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Speakers (GGC 2013)

The Gotland Game Conference is proud to announce the following speakers, distinguished experts and brilliant thinkers who will be delivering keynotes and featured presentations.

  • Sheri Graner Ray (Where Do We Go From Here)
    … is the Studio Design Director with Schell Games and has been designing computer games since 1989. She is author of the book, “Gender Inclusive Game Design – Expanding the Market” and is the game industry’s leading expert on gender and computer games. In 2005 she was awarded the IGDA’s Game Developer’s Choice award for her work in gender and games.
  • Heidi McDonald (Narrative as a Tool for Inclusiveness)
    … is the Women in Gaming Rising Star Award Recipient for 2012. Specializing in Narrative Design, McDonald invented the ICING Model to help narrative designers write more satisfying NPC Romances. McDonald is a Game Designer at Schell Games in Pittsburgh.
  • Tom Abernathy (Diversity Means Dollars)
    … is a writer/narrative designer at Microsoft Studios, and the mind behind titles like Halo: Reach, Saboteur and Destroy All Humans! Tom will show you that diversity equals more units sold and more money in the bank, and how to achieve that in real world production environments.
  • Pernilla Alexandersson (Creating Equal Cultures)
    … is one of Swedens foremost gender equality experts, CEO and founder of Add Gender. Her areas of expertise are business strategy, creativity and innovation with a focus in the field of gaming. Her interest in the gaming industry is not a coincidence: She has been a gamer since childhood and therefore she herself has a desire to create a competitive and creative industry where everyone’s talents and experiences are utilized.
  • Amanda Lange (Community Through Communication)
    … is the Online Community Manager for GameSprout at Schell Games in Pittsburgh. She is an alumni of Bowling Green State University and of Michigan State University, where she worked on serious games for learning and research and wrote her masters thesis on games and storytelling. She is an active games critic, and staff contributor to www.tap-repeatedly.com.
  • Will Bonner (Safe by Design)
    … is looking into the fact that most of our social networks, game lobbies, forums and websites are not built with an understanding that they can be used as tools for harassment. He aims to change that, and present both technical and social measures to create safe(r) spaces – both in game and in the surrounding game communities.
  • Derek Burrill (Watch Your Ass!: Masculinity, Play and Games)
    … studies performance and movement in digital games, as well as the cultural and artistic impact of video and computer gaming. Pulling from all of these topics to trace the cultural connections between videogames, masculinity, and digital culture.
  • Andrea Hasselager (Game Girl Workshop Palestine)
    … Andrea created Prince$$ of the Hood, a 3D single-player game for young women raising the topic of over-consuming fashion brands. Prince$$ got selected for FuturePlay, a conference about the future in computer games in Canada. She’s currently at the Pervasive Media Studio, where she’s making a preventive alternate reality game about human trafficking. The game is targeted to 14 to 15-year olds.
  • Sara Lempiäinen & Tobias Sjögren (Girls Just Want To Have Fun)
    … works at Stardoll – a social gaming experience for young women from around the world and the largest teen community site in the world! The company is well known for their focus on personal development and representation.
  • Jenny Brusk (Creating Equal Cultures)
    … is a teacher at the game education at Högskolan i Skövde. She was recently awarded the Anna Lindh Committee’s grant for her work with gender equality in the Swedish computer industry.
  • Annika Bergström (Creating Equal Cultures) is an Alumni from Gotland, currently working as a games researcher and program coordinator for the education at Södertörns högskola. From 2004-2007 she ran Super Marit; a project to inspire- and create inroads for female game creators, and to increase the variety of games available.
  • Åsa Roos (Creating Equal Cultures)
    … is a game designer and outspoken feminist, with more than 13 year in the industry. When not designing AAA titles at Avalanche Studios, she participates as industry advisor, teacher and most recently on the board of directors for the vocational Futuregames in Stockholm.
  • Thor Rutgersson (Creating Equal Cultures)
    … is a writer and non-formal adult education organiser with a passion for gaming in general and Nintendo in particular. For several years, Thor worked as national project leader for ABF:s music study circles in Sweden (mostly rock and pop bands) and dealt with several projects on gender equality within popular music. He believes there are many similarities between the male dominated music scene and the male dominated world of game development. Thor has also written for Club Nintendo Magazine and currently operates the gaming blog nintendo-och-livet.se
Posted on - 1 Comment on Ernest Adams nails his dissertation!
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Ernest Adams nails his dissertation!

In February, after nearly 18 years of thinking and writing about interactive storytelling (as well as a good many other topics), I received a Ph.D. in that subject from the University of Teesside in the UK. My thesis is called Resolutions to Some Problems in Interactive Storytelling, and it’s a retrospective and analysis of the papers and lectures I’ve given over the years. In this month’s column, I’m going to summarize a few of my conclusions.

— Ernest Adam, published on Gamasutra.

So YES! Ernest finally got to nail his doctoral thesis on campus this month!

“Spikning” (lit. nailing) is an academic ritual in connection with the submission of a dissertation. Before the dissertation thesis is published it must be made available to anyone who wants to read it and come up with criticism for the disputation. The Swedish tradition is to have the respondent ceremonially nail a copy of the dissertation to a wall, for public display.

Ernest is the second GAME staffer to drive a nail into that board in Almedalen, and the entire thesis is available for download at the bottom of this post. For a quick overview of some of the juicy bits, click through to his Gamasutra writeup.

Good job man!

Resolutions to Some Problems in Interactive Storytelling, Volume 1 [PDF]
Resolutions to Some Problems in Interactive Storytelling, Volume 2 [PDF]

Posted on - 1 Comment on Game Developers Conference
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Game Developers Conference

Tracks at the GDC 2013
Adam Mayes is such a shameful fanboy. His enthusiasm for USA, San Francisco and the “real” GDC has been diabetes inducing – long ago triggering the predictable counter-reaction in yours-trolly.

I am willing to admit now though that the man was right about GDC. I can’t remember leaving a session of GDC Europe feeling inspired. Or enthusiastic. Or validated. Or whipped.

Informed – absolutely, but never… improved.

Leigh Alexander

We’ve been here two days and the conference has yet to start proper. The first two days are “summits” – I’m primarily following the Education and the Monetization summits with a dip in the AI track every now and then. The AI people have, by far, the most fun in their sessions.

Only two days, and I’ve already met and spoke with Brenda and John Romero, Leigh Alexander, Tracy Fullerton, Eric Zimmerman, Ian Schreiber, Jeff Orkin – you know. The people that writes The Books. The people that we Follow.

A lot of talk of inclusion, gender and death to the boy club all around the conference. The topic crops up in almost every session. There is an undeniable air of synchronicity with our own conference theme. People respond extremely well when I bring the GGC up, so I’m doing my best and grabbing big name-speakers here.

It's... pretty big too.

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24-hour lecture circuit

Adam and I are on the plane back from Stockholm – cutting through a massive snowstorm after a long day off the island. We’ve been speaking at Fryshuset Gymnasium and GUC Uppsala.

Three months ago when Fryshuset invited us to talk about ethical games we were brimming with ideas! We would talk about abuse in gaming spaces, exclusion in the industry and culture, bullshit copy protection schemes, bullying, harassment – all of the things!

We spent many late evenings gathering materials, thinking and discussing. It was all good and productive until we looked up what ethics means – and promptly had to throw out everything we’d done up to that point.

We had fallen into the classical trap of assuming that ethics are equivalent to “decent behavior”. Rectifying that schoolboy error, we then proceeded to spend the nights arguing, bitching and moaning (with great intellectual vigor!) until Securitas arrived and gave us ten minutes to leave the building before calling the police.

This went on until 17 hours before we were due to present.

Our problem? The topic was simply too big. How do we talk about ethics, when there are so many different schools of thought? And how do we, as an artistic/entertainment medium, balance free speech/expression and explore difficult topics, while presenting an ethical framework for these works?

And how do we stop apologizing for our industry, while also recognizing that all entertainment media has gone through this process?

A brain melt of epic proportions – leaving us on stage in Stockholm, in front of young impressionable minds – and in big, big trouble.

The result was a presentation on personal responsibility in the work we produce, and a respect for the audience we produce for. A demand for each developer to work out what their ethics and morals are, and how to express them through their work. And an argument for game design as the tool to express with intent in this rich medium of ours.

It seemed to go over well. 🙂

Then off to GUC.

We were going to present a standard description of our education but on arriving, we realized that all our “standard descriptions” are aimed at either external organisations evaluating us, or students about to apply to us (and thus, in dire need of a beating).

So, with 15 minutes before showtime and with the threatening temptation of pie, we cannibalized and Frankensteined 3 presentations into a single, coherent, presentation on the value of our education, the value of studying games, and a quick tour of the ethics of our medium.

All in all, an impressive days work put together with spit and string!

And – even better – right now as we type this on the way home, penniless, on a plane without access to the most basic of credit card technology and bereft of coffee, we were offered money by complete strangers for our caffeine fix, before being given it for free by the professionally kind staff of GotlandsFlyg.

…. we should write and demand the company shower her with our praise.

Thanks to both Fryshuset and GUC for having us. It was great to see you all again and thanks for giving us the chance to flex our minds.

… and we’ll get this guy next year. 😀