Katherine Isbister is a full professor in the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Department of Computational Media, where she is core faculty in the Center for Games and Playable Media. She was the founding director of the Game Innovation Lab at NYU.

Her research focuses on designing games and other interactive experiences that heighten social and emotional connections, toward innovating design theory and technological practice. Isbister’s most recent book from MIT Press is How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design.

John Sharp is a designer, art historian, curator and educator with twenty five years of involvement in the creation and study of art and design. John’s current design work focuses on cultural games, artgames and non-digital games. His current research addresses game aesthetics, the history of play, and the processes of creativity.

Jesse Schell is the CEO of Schell Games, a team of one hundred people who strive to make the world’s greatest educational and transformational games, including Yale Medical’s PlayForward: Elm City Stories, Water Bears VR, SuperChem VR, the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood games, and Happy Atoms. Schell Games also creates pure entertainment content, such as the award-winning VR game, I Expect You To Die, and the comedy space game Orion Trail.

Title: Director of Design, ArenaNet

Jason VandenBerghe has been making video games for over twenty years. He has recently joined ArenaNet, and has worked at several other major publishers before that. He served as the Creative Director on For Honor, a game that was a personal quest for him for many years, and has directed a long list of successful AAA projects before that. Jason has a great interest in player motivation and practical game design models, and his talks on the Engines of Play (at the GDC and elsewhere) have been consistently well-received.

James Paul Gee is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Fifth Edition 2015) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the “New Literacy Studies”, an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts.

Ira Fay is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Game Design at Hampshire College (ranked top 10 nationally for game design by Princeton Review) and is the CEO of Fay Games, a studio primarily focused on games for educational impact. He previously co-founded the Game Design and Development program at Quinnipiac University, where he was an Assistant Professor of Game Design and Development.