Michael Cook
Mike Cook is a researcher and game developer from London. He’s interested in procedural content generation, computational creativity, automated game design, and building things out of little bits of the internet he finds lying around. He’s the creator of ANGELINA, the automated game design system that entered Ludum Dare and made games about Rupert Murdoch. He also writes about games research, organises the procedural content generation jam, and makes games about dogs barking at trees. He would love to talk to you on Twitter @mtrc.
Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari
Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari is a game designer, researcher, and indie-developer who entered the video game industry as a programmer in 2000. She has worked as a game designer in various research projects including IPeRG and C2Learn. She is currently a research associate at the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta, and at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. Having focussed on intelligent agents and story construction, her present research focus is AI based game design. Her approach includes exploration of the game design space through experimental prototypes. She recently founded the indie studio Otter Play.
Josh McCoy
Mark J. Nelson
Mark Nelson researches the generative and interpretational possibilities of computation. He has a background in artificial intelligence, which he views as a rich interdisciplinary field rather than a purely technical one, in which the goal is to investigate how formalizing or “computationalizing” concepts, data, media, etc., enables machines (or machines and humans together) to do interesting and/or useful things. His own work has focused especially on videogame design, with applications ranging from design/prototype assistance to automated game generation. In that vein, he is also co-author of a textbook on procedural content generation in games. From 2011–15 he was a professor in the Center for Computer Games Research of the IT University of Copenhagen, and now runs a small independent research organization, Anadrome Research.
Gillian Smith
Gillian Smith is an Assistant Professor in Game Design, Art+Design, and Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston, MA, USA. Her research focus is in procedural content generation and computational craft. She is interested in investigating the role that computers and formal systems play in relation to human creativity in playable media. She is also interested in issues at the intersection of feminism, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and playable media. She has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studied in the Center for Games and Playable Media.
Anne Sullivan
Anne Sullivan is the Creative Director for Play Crafts in Santa Cruz, CA. Her research focus is on storytelling in games and craft. She is interested in creating systems that give meaning to player choices within games, working on dynamic quest and storytelling generation that respond to the player’s actions. She also creates generative and visualization systems for crafts and is interested in tactile artifacts that uniquely represent a player’s path through a game. She received her PhD in Computer Science from University of California, Santa Cruz in the Expressive Intelligence Studio.
Mike Treanor
Mike Treanor is a game developer and theorist whose research is aimed at finding new approaches for interpretation and expression of meaning within videogames and computational media. Recently, Treanor was a design and technical lead on Game-O-Matic, an expressive videogame generator, and Prom Week, a social simulation game that was a finalist in both The Independent Game Festival and Indiecade. He has been an active participant in the field of Game Studies and has published on the subjects of videogame interpretation, tools for game creation, social simulation and procedural content generation. Treanor holds a MFA in Digital Art and a PhD in Computer Science the University of California at Santa Cruz and is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at American University in Washington DC.