Speakers

Nick Bush: Designing Narrative Strategy for 4 to 4,000 Players
Cam: Horror Games: Lore VS Gameplay
Joey Centofanti: Gorogoa: O’ Sensemaking Machine; Joey Centofanti is pursuing a BFA in Game Development at the University of Southern California. His talk is based on a paper which won gold at GDC’s Game Narrative Review. Post-graduation, he is excited to launch a philosophically-dense game company.
Autumn Chen: On Goncharov (1973): Fact and (Interactive) Fiction
Sasha Fenn: SweepWeave: A Synthesis of Storylets and Simulated Characters
Clara Fernandez-Vara: Take That! The Multicultural Origins of the Ace Attorney Series
Aster Fialla: Thematic Puzzle Design: Learning from Erstwhile, Sub Rosa, and more; A queer illustrator, game writer, poet, and sundry-other-things-doer. Aster likes TTRPG that aren’t D&D, crying at LARPs, and spending too much time on discord.
Diana Flindt: How to End the World: A Post-Mortem of RuneScape 3’s 2022 Season Finale
Luis Garcia: Civil Disobedience in Games
Amanda Gardner: Trust, Lust, and UST: Writing Effective Romance in Games; Narrative Director at the Deep End Games, writer of the award-winning indie titles Perception and Romancelvania, and nationally-recognized wellness speaker, Amanda Gardner loves a good story and a hot cup of tea. As a mother of four, she spends any spare time wrangling her youngsters and taking them to sports, where she then takes notes on her unusual monster fantasies for in-game use. Amanda also teaches yoga and stress-relief techniques to techies and teens.
Edmundo Ruiz Ghanem: The Little Engine That Could: The History of the Adventure Game Studio Engine, Games, and Community; Edmundo Ruiz Ghanem is a software developer based in Philadelphia. A Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center graduate, he previously worked on theme park attractions for Disney and social games at Electronic Arts and Zynga. He is an ongoing contributor and playtester of independent point & click adventure games that include the Ben Jordan series, A Golden Wake, and The Crimson Diamond.
Francisco González: Going Union: How A Basement Indie Hired AAA Talent (And How You Can, Too!); Francisco Gonzalez has been making adventure games using Adventure Game Studio since 2001. After releasing the final case in the 8-part Ben Jordan series in 2012, he decided to take the plunge and begin making games professionally. His first game, A Golden Wake, was published in 2014 by Wadjet Eye Games. He made his second game, Shardlight, while working in-house at Wadjet Eye as as a full-time developer. In 2018, he released Lamplight City, published by Application Systems Heidelberg.
Gerben Grave: 6 “Cons” of Worldbuilding: a Practical Approach to Structured Creation
Martin Hanses: My Game Is A Joke, And I Demand To Be Taken Seriously; Martin Hanses is a narrative designer, writer, and developer from Finland, currently based in Vancouver, Canada. Most recently, he wrote and directed Tails: The Backbone Preludes for Eggnut, and is currently working on his solo project Clam Man 2: Headliner, a narrative role-playing game under the sea. He is known for his focus on organic branching dialogue, comedic writing, and hobbies such as crosswords and playing the banjo.
Jess Haskins: How the West Was Many: Crafting a Culturally Diverse Western Adventure with Rosewater; Jess Haskins is a game editor and narrative designer living in Brooklyn. She teaches game design at the NYU Game Center and provides editing and consulting services for games. Recent titles include idle adventure The Longing, detective adventure Lamplight City, and eco-friendly farm sim Coral Island. With her partner Francisco González, she is co-writer of the forthcoming Western adventure Rosewater. Her work centers on worldbuilding with intention, forging inclusive communities, and exploring interactive storytelling. (jesshaskins.com, paperback-studio.com)
Javeria Kausar: Choices of the Oppressed: Writing Choice-Based Fiction Using Theatre of the Oppressed Methods to Enable Muslim Minorites and Challenge Majority Assumptions; Javeria Kausar is a writer, poet, and PhD (Creative Writing) student. She has won the Damodarshree National Award, the Sweek Microfiction (microlight) contest, and prizes in 3 Writer’s Workout short fiction events, 3 Wordweavers India contests (short fiction and poetry), and the Great Indian Poetry Contest. Her poem “(con)TEXT” was longlisted in the “Opening Up” category of the New Media Writing Prize 2022, and a poem responding to the theme of anti-slavery and lawyers’ role was shortlisted (top 2) in the Newcastle Law School’s poetry contest. As part of her PhD at Newcastle University, she is developing a new interactive form of fiction to help tackle Islamophobia.
KB: Narrative-Based Games for Sexual Health; KB is an artist and lover of nearly all Pokémon games. In addition, she loves weird, tiny, radical games and experiences. She is particularly motivated by the intersection of games and learning; she is interested in games as a tool for education. As a former teacher, KB’s goal is to build learning environments in which players are empowered, responsible, and empathetic. Other things KB is passionate about: sex education, poetry, and cartoons.
David Kuelz: When Theater Is A Game
Bjarke Alexander Larsen: “Don’t Try to Explain It” - Why Some Things Should Not Make Sense
Brianna Lei: Keynote
Yoyu Li: Narrative Meets Multiplayer: Creating a Social Narrative Experience
Stacey Mason: Narrative Design in the Age of Twitch
Jim Nelson: According to Cain: From Concept to Completion; Jim Nelson is a software engineer and novelist. His latest book is A Man Named Baskerville.
Colin Post: Cataloging Narrative Games to Expand the Bibliographic Universe; Colin Post is an Assistant Professor in Library and Information Science at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro, where he teaches and conducts research on preserving digital culture.
Erik X. Raj: Designing a Narrative-Driven Video Game to Build Resilience in Children who Stutter
Alejandro Ruiz del Sol: Spontaneously Inspired: How Dadaism May Energize Narrative Design
Luciano Salerno: Endless Stories, Impossible Structures: Conflict and Plot in Mobile F2P Games; Luciano Salerno is an Argentine writer currently based in Berlin, Germany. Coming from a screenwriting background and formation, he works as a professional writer for the video game industry, both for mobile top-grossing games as well as in independent, personal projects. Specialized in narrative structures, he spends his time either writing and plotting or analyzing the storytelling strategies and composition of narrative works in any media.
Ben Schneider: Cairns & Keystones: Building Interactive Narrative Non-linearly; Ben Schneider is a video game writer and designer with twenty years of industry experience, and is currently a professor of practice in the Interactive Media and Game Development (IMGD) program at WPI. He has created content for games such as Empire Earth, Titan Quest, Dawn of War, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and Lord of the Rings Online. His creative interests include procedural narrative systems, conventional prose, folklore, and experimental interactive narrative.
Ben Books Schwartz: You Should Be Larping More (If You Want To Exercise Your Interactive Narrative Muscles); Ben Books Schwartz is a nomadic writer and narrative designer of video games and larps, with a particular focus on stories for young adults and procedural narrative generation. They spent many years helping run larp summer camps including The Wayfinder Experience, Trackers Earth, and Magischola Prep, as well as destination larps for adults including College of Wizardry, New World Magischola, Event Horizon, and Changeling: the Dreaming. They’ve worked in mobile games (Lifeline, Puzzle Legends, Gossip Harbor) as well as AAA games (unannounced/NDA), and currently work as a Senior Narrative Designer at The Molasses Flood (a CD Projekt studio).
Hélène Sellier: Representing Disability and Depicting Ableism in Video Games; Hélène is a video game researcher and narrative designer. Her Ph.D. thesis is about the relationships between literature and video games, studying the diverse forms of frictions and hybridizations between the two media cultures. She writes visual novels and expressive games for game studios (Beemoov, The Seed Crew) and teaches Interactive Fiction Writing and Media Cultures.
Fran Tufro: Cuentitos: a Storylet Engine with Probability at its Core; I’m Fran (he/they) and I’m optimizing towards living a creative life. I created Hidden People Club because I needed a wholesome workplace with creativity and cooperation as the main pillars.
Matthew Viglione: Procedural Prohibition: Bringing Story Generation into a Simulation Game
Pamela Weidman: “You”: Addressing the Reader-Player-Character in Twentieth-Century Texts; Pamela Weidman is a PhD candidate in English and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She works on theories of character, and teaches an undergraduate course on interactive fiction and other twentieth-century interactive literature.
John M. Withers IV: T. Tanzi and Last Match: Immersive v. Interactive Theatre