currently holds a position as Associate Professor of Game Design at Northeastern University in Boston, is co-founder and Festival Chair of IndieCade, and served as co-curator for XYZ: Alternative Voices in Video Games, the first exhibition to celebrate women game designers. Her games have been featured at Come Out & Play, Different Games, CHI, SIGGRAPH, Incubate, SAMM Arcade at the Smithsonian, and Boston Festival of Independent Games, where her electronic-quilt based board game eBee, designed in collaboration with Gillian Smith, won an award for most Innovative Tabletop Game in 2016. She is also launch title co-developer for Move38 “Blinks,” an intelligent tile system for tabletop games; the first game on the platform, Fracture, was a finalist at IndieCade 2016. Dr. Pearce has also written on game design, emergent social behavior in games, indie games and artgames. Her books include Communities of Play (MIT Press, 2009), Ethnography and Virtual Worlds (Co-Author; Princeton), Meet Me at the Fair: A World’s Fair Reader (Co-Editor and Contributor, ETC/CMU Press), and IndieCade: A History — The Interdependence of Independents, due this year through CMU/ETC Press.
