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Nichol Bradford
Nichol Bradford is no stranger to Action-Adventure!
She works in the fast growing, exciting video and computer game
industry. As the Global Director of Strategic Growth at Vivendi
Universal Games (VUG), Bradford reports to CEO Bruce Hack and
works on special projects, portfolio planning, and manages the
strategic/marketing relationships with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
Before moving into this special role, Bradford spent two years
in Marketing at VUG. As a Sr. Global Brand Manager she marketed
video games tied to major film properties like Van Helsing,
Fight Club and Scarface. She worked extensively with Universal
Studios Motion Picture Group, Twentieth Century Fox and other
Studios/content holders to bring properties to the 3-D interactive
world. Prior to VUG, Bradford spent two years at Disney Interactive/Buena
Vista Games, a division of The Walt Disney Company, as a Marketing/Licensing
Manager on video games for Finding Nemo, Pirates of the Caribbean,
Haunted Mansion, Lilo & Stitch and Spy Kids among others.
During this time, she worked closely with Miramax Films, Pixar,
and Jerry Bruckheimer Films. Nichol Bradford is committed to
the growth and development of the video game industry as evidenced
by her three-year Chairmanship of an annual art exhibit titled,
Into The Pixel: A Celebration of Video Game Art. Into the Pixel
is a joint project between E3, the Academy of Interactive Arts
and Sciences and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
where Bradford sits on the Board of the Prints and Drawing Council
(PDC). She is passionate about encouraging diversity in the
video game industry. To that end, Bradford is a Board Member
of the Urban Video Game Academy (UVGA), whose mission is better
prepare students in disadvantaged areas for postsecondary education
and technology careers by teaching them the fundamentals of
video game design and development. In addition, she organizes
an annual dinner at E3 for diverse executives. In 2001, Nichol
received her MBA in Strategic Management from the Wharton School
of Business. Before graduate school, Bradford worked in New
York in cosmetics and fashion licensing at Estee Lauder and
The Anne Klein Company. She earned her BBA in Marketing from
the University of Houston. Bradford recently completed her first
novel, currently titled My Sister’s Keeper. During her
spare time, Bradford studies the Tango.
http://www.vugames.com
http://www.intothepixel.com
http://www.uvga.org
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Cornelia Brunner
Dr. Brunner has been involved
in the research, production, and teaching of educational technology
in a variety of subject areas for thirty years. In addition
to conducting research projects about the relationship between
learning, teaching, and technology, she has designed and implemented
educational materials incorporating technologies to support
inquiry-based learning and teaching in science, social studies,
media literacy, and the arts. She has worked extensively with
staff and students in a variety of school environments on curriculum
development projects, teacher support and training, and informal
education. She has taught experimental courses at Bank Street
College and the Media Workshop New York, in which teachers are
introduced to new technologies, learn how to integrate technology
into their curriculum, and learn to use multimedia authoring
tools to design their own educational programs. Dr. Brunner
has also been an industry consultant for the design of educational
and entertainment products for children of all ages during the
last thirty years.
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Justine Cassell
She holds a master's degree
in Literature from the Université de Besançon
(France), a master's degree in Linguistics from the University
of Edinburgh (Scotland), and a double Ph.D. from the University
of Chicago, in Psychology and in Linguistics. Cassell's research
interests originated in the study of human-human conversation
and storytelling. Progressively she became interested in allowing
computational systems to participate in these activities. This
new technological focus led her to deconstruct the linguistic
elements of conversation and storytelling in such a way as to
embody machines with conversational, social and narrative intelligence
so that they could interact with humans in human-like ways.
Increasingly, however, her research has come to address the
impact and benefits of technologies such as these on learning
and communication. In particular, Cassell is credited with developing
the Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA), a virtual human capable
of interacting with humans using both language and nonverbal
behavior. More recently Cassell has investigated the role that
the ECA can play in children's lives, as a Story Listening System
(SLS): peer support for learning language and literacy skills.
And Cassell has also employed linguistic and psychological analyses
to look at the effects of online conversation among a particuarly
diverse group of young people on their self-esteem, self-efficacy,
and sense of community. Once machines have human-like capabilities,
can they be used to evoke the best communicative skills that
humans are capable of, the richest learning? This is the goal
of Cassell's research: to develop technologies that evoke from
humans the most human and humane of our capabilities, and to
study their effects on our evolving world.
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Mia Consalvo
Mia Consalvo is an Associate
Professor in the School of Telecommunications at Ohio University.
She is the executive editor of the Association of Internet Researchers’
Research Annual series, and she has also edited the volume Women
and Everyday Uses of the Internet: Agency and Identity with
Susanna Paasonen. Her research focuses on women and games, the
videogame industry, and pedagogical uses of games. She has published
related work in The Video Game Theory Reader, as well as the
journals On the Horizon, Television & New Media, and The
Journal of Communication Inquiry. Consalvo has given more than
40 conference and invited presentations, and is on the steering
committee of Women in Games International. She is currently
writing a book on the role of cheating in the digital game industry.
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~consalvo
http://memorycard.blogs.com
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Mary Flanagan
Mary Flanagan holds an MFA and
MA from the University of Iowa and studied film studies and
experimental filmmaking, and holds a PhD in Computational Media.
In the 1990s, Flanagan was a producer/designer at Human Code,
an Austin based software developer, garnering over 20 international
awards for titles produced for The Discovery Channel, Creative
Wonders/ABC, and Knowledge Adventure. Currently Flanagan's projects
are primarily networked and computer-based works which investigate
everyday life and the influence of technology, including net.culture,
computer gaming, and mundane technological tools. The works
are created for the net or installation.
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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 Cinema-Television 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. 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! and Multiplayer Wheel
of Fortune and MSN’s NetWits, the first multiplayer online
game show. 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 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, and Time Magazine’s Best of the Web.
In December 2001, she was featured in the Hollywood Reporter’s
“Women in Entertainment Power 100” issue.
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Betty Hayes
Elisabeth (Betty) Hayes is a
professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with joint
appointments in the Departments of Curriculum and Instruction
and Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. She is part
of the UW Games, Learning, and Society Research group (http://www.academiccolab.org/initiatives/gapps.html).
She brings to gaming research a background in adult education,
specifically adult literacy education, gender studies, adult
learning and diversity issues. She has been on the faculties
at Syracuse University and Rutgers University, and was an adult
literacy teacher and teacher trainer. Dr. Hayes’s current
research interests include understanding how gender influences
the construction of virtual identities and game play, exploring
sports games as examples of simulated communities of practice,
and using virtual worlds to foster digital and design literacies,
particularly for girls and women. She is the author or editor
of numerous articles, chapters, and books, including Women as
Learners (2000) and “Women, Video Gaming, & Learning:
Beyond Stereotypes” (TechTrends, December 2005). She often
can be found in the dungeons of World of Warcraft or the dance
halls of Second Life.
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Kristin Hughes
Kristin Hughes is Assistant
Professor in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design.
Her research focus is the creation of design-based programming
and products for at-risk youth to develop their critical thinking
and problem-solving skills. She uses a research-intensive approach
that emphasizes front-end evaluation to build upon the participants'
authentic experiences and questions. For the past three years
she has been collaborating with an inter-disciplinary team on
a National Science Foundation funded exploration of gender-sensitive
science-based communications, Explanatoids. The Explanatoids
project has developed, produced and evaluated signs, videos
and other media, seeking opportunities to support informal science
learning in the everyday environment where Pittsburgh's families
gather (http://www.explanatoids.org).
Her current project, Click! Urban Adventure (www.click2005.org),
is designed to immerse middle school girls in an interactive,
mixed-reality game that provides them with the tools they need
to learn discipline-specific science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics skills. The goal of Click! is to establish an
educational pathway for middle school girls that excite their
interest in science and technology. Ms. Hughes has a master's
degree in visual communication from Virginia Commonwealth University.
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Mimi Ito
Mizuko Ito is a cultural anthropologist of
technology use, focusing on children and youth’s changing
relationships to media and communications. She is part of a
new research project supported by the MacArthur Foundation,
“Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media,”
a three year ethnographic study of kid-initiated and peer-based
forms of engagement with new media. She is also conducting ongoing
research on Japanese technoculture, looking at how children
in Japan and the US engage with post-Pokemon media mixes. Her
research on mobile phone use in Japan appears in a book she
has co-edited, Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones
in Japanese Life. She is a Research Scientist at the Annenberg
Center for Communication at the University of Southern California,
and a Visiting Associate Professor at Keio University in Japan.
http://www.itofisher.com/mito
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Daniel James
Daniel co-founded Three Rings and serves as
Chairman of the Board and CEO. In addition to his duties as
CEO he was Three Rings original game designer, responsible for
the concept and direction of Puzzle Pirates. Prior to Three
Rings Daniel consulted for Electronic Arts, Skotos, Codemasters
and Launch Media. He moved to the US from London in 1998 to
work for Sierra Online as a designer on Middle-earth Online,
after plotting for two years to acquire the Tolkien online game
rights for an MMOG startup. Daniel co-founded his first online
game company, Avalon, in 1990, bringing the game to the internet
in 1994. In 1995 he co-founded a web consultancy, Sense, which
continues to operate profitably. Daniels experience creating
and playing online games dates back to teenage wiz-dom on Essex
MUD in 1982. Daniel has a first-class degree in Computer Science
and Philosophy from the University of Leeds. He has been a speaker
or moderator at conferences including E3, GDC, Austin Games
Conference, Casual Games Conference and others, and is a member
of the IGDA Online Games steering committee.
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Henry Jenkins III
Henry Jenkins III, the John
E. Burchard Professor of Humanities and Director of MIT Comparative
Media Studies, has spent his career studying media and the way
people incorporate it into their lives. He is the principle
investigator for the MIT-Microsoft Games-to-Teach project, which
is examining the educational potential of computer and video
games. He writes a regular column, The Digital Renaissance,
for Technology Review magazine and is currently writing a book
designed to explain "why media change matters. He testified
in 1999 before the U.S. Senate during the hearings on media
violence that followed the Littleton, Colorado shootings, testified
before the Federal Communications Commission about media literacy,
and spoke to the governor's board of the World Economic Forum
about intellectual property law. His books include Hop on Pop:
The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (co-edited with
Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc, 2003), From Barbie to Mortal
Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (co-editor with Justine Cassell,
1998), The Children's Cultural Reader (editor, 1998), Science
Fiction Audiences: Doctor Who, Star Trek and Their Followers
(with John Tullock, 1995), Classical Hollywood Comedy (co-editor
with Kristine Brunovska Karnick, 1994), Textual Poachers: Television
Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), What Made Pistachio Nuts?:
Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (1992), and
the forthcoming The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture.
Jenkins earned his doctorate in communication arts from the
University of Wisconsin, Madison and a master's degree in communication
studies from the University of Iowa.
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Caitlin Kelleher
Caitlin Kelleher is currently
finishing a PhD in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
where she is a member of the Alice research group. Alice (www.alice.org)
is a programming environment for novice programmers that allows
users to construct programs that control 3D virtual worlds using
drag and drop. Alice is currently in use in introductory programming
classes at more than 60 universities and 40 high schools across
the country. Caitlin’s research focuses on creating a
programming environment based on Alice that will give middle
school girls a positive introduction to computer programming
through the activity of creating short animated movies. Over
the past 4 years, she has observed hundreds of middle school
girls learning how to program by creating stories in versions
of Alice. When not working, Caitlin enjoys spending time playing
her harp and throwing frisbees for her dog. For more info: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~caitlin
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Brenda Laurel
Brenda Laurel is a designer,
writer, researcher, and performer. She chairs the graduate Media
Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena,
CA. She also serves as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems,
working as a Senior Director in Sun Labs. Since 1976, her work
has focused on experience design, interactive story, and the
intersection of culture and technology. Dr. Laurel co-founded
Purple Moon to create interactive media for girls in 1996 (acquired
by Mattel in 1999). The company was based on four years of research
in gender and technology at Interval Research Corp. In 1990
she co-founded Telepresence Research, developing technology
and applications for virtual reality and remote presence. Other
employers include Atari, Activision, and Apple. She edited The
Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (Addison-Wesley, 1990)
and authored Computers as Theatre (Addison-Wesley, 1991 and
1993) and Utopian Entrepreneur (MIT Press, 2001). Her latest
book is Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (MIT Press,
2004). In addition to public speaking and consulting, Dr. Laurel
is a member of the Boards of Advisors of several companies and
organizations, including Cheskin, the Communication Research
Institute of Australia, and the Comparative Media Studies program
at MIT. She is active in the digital storytelling movement,
the game design community (IGDA) and the ACM.
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Nicole Lazzaro
Nicole Lazzaro is the Founder
and President of XEODesign, Inc. She has over fifteen years
of expertise in Player Experience Research and Design for mass-market
entertainment and consumer creativity products. Clients including
Sony, LeapFrog, Mattel, Sega, The Learning Company, Xfire, Broderbund,
Roxio, Ubisoft, and Maxis. She has a degree in Psychology from
Stanford University. For more information: http://xeodesign.com/about.html
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Holin Lin
Holin Lin is a professor in the Department
of Sociology at National Taiwan University. She has been working
in the field of internet studies and the social interaction
in computer game communities for several years. Her research
focuses on topics such as the formation and corporation of in-game
communities, game tips writing behaviors, cash trades of in-game
assets, norms and deviance negotiation in MMORPGs, and gendered
gaming experience in different spaces.
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Caroline Pelletier
Caroline Pelletier is a researcher
in the fields of new media, learning and educational policy
at the London Knowledge Lab, University of London. She is currently
managing the project 'Making Games: developing games authoring
software for educational and creative use'. This is a three-year
research and development project funded by the UK government,
set up in collaboration with Immersive Education, and which
aims to enable young people create their own computer games.
The research is investigating the educational benefits a game-authoring
tool might offer to young people, particularly girls and students
with print literacy difficulties. Caroline also co- teaches
the Gaming, Gaming Cultures and Education module on the London
Institute of Education’s MA in Media, Culture and Communication.
Her research focuses on epistemology, subjectivity, pedagogy
and policy in relation to new media technologies for learning
and teaching, both in schools and higher education institutions.
Previously, she was an independent researcher and consultant
advising publishing and technology companies on e-learning,
and an editor in academic publishing.
Centre for the study of children, youth and media
http://www.childrenyouthandmediacentre.co.uk/staff.asp?TableName=Overview&RowID=9&PeopleID=13
Institute of Education, London
http://ioewebserver.ioe.ac.uk/ioe/cms/get.asp?cid=8440
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Nichole Pinkard
Dr. Nichole Pinkard is a Senior Research Associate (Assistant Professor) at the University of Chicago's Center for Urban School Improvement where she serves as the Director of Technology for the Center and as the USI Director of the IIS project. Dr. Pinkard plays a leading role in USI’s engagement in the ongoing integrated process of researching problems around the integration of advanced technology systems into urban schools. As the Lead Designer of the center’s Information Infrastructure System project she is leading the design and development of a knowledge management system that will better equip urban schools to provide ambitious intellectual work for all students. Dr. Pinkard's research interests focus on the development of visualizations to support teacher analysis of practice and student learning, the cultural context of learning and literacy, specifically issues surrounding urban education and the relationship between gender and technology, and understanding how culture influences the design and use of learning environments by examining how designers’ design decisions constrain and/or afford users’ actions. Dr. Pinkard has received a prestigious National Science Foundation Early Career Award and the AERA Division C Jan Hawkins Early Career Award. Prior to joining USI she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Education. Dr. Pinkard holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University and a M.S. in Computer Science and a PhD in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University.
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Morgan Romine
Morgan Romine, better known as “Rhoulette”
in the video game online community, helped found and build Ubisoft’s
all-girl gaming team, the Frag Dolls. As captain of the team,
she serves as spokesperson, gamer, road manager, and has participated
in several panels discussing gender and games. Romine fell in
love with video games when she was six years old and she’s
been playing ever since, with online games being her current
passion. As an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley,
she coordinated and led a class about the “anthropology
of online gaming communities”. She used her personal experience
with MMORPGs like EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, Lineage, and
Dark Age of Camelot to engage the class in discussions about
this unique and growing social world. Her introduction to Ubisoft
was through their MMORPG title, Shadowbane, where she led a
clan of more than 200 players. She entered the game industry
after graduating with her degree in anthropology, and now as
a Community Manager for Ubisoft she interacts directly with
their core video game audience. In her personal gaming life
she is currently playing games like World of Warcraft and Halo
2. Romine is excited about the continued growth of the video
game industry and how women will play an integral role as gamers
and within the business itself.
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Elizabeth Sweedyk
Elizabeth Sweedyk is an Associate
Professor of Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College. http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~z
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Jessica Tams
Jessica is the VP Product Planning for SkillJam Technologies and Managing Director of the Casual Games Association. SkillJam Technologies Corporation is the leading network games platform provider for the Casual Games industry. SkillJam’s technology is utilized by the top games portals in the world, such as AOL, MSN, the Gameshow Network, the NHL, Real Arcade and Virgin. SkillJam.com is the company’s casual games site, with more than 100 games offered in subscription or skill-based format. SkillJam is a subsidiary of FUN Technologies, of which Liberty Media owns a 51% share, and host to the million dollar Skill Games World Championship taking place in September 2006.
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T.L. Taylor
T.L. is associate professor
at the IT University of Copenhagen and the Center for Computer
Games Research. She has been working in the field of internet
and multi-user studies for over a decade and has published on
topics such as values in design, avatars and online embodiment,
powergaming, gender and gaming, pervasive gaming, and intellectual
property in MMOGs. Her current book Play between Worlds: Exploring
Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006) uses her multi-year ethnography
of EverQuest to explore issues related to play and game culture.
For more information: http://www.itu.dk/~tltaylor
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Faran Thomason
Faran Thomason is a game industry veteran of
over 10 years who has worked on and shipped over a dozen acclaimed
titles that have sold millions of units. He has developed games
on all major gaming platforms and has worked on games in every
genre including sports, online RPGs, Real Time Strategy, Pinball
and Action Adventure. He has produced many critically acclaimed
AAA products and has worked both as Producer and Designer and
have developed entertaining games for all audiences.
More info at: http://www.fntproductions.com/resume/index.htm
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Nick Yee
Nick Yee was born and grew up
in Hong Kong before starting high school in the US. He earned
his undergraduate degree in Psychology at Haverford College.
His undergraduate advisor Doug Davis, a Freudian personality
psychologist who was fascinated by identity play online, provided
the inspiration for much of Nick’s initial interest in
online gaming psychology. Nick Yee is currently a PhD student
in the Department of Communication at Stanford University doing
research in immersive virtual reality and online games. Over
the past 5 years, he has surveyed over 35,000 MMORPG players
on a wide variety of issues, such as age and gender differences,
motivations of play, relationship formation, and problematic
usage. Many of these survey findings are available online at
The Daedalus Project:http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus
At Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, he works with
Jeremy Bailenson in designing and analyzing experimental studies
exploring social interaction in virtual environments. Many of
these studies explore a research area known as Transformed Social
Interactions (TSI) - understanding how behaviors and self-representations
can be altered in virtual environments to enhance social interactions.
More information on these studies can be found at the lab’s
website: http://vhil.stanford.edu
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