Ian Livingstone is the Life President at Eidos, and a leading pioneer of interactive entertainment. 

In 1975 he founded Games Workshop Ltd with Steve Jackson and launched Dungeons & Dragons in Europe and the Games Workshops retail chain. 

In 1977 he launched White Dwarf, the UK’s first interactive games magazine, and was its editor for 5 years.  In 1982, again with Steve Jackson, he wrote the first in the series of Fighting Fantasy interactive gamebooks that sold over 15 million copies in 23 languages, including his own best-selling Deathtrap Dungeon.

He has written more than 20 books and has also invented many board games including Legend of Zagor, Boom Town, Automation, Judge Dredd and Battlecars.  In 1992 he became Deputy Chairman of computer games company Domark.  In 1995 he was instrumental in the merger and flotation of Domark with technology company Eidos and was appointed Executive Chairman of the Board of the new interactive entity Eidos plc, a position he served until 2002.

At Eidos – one of the UK’s leading developers and publishers of video games – he has helped to secure many of the company’s major franchises including Tomb Raider, Championship Manager, and Hitman.  In 2000 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Technology by the University of Abertay Dundee.  In 2002 he was awarded the BAFTA Special Award for his outstanding contribution to the interactive entertainment industry.

In 2003 he was appointed Creative Industries advisor to the British Council.  In 2004 he was made a Creative Industries Luminary for London.  In 2004 he was appointed Non-Executive Chairman of Bright Things plc.  In 2005 he was appointed Chair of the Computer Games Skills Forum.  In 2009 Livingstone became Life President of Eidos for Square EniX, which bought the publisher in 2009, and has creative input in all of the Eidos-label games.

He is an active supporter of new and upcoming games talent having invested in Indie studios including Playdemic, Appatyze and Mediatonic. He is also sits on many boards including trade body UKIE, industry charity GamesAid, Skillset games council, BAFTA games committee, the Creative Industries Council and is an advisor to the British Council. Earlier this year, he co-authored the NextGen report for the government urging changes in education policy to assist the UK games development industry.

Chris Deering has led multicultural motion picture video and computer game publishing for nearly 3 decades, initially as Vice President – International for Atari game consoles and computers, and subsequently as Executive Vice President and COO for Columbia Pictures International Video, and from 1995 to 2005 as President of Sony Computer Entertainment - Europe (SCEE).

At SCEE he led the team that has sold over 80 million consoles and facilitated the sale of over 1 billion games. Most of SCEE's original management team, set up by Chris, remains at the core of PlayStation leadership, now including the management of Sony's worldwide game development studios.

From 2006 to 2010, Chris served as Chairman of the Board for Codemasters, the world’s leading independent video game developers; and as Chairman of the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival.  He was a board director at Malmo based Wayfinder Systems, a GPS navigation software firm, before it was acquired by Vodafone in 2009.  Chris was also a board member of Malmo-based Sony Ericsson in 2004 - 2005.

Chris currently serves as Chairman of Stockholm based Music Myne and is a board member at PlaySpan of Santa Clara, California.

With over 12 years of experience building online communities, Caryl most recently managed the websites for The Sims and Simcity before creating and launching the website for The Sims 2.

Her current project is Spore, where she is the Pollinated Content Producer - designing and developing the ingame, behind-the-scenes content sharing features. Prior to working at Maxis, Caryl was on the launch team for PlanetOut and then worked at HotWired - the online arm of Wired Magazine.

Working with communities that center around content creation has shown Caryl that given the chance users will make creative choices that push the original game design into new and interesting directions. And that game developers can apply the learnings from those emergent behaviors to make better games.

John Buchanan is a Professor at the prestigious Entertainment Technology Center of Carnegie Mellon University, and previously Head of Research at Electronic Arts (EA), the world’s largest games publisher.

In 1985 John wrote a game that he released into shareware and received a check from Germany for 10 marks. 

Realizing that game design was not his future he enrolled in a M.Sc. at the University of Toronto.  In 1993 John joined the University of Alberta where he pursued his doctoral research in Non-Photorealistic rendering.  His main learning from this research was that the role of a computer scientist in this area is to enhance the creative abilities of an artist, rather than to try to replace them.

In 1998 John worked at Radical entertainment for 5 months then joined Electronic Arts as head of the research group.  His role as head of the research group then extended to Director, Advanced Technology (acting CTO).  In addition to these roles John was always building and maintaining relationships with University researchers.  In 2002 John was asked to take on the role of University Research Liaison Dude full time.  He pursued this job for 4 years. 

During John’s tenure at EA he grew very fond of visiting the Entertainment Technology Center in Pittsburg.  He liked the basic premise of the program so much that in 2006 he joined the teaching faculty of the ETC.  Currently John is the CS Pacific Rim professor for the ETC.  He is residing with the Australia campus at this time. 

John is interested in the development of tools for rapid exploration of interactive world ideas.  He believes that current prototyping tools are too far down the production pipeline and that more focus should be paid to pre-production tools for the industry.


 

Katie Salen is an Associate Professor in Design and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design and co-author of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, a textbook on game design, as well as The Game Design Reader, both from MIT Press.

Interested in games as both aesthetic, educational, and cultural forms, she has developed a critical practice that includes designing games of many different types, from big games, to downloadable games, to conference games and game-hybrids that take gaming as points of creative departure. She writes extensively on game design, interactivity, and game culture, including authoring some of the first dispatches from the previously hidden world of machinima.

Katie has worked on a range of projects for Microsoft, Gamelab, the Hewlett Foundation, the Design Institute, mememe Productions, Salty Features, the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and others. She is a former member of Playground, a design team focused on large-scale, experimental, urban games. Playground has been recognized as helping to pioneer a genre of games know as Big Games—large-scale urban games that engage players in activity both in physical and online space—and recently explored another new genre of games—Slow Games—in the 25th anniversary issue of Metropolis magazine. Slow Games take 25 years to play.

Katie is currently working as Lead Designer on a digital game designed to teach game design to middle school and high school youth. It is supported through a 1.2 million dollar MacArthur Foundation grant, produced in conjunction with Gamelab and GAAPS, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is concurrently editing a book on the Ecology of Games for the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning, set for publication in 2007.

A contributing writer for RES magazine, Katie worked as an animator on Richard Linklater’s critically acclaimed animated feature Waking Life, as well as two music videos for the band Zero 7 (In the Waiting Line; Destiny). In 2003-04 she partnered with screenwriter and director Hampton Fancher (Minus Man; Bladerunner) on a project for the XEN division of Microsoft to develop an animated storytelling experience distributed through Xbox Live. She teaches and lectures widely, and has helped curate programs at the Lincoln Center, Cinematexas, ZKM, Exploding Cinema, and the Walker Art Center on machinima, the practice of creating animated films using game engines. Katie spends much of her time playing games on trains and planes in lieu of single serving meals.

Tracey Fullerton is a game designer, educator and writer with fifteen years of professional experience.

She is currently Professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinema-Television where she serves as Co-Director of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab. Tracy is the author of Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping and Playtesting Games, a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide.

Prior to joining the USC faculty, she was President and founder of the interactive television game developer, Spiderdance, Inc. Tracy was a founding member of the New York design firm R/GA Interactive. As a producer and creative director she created games and interactive products for clients including Sony, Intel, Microsoft, AdAge, Ticketmaster, Compaq, and Warner Bros. among many others.

Additionally, Tracy was Creative Director at the interactive film studio Interfilm, where she wrote and co-directed the "cinematic game" Ride for Your Life, starring Adam West and Matthew Lillard.

Tracy's work has received numerous industry honors including best Family/Board Game from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, ID Magazine's Interactive Design Review, Communication Arts Interactive Design Annual, several New Media Invision awards, iMix Best of Show, the Digital Coast Innovation Award, IBC's Nombre D'Or, and Time Magazine's Best of the Web. In December 2001, she was featured in the Hollywood Reporter's "Women in Entertainment Power 100" issue.

Sande Chen is the author of Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform, and a freelance writer and game designer.

She has written for mainstream and industry publications, such as GameDev.Net(http://www.gamedev.net), and was a contributor to Secrets of the Game Business on the topic of online business models. Her past game credits include IGF winner Terminus, Siege of Avalon, Scooby Doo, and JamDat Scrabble. Sande graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with dual degrees in Economics and in Writing and Humanistic Studies.

Afterwards, she continued to combine her love of creative media with her analytical skills by earning a M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics and a M.F.A. in Cinema-Television from the University of Southern California. In 1996, she was nominated for a Grammy in music video direction.

Zhan Ye is President, GameVision, and a Strategic Investment Consultant for Giant Interactive Group, China’s leading online game developers and operators in terms of revenues. 

Giant Interactive has over 1000 employees at their headquarters in Shanghai, and over 3000 Sales & Marketing personnel throughout China.

A veteran game developer and entrepreneur, Zhan Ye is one of the first-generation game developers in China.  Zhan began creating PC games in 1995 and his thinking and writings have inspired many of today's Chinese game developers. Zhan established China’s first game developers magazine and served as its editorial director. He is the founder and president of GameVision, a business consulting and outsourcing management firm. GameVision's clients include global game publishers and developers, Venture Capital firms, technology vendors, and media companies.

Zhan Ye received a Master's Degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from Carnegie Mellon University.