Search Results

Angelo is an in-house attorney at Microsoft, but unlike the very exciting areas of work within the company like Microsoft Office, Windows, and Azure, Angelo toils daily in the Xbox mines, supporting their first-party game development studios. He currently provides legal support for 343 Industries (Halo), The Coalition (Gears of War), and Ninja Theory (Hellblade). With an engineering background and some experience as a software developer, he understands the technical aspects of game development (while also having enough self-knowledge to acknowledge that he no longer has the coding chops to do it himself), and spends what free time he has left after raising his two young children playing whatever games he can get his hands on (while justifying it to himself as market research). Prior to his role at Microsoft, Angelo has spent time in the legal departments of Google, Yahoo!, and Bandai Namco Entertainment America. Angelo frequently speaks about legal issues affecting the video game industry at legal conferences as well as game industry events such as GDC, PAX, TwitchCon, and SXSW.

Scott Crabtree is the founder and Chief Happiness Officer of Happy Brain Science. His mission is to help the world apply science to thrive more at work. Before founding Happy Brain Science, Scott was a professional video game developer, then worked at Intel. He's presented over 600 sessions to repeat clients including DreamWorks, Google, Nike, Intel, Activision, Blizzard Entertainment, NBC/Universal, EA, and Epic Games. He's led the development of many videogames through the years. The most recent game he designed and led production on was Choose Happiness @ Work Online — a video game designed to boost the science of happiness on teams. He's also served as programmer on titles such as Yourself!Fitness by ResponDesign, NRL Rugby League, and many children's educational games such as Arthur's Thinking Games. He loves playing strategy games the most. When not gaming or presenting, he's usually outside in beautiful Central Oregon where he lives, or playing music in multiple bands.

Nashville native Toiya Kristen Finley, Ph.D., has been a freelancing writer and editor her entire adult life. She earned a doctorate in literature and creative writing from Binghamton University. Over her career, she has published more than 80 works of fiction, nonfiction, comics/manga, and games, and has over 20 years of experience writing in a range of genres, tones, styles, and voices. She gained editorial experience interning at Henry Holt's imprint, Owl Books. At Binghamton, she founded the literary journal Harpur Palate and served as its managing/fiction editor. In 2011, she cofounded the Game Writing Tutorial at GDC Online with Tobias Heussner and served as an instructor in 2011 and 2012. In videogames, she has worked as a game designer, narrative designer, game writer, editor, and diversity/narrative consultant (or some combination of the five) on everything from AAA titles to mobile games to games for children to small indie projects. Recent work includes writing visual novel Siren Song (Stardust Works), copyediting for Destiny 2 (Bungie), developmental editing on Insecure: The Come Up Game (Glow Up Games), writing/editing on Ritual of Raven, writing for the Interview with the Vampire TTRPG, and editing Our Brilliant Ruin. A presenter at conferences throughout the year, she has lectured on freelancing and storytelling and led workshops on narrative design and game design. She is a member of the IGDA Game Writing Special Interest Group's Executive Board. The Game Narrative Toolbox (CRC Press), a book on narrative design she coauthored with Jennifer Brandes Hepler, Ann Lemay, and Tobias Heussner, was published in 2015. Narrative Tactics for Mobile and Social Games: Pocket-Sized Storytelling (CRC Press), which she edited and contributed to, was published in 2019. Her latest books are Freelance Video Game Writing: The Life & Business of Digital Mercenary for Hire (2022) and Branching Story, Unlocked Dialogue: Designing and Writing Visual Novels (2023) both from CRC Press. Of late, she has been working on her own visual novel series, beginning with Incarnō: Everything Is Written. Speaking History: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-vZf3N5I_8Nclp0dkZ1UVpBcTQ/view?usp=drive_link&resourcekey=0-Hw0yQbGXjCsqC1CiPu9lmA

Kristie Fisher is a cognitive psychologist currently leading the global multidisciplinary Research team at PlayStation Studios. At Google she worked on Stadia, Support Platform, Gmail, and Ads and was a co-author of Google's People + AI Guidebook. Prior to Google she started her career at Xbox Research, collaborating with game producers and development teams to improve player experience on Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Kinect, and Windows. She has been a people manager since 2018.

Pamela Iluore is a Senior Product Manager at PlayStation, where she leads strategy for mobile games. Throughout her career, she has helped shape products at some of the industry's largest companies, including Electronic Arts, where she worked on Apex Legends Mobile, a title recognized as Apple's and Google's Mobile Game of the Year.

Emil Kjæhr is Head of Product & Partners at Funday Games in Aarhus, Denmark. Over eleven years at the studio he has worked as Producer, Game Designer, Creative Lead and Product Manager, helping build Funday into a specialist in cross-platform development and IP collaborations. His shipped credits span LEGO® Star Wars: Microfighters and LEGO® DC Super Heroes Chase, HTML5 titles for Snapchat and Discord, and the App Store and Google Play launch of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. He has been in and around games since 2007, when he started hosting game jams, ran a games incubator, organized game conferences, and even shipping a game on the (in)famous OUYA console as an indie developer.

Hailing from Australia, but now living in San Francisco, Mark Mandel is a Staff Developer Advocate improving developer experience on Discord's platform for game developers. He is also often known as the founder of two open source projects - Agones, a dedicated game server hosting and scaling platform and Quilkin, a UDP proxy for large-scale multiplayer game server deployments, both of which he founded while Tech Lead for Developer Relations at Google Cloud for almost 10 years. When not working, Mark spends his time pottering on open source. looking for new and interesting things he can do with cloud native technology and games, being distracted by dogs, and practising too many martial arts.

Nathalie Mathe is a pioneer Virtual Reality creator, producer, consultant, and educator. She is currently Professor of Practice in the Game Science and Design Master program at Northeastern University. She founded NativeVR, an independent VR studio focused on creating immersive experiences with a transformative and social impact. Her VR film Uturn on gender bias was nominated for best interactive experience at the Raindance and FIVARS festivals and screened at a dozen international film festivals. She has contributed to dozens of VR projects for JauntVR, Google, Facebook, etc., and created visual effects for feature films like Skyfall and Dark Knight Rises.

RJ Mical is a lifelong inventor, software wizard, and professional tech-evangelist who believes that making things should always be an absolute blast.  "You have to have a happy life" is his driving motto, for himself and for you too.  Over his wild ride of a career he co-creating some legendary hardware, from the magical Amiga computer (and its "Intuition" interface) to the handheld Atari Lynx and the pioneering 3DO console.  Along the way, he racked up 12 patents, launched five startups, and programmed more video games than he wants to count.  He led brilliant teams at companies like Sony PlayStation and Google.  When not engineering the future, he loves traveling around the globe, and hosting quiet dinner parties at home.  He lives life with absolute gusto, and loves to inspire that same creative fire in everyone!