2025 Speakers
Ira Fay, Learning Game Designer, MIT
Ira Fay is a published puzzle designer and board game designer and developer, writing a regular puzzle column in the board game magazine Senet and having worked on Agricola expansions, Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures, Xia: Embers of a Forsaken Star, Sleeping Gods: Tides of Ruin (arcade mode), Sorcery: Contested Realm, and Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread. He is a Learning Game Designer in The Education Arcade at MIT, an Affiliated Scholar at Hampshire College, and CEO of Fay Games, a studio primarily focused on games for educational impact. From 2013 - 2020, Ira was an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Game Design at Hampshire College, where he founded their game design and development program, which Princeton Review consistently rated in the Top 10 undergraduate programs in the US. Prior to his academic career, Ira was a Senior Game Designer at Electronic Arts (Pogo.com), and before that, he worked at Z-Axis (Activision) on X-Men 3, Maxis on The Sims 2, and Walt Disney Imagineering on ToonTown Online. Ira graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and master’s degrees in information systems management and entertainment technology.
