A co-founder of Suddenly Social, a new startup in the Bay Area doing some revolutionary realtime multi-user, location-savvy tech for mobile (games and other apps), Noah is eager to talk to people at companies with interest in this area. 

Suddenly Social's First game Bad Pets, lets 8 people play in real time with or against each other in a circular Rock-Scissors-Paper duel. It will be out for the iPhone/iPad shortly and for other platforms soon after, and players can play games with others on any platform simultaneously.

Noah has been in the computer game industry since 1980 with many hit title credits and work experience at major developers like LucasArts, 3DO, and Dreamworks Interactive. Noah run's his own freelance design business, The Inspiracy. The Inspiracy offers design and production consulting for companies and individuals interested in top quality game development and business contacts. Noah also lectures and conducts seminars on game design and development, for both traditional and serious games.There are very few people with decades of game industry experience, a track record of major design roles in hit games, and extensive International contacts. Fewer still offer their services on a freelance basis. As a full time freelance designer/producer since 1996 Noah may hold the world record for time in this role.

Noah's career highlights include:

Executive Producer @ Dreamworks Interactive as 3rd employee and worked directly with Steven Spielberg on several unreleased titles. Noah launched the "Normandy Beach" project which eventually (under other hands) became the Medal of Honor series and started a Story and Design group within Dreamworks.

President @ NF Interactive (Sole Proprietorship) doing Consulting for the games industry.

Producer @ The 3DO Company as 9th employee, reported directly to Trip Hawkins, produced initial demos and launched first four internal titles Project Leader/Assistant

Creative Director @ LucasArts Entertainment as the 7th employee of Lucasfilm Games (which became LucasArts in 1989). Projects produced and/or codesigned included Koronis Rift, PHM Pegasus, Strike Fleet, Battlehawks 1942, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and many others.

Noah has chapters published in six different game industry books, and is working on his own book about game design issues.

Consulting on game production and design, also educational and training game software: Recent work includes co-design of an upcoming Facebook game, as well as design consultation on Remedy's hit Alan Wake. Design columnist for Gamasutra and former monthly columnist on design for Game Developer magazine. Clients include Intel, Cisco, Disney, Dreamworks, Microsoft, JoWood, LucasArts and Cavedog Entertainment as well as many startups.

Ondi Timoner is an American film director, producer and editor. She is the only director to win a Sundance grand jury award twice in the prestigious festival's history for her two documentaries DIG! and We Live in Public.

Timoner graduated cum laude from Yale University and founded Interloper in 1995. She filmed the documentaries Voices From Inside Time about incarcerated women in Connecticut, winner of the Yale Film Prize - and later, The Nature of the Beast, about one woman's heroic journey through the criminal justice system, and winner of the Bettina Russel Grand Jury Prize in Canada and The National Society for Visual Anthropology Commendation, which aired on PBS. She later went on to shoot Dam Nation, set in the oldest living civilization of sub-Saharan Africa about a WTO dam.
 
Timoner created and directed for the TV series Sound Affects, the highest-rated pilot in VH1's history, and ABC's highly successful Switched!. With her own company, Interloper Films, Ondi has made music videos and music documentaries for The Dandy Warhols, The Vines, Paul Westerberg, Lucinda Williams, Vanessa Carlton, The Jonas Brothers, and DMC, among others.
 
Ondi is currently slated to direct a narrative feature film based on the life of controversial artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

Lee Sheldon has written and designed over 20 video games including a successful recent series based on Agatha Christie novels. Other titles include the award-winning The Riddle of Master Lu, Dark Side of the Moon, and Wild Wild West: The Steel Assassin, and the early ARG (Alternate Reality Game), The Light Files.

He has worked on massively multiplayer worlds for Cyan (URU: Ages Beyond Myst) and Disney (Disney's Virtual Kingdom), as well as an experimental multiplayer X-Box project for Microsoft. His book Character Development and Storytelling for Games, is used as a primary text book in game design programs at some of the world’s most distinguished universities. He is a contributor to the recent books Writing for Video Game Genres, Game Design: A Practical Approach, Second Person and Visual Storytelling. Before his career in video games Lee wrote and produced over 200 popular television shows, including Star Trek: The Next Generation, Charlie's Angels, and Cagney and Lacey. As head writer of the daytime serial Edge of Night he received a nomination for best writing from the Writers Guild of America. Lee has been twice nominated for Edgar awards by the Mystery Writers of America. His first mystery novel, Impossible Bliss, was re-issued in 2004. Lee has been a consultant on an online multiplayer world recreating jazz clubs of the 1940s and 50s in Oakland, California for the University of California at Berkeley, and a single-player game teaching Iraqi Arabic to soldiers for the University of Southern California. He is currently a professor at Indiana University where in addition to teaching he is leading the design of his own narrative-driven virtual worldLondontown; and wrote and designed The Skeleton Chase and Skeleton Chase 2: The Psychic, ARGs funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He was also creative consultant on a new Sci-Fi Channel reality show called Danger Game; has written and designed his fourth Agatha Christie videogame; and is writing his second novel The Keys.

Dr. Ian Bogost is a videogame designer, critic, and researcher. He is Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, and a Board Member at Open Texture.

His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social and political issues.

Bogost is author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press 2006), recently listed among “50 books for everyone in the game industry,” of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press 2007), and co-author of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. He is a popular writer and speaker and widely considered an influential thinker and doer in the videogame industry and research community.

Bogost’s videogames about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally at venues including Laboral Centro de Arte (Madrid), Fournos Centre for Digital Culture (Athens), Eyebeam Center (New York), Slamdance Guerilla Game Festival (Park City), the Israeli Center for Digital Art (Holon) and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne).

Bogost holds a Bachelors degree in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, and a Masters and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. 

 

Internet Pioneer, Artist (Los Angeles, Sidamo)

Joshua M. Harris is an Internet Pioneer, Entrepreneur and Professional Artist.

In 1986 Joshua founded the world’s first Internet market research company, Jupiter Communications.  Jupiter Communications went public in 1988 and was subsequently merged and sold.

In 1994 he founded the world’s first Internet-based interactive television network (Pseudo.com), when less than 1% of US households had broadband.

Called the “Warhol of the Web”, Harris created social and human experiments testing the effect of media and technology on the development and understanding of personal identity.  Amongst many art projects, he created an underground bunker in the heart of NYC at the turn of the Millenium and had over 100 people move into his “living human Petri dish” – an artificial society where they lived in pods, each with their own surveillance camera and channel in a closed circuit network, and subjected themselves to artillery training and interrogations in order to be on camera.

Harris is the focus of director Ondi Timoner’s documentary WE LIVE IN PUBLIC, the winner of the Grand Jury Prize, Documentary, at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

Currently, Harris is the CEO of the African Entertainment Network, which is based in Sidamo, Ethiopia.

 

Michel is responsible for the leading innovation of the broadcasters, including “future proofings”, its TV, radio and digital activities.

Michel, previously with McKinsey&Company, Director of Grey Interactive, and formerly a private entrepreneur, joined Netherlands Public Broadcasting in 2001. He is responsible for developing and implementing its online strategy, including the country's prime content portal Omroep.nl and its largest VOD service Uitzendinggemist.nl, serving 9 million video streams monthly to the Dutch audience.

Most recently he constructed a deal to launch 17 thematic channels with the country’s cable platforms.

Michel Mol: “We need to make many larger and smaller adjustments in strategy and execution: from moving our VOD offering from the web to TV sets in the living room, adding interactivity to TV, launching mobile channels and enriching radio with visual images, to a renegotiation of our rights policies and overall creating sustainable models with industry partners throughout the value chain."

Dr Yusuf Pisan received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Northwestern University, USA.

He is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney and the co-director of the Creativity and Cognition Studios (CCS), an internationally recognized research group with eight researchers and over fifteen PhD students. His research interests include enabling technologies for computer games and the design of virtual environments that support collaborative work.

Yusuf initiated and chaired the first Interactive Entertainment conference, which is now established as an annual conference series. He has been appointed to head the International Game Developers Association's (IGDA) task force to design a model curriculum for game studies. Yusuf is one of the founders of the Sydney Chapter of ACM Special Interest Group on Graphics (SIGGRAPH), which has become a key group that brings together academics and practitioners. Yusuf introduced the first advanced subjects on computer games in Australia, designed the Bsc in Games Development course and serves as the Faculty of IT representative to oversee the cross-faculty Master of Animation course.

Based at Swinburne University of Technology, Mandy is a senior researcher for the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre.

Her specialist interest is online environments and communities, and their potential to impact on service delivery across government, education, business and industry.

Prior to this, Mandy worked a journalist, writer and producer in radio, television, newspapers, theatre and documentary film. In 2008-9, Mandy wrote the column Web Watch, for the Age Newspaper, which chronicles the disruptive nature of emerging web practices for a general readership.

Mandy holds degrees in Arts and Communication. She was a representative at the Virtual Worlds 2008 Conference, New York and LA and a panellist at the Harvard, Yale and New York Law School convened 'State of Play V' Conference in Singapore in 2007. Locally, Mandy has contributed to AMIA, AIIA, World Internet Partners (WIP), Monash Law School, AFTRS and Asia Link initiatives in this emergent field. She is associate editor of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research (USA) and a foundation member and conference convenor of the Australasian Virtual World Association.

Multi-award winning Writer (The Boys, The Blind Giant is Dancing); Director (Sydney)

Well-known for his film and theatre work, including his AFI Award winning script of The Boys as well as plays such as The Blind Giant is Dancing, The Secret Death of Salvador Dali (Best Show of the Adelaide Fringe, 2001) and  Myth Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America – A Drama in 30 Scenes (Playbox Theatre, State Theatre Company of South Australia, June-July 2003; The Orange Tree Theatre, London 2004), Sewell is one of the most awarded and experienced writers in Australia.

Sewell chaired the Australian National Playwrights Centre for a number of years and is the recipient of numerous awards, including a two year Australian Council Literary Fellowship and the prestigious ANPC Award for Significant Contribution to Australian Theatre (2004)

Recently, his work has expanded beyond films and plays into interactive and immersive media projects such as Home - AfterLife, for the internationally recognised iCinema Centre at the University of New South Wales and Alternate Reality Games such as Artefact, for MiniStudios. Sewell is currently involved in an interactive musical Andy X based on the last hours of Andy Warhol being developed in association with director Jim Sharman.

Creative Director, Tantalus Interactive (Melbourne)

David Hewitt is Creative Director at Tantalus Interactive, one of the world’s leading independent videogame development studios.

Tantalus is renowned for its handheld work on franchises such as Sponge Bob, Top Gear, MX as ATV, Cars and Pony Friends, Tantalus also develops for the current generation of consoles.

At Tantalus David sets the creative vision for the company – managing the design team and mentoring game designers.

Prior to Tantalus, David was the lead designer at Ratbag games.  In his decade in the videogame industry he has shipped 15 titles as designer or creative director.

David is the Founder and Coordinator of the Melbourne chapter of the IGDA, and is a regular and enthusiastic participant in local industry events.

Alana Valentine's writing has been nominated for a NSW Premier's Literary Award and a prestigious three Helpmann Awards, including best New Australian Work and Best Play, for Parramatta Girls.

She is the recipient of the 2004 QLD Premier’s Award for best Drama Script, 2003 NSW Writer’s Fellowship, the 2002 Rodney Seaborn Playwrights’ Award, and a International Writing Fellowship at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. She has also received a Victorian Green Room Award nomination, a 2001 commendation for the Louis Esson Prize, a 1999 AWGIE Award, a residency at the Banff Playwrights’ Conference in Canada, the ANPC/New Dramatists Award in NYC, a Churchill Fellowship for England and Ireland and a NSW Premier’s Award.  Her stage plays include Eyes to the Floor (Outback Theatre for Young People), Parramatta Girls (Company B, Belvoir St Theatre), Singing the Lonely Heart (New Theatre), Love Potions (New Theatre), Butterfly Dandy  (Women on a Shoestring),  Covenant (Powerhouse Youth Theatre), The Prospectors (Monkeybaa/STC, ANMM), Run Rabbit Run (Company B, Belvoir St Theatre), Titania’s Boy (Riverina Theatre Company, Wagga Wagga and Griffith), Savage Grace (Steamworks/La Mama, Performing Lines, Subiaco Arts Centre, Blue Room, Religion, Literature and Arts Festival, Adelaide Festival Centre) Row of Tents (New York Fringe Festival 2001), The Conjurers (Playbox, La Boite), Ozone (Brisbane Festival), Spool Time (Vitalstatistix) and Swimming the Globe (Freewheels, Northern NSW Tour, Commonwealth Games Cultural Festival, Malaysia). 

Alana has written numerous award winning radio plays as well as episodes of the television series McLeod’s Daughters. Her short films include Mother Love (for SBS Television) and Reef Dreaming (for installation on a waterscreen in Darling Harbour). In 2001 Alana was the recipient of a Graduate Diploma in Museum Studies (with Merit) from the University of Sydney and has created Museum Theatre works for the Australian National Maritime Museum, the Australian War Memorial, and Sydney Observatory.

Keren Flavell is an award-winning interactive digital media producer with 14 years experience in producing content online, with a focus on entertainment and music.

Keren is internationally recognised as a world-leading innovator in reaching audiences through multiple digital media platforms, and pioneering the use of virtual worlds as a tool for the production and distribution of television content made collaboratively with in-world participants. In its first year of operation, Treet.TV has produced over 600 hours of broadcast content and has a monthly audience of 100,000 people.

Prior to co-founding Treet.TV, Keren was awarded the prestigious Gold Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival - Best Entertainment Website for the ABC/Film Victoria Digital Media Fund Accord project Sounds Like Techno.

Keren is a regular guest speaker at International conferences and has lectured in new media production at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, Victoria College of the Arts, La Trobe University and Victoria University.

Keren also serves on the Evaluation & Advisory Committee of Film Victorias Digital Media Fund.

Director, Writer, Producer, Community Prophets (Melbourne)

David Vadiveloo is a recipient of multiple awards for his works in documentary, drama, interactive media and as a human rights lawyer.

His numerous credits include the internationally acclaimed multi-platform children’s drama series Us Mob (www.usmob.com.au) and the compelling drama, Burn (http://www.burn-movie.com.au). His documentaries include the challenging, inspiring films Trespass, Beyond Sorry and the recent series Voices from the Cape.

David’s company, Community Prophets, is a media entertainment and social justice agency that specialises in producing high-quality screenworks and delivering media based engagement and empowerment programs for youth. The Community Prophets workshop model is used in Australia, Canada and the United States and from 2009 Community Prophets will partner with National Geographic’s All Roads project in the US and internationally.

David sits on advisory boards to the Australian Centre for Cultural Partnerships and the Global Angels Foundation. For over a decade he worked as a human rights lawyer and was an advisor to the Federal Race Discrimination Commissioner. In 2005 David was the recipient of the Australian Human Rights Award for Individual Community Achievement. He is the youngest recipient to be Highly Commended for the Human Rights Medal, recognising lifelong commitment to human rights.

Morgan has developed a number of critically and commercially successful games over his decade in the industry.  He has shipped millions of units across every major platform with games that run the gamut from the casual to hardcore markets.

Morgan began his career in Australia, working with Irrational Games (now 2K Marin) before moving to North America to work with major studios such as Relic and Ubisoft before returning to Australia to work with Pandemic/EA as the Lead Designer for their Brisbane Studio.

Since early 2009 Morgan has focused on assisting traditional media companies to make the transition to developing their IP for game platforms, consulting on projects that advance the possibilities of games as a narrative and educational form.

Most recently he has formed Defiant Development, a Brisbane based game development studio that focuses on building cutting edge games and transmedia IP for the modern, mature gaming market.

Morgan is a regular speaker on game development process and the new opportunities interactive entertainment offers.  He is on the advisory boards for several of Australia's most exciting new interactive projects which merge talent from the fields of traditional media with seasoned game development professionals.

Cath Godfrey, General Manager of the Higher Education and Medical Divisions at McGraw-Hill Australia and New Zealand, has been in higher educational and professional publishing for 16 years.

In that time she has had a range of publishing, digital product development, sales and marketing roles. The print based educational publishing industry is in the midst of change, students and educators increasingly want to rely on a mix of print and digital/interactive mediums to achieve quality educational outcomes. Problem and scenario based learning pathways are increasingly common models of delivery in medical and higher educational settings.

Since 2007 Courtney Gibson has been Executive Head of Content Creation at ABC TV, the broadcast and online partner in Australia's first Serious Games Production Initiative.

Courtney joined the national broadcaster as Head of Entertainment in 2003, became Head of Arts and Entertainment the same year and was Head of Arts, Entertainment and Comedy from 2005-2007. During these years she commissioned programs such as Summer Heights High, The Chaser's War on Everything, We Can Be Heroes, Spicks and Specks and The New Inventors.

From 1998-2003 Courtney was at SBS; as an executive producer in SBS TV and Deputy Commissioning Editor of Documentary at SBS Independent.

From 1996-1998 she was a writer-producer in Australia's then-fledgling pay TV industry on series including Mouthing Off for the Comedy Channel and The Hub for Arena.

And from 1992-1996 she was a writer-producer in the UK, working for companies such as World of Wonder, Planet 24, Rapido and Kudos on a range of high-profile talks, factual and entertainment programs, including the start-up years of The Big Breakfast and The Girlie Show, both for Channel 4. This followed two years as a researcher then producer on a daily live talks show for Sky News.