Speakers

Elana Bell Bogdan: Big Story, Tiny Engine: Hacking Bitsy to Tell Rich, Puzzle-Driven Stories; Elana Bell Bogdan is a freelance technical designer, currently working with queer indie studios Unquiet Games and Bolero. She’s usually the voice in the room advocating for accessibility, inclusion, and narrative-driven design. Escaped from the tech industry after nearly a decade in its thrall, she is excited to use her background in engineering to breathe life into games & stories that matter! You can find her online at elana.games.
Tim Bryant: The Art of Ludic Adaptation: How to Make Games Out of Books, Movies, or Almost Anything; Tim Bryant is Associate Professor of English at Buffalo State University, where he teaches classes on American literature, popular fiction, and film.
nilson carroll: AI is Obsolete: Generative Glitch Narratives; nilson carroll is a poet, game maker, curator, and archivist working at the intersections of games, experimental video, and queer theory. nilson currently works at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, as Assistant Curator and Preservation Specialist. nilson has shown artwork, performed, and presented at various organizations and with festivals internationally, including at Mono no Aware, EXIS Festival, Milan Machinima Festival, among many others.
Gary Chadwick: Everything is Storytelling – But is it Coherent?; Gary Chadwick is a visual novel writer/developer living in Ireland and making games that play with text in fun and novel ways.
Autumn Chen: Random Testing for Narrative Games; Autumn Chen is a hobbyist interactive fiction writer and programmer.
Nat Clayton: Keynote: Spatial Tales and Highland Songs; Nat Clayton is a level designer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She’s currently hammering away at things with Bithell Games, but previously worked on the 3x IGF nominated A Highland Song with Inkle Studios and has a long history of experimental level design through tools like Unity, Bitsy, and various modding projects. In another life, Nat was also a writer for sites like PC Gamer, Waypoint and Rock Paper Shotgun; briefly assisted development on Minecraft’s console ports and Alien: Isolation; and trained sled dogs at the top of the world. Twice.
Valencia Coleman: My Experience as a First Time Visual Novel Writer; Valencia Coleman is an Associate Gameplay Engineer at Owlchemy Labs. She worked as a contractor for Sweet Baby to work on localization editing for Ubisoft’s The Crew: Motorfest. She has published several small projects on her itch.io. She has a passion for narrative design and always looking for ways to combine her love for writing and programming.
Brendan Desilets: Interactive Fiction in the Library
Mar Ferreri: Utsuge and Nakige in the Dating Sim Genre: Why is There So Much Death in my Dating Games?; I’m a multi-award-winning interactive designer and storyteller. From smaller, intimate immersive theater shows to large-scale experiences in theme parks, I have a wide breadth of knowledge in design and narrative that can help bring any idea to life. I specialize in interactivity and environmental storytelling – both physically and digitally – and have the technical experience required to understand the constraints of a given project and communicate technical needs across creative teams. I also am, as evidenced by my talk, a huge lover of dating sims.
Hexe Fey: Rocks and Why They Matter
Shaun Foster: Game Arts Education: Bridging Narratology and Ludology; Shaun Foster, Director of 3D Digital Design and Professor at RIT, NY, excels in next-gen interactive 3D and education with over 20 years in 3D graphics and interactive design. Leading multiple award-winning projects, his work intersects 3D, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Involved in numerous grants, he’s explored augmented reality, biofuel education, and VR. An Authorized Unreal Instructor since 2021, Foster has received the EPIC Games ICVFX Fellowship (2022) and Provost’s Innovative Teaching Award (2023). Currently, he focuses on XR/VR, AI, and Virtual Production, integrating 3D Digital design with Generative AI for higher education advancements, also sharing insights on his YouTube channel.
Geoffrey Golden: First Person Talkers: Simulating Conversation; Geoffrey Golden is a narrative designer, game creator, and interactive fiction author based in Los Angeles. He’s written for Ubisoft, Gearbox, Disney, and indie studios around the world. His experimental games have been featured at IndieCade, San Diego Comic-Con, WordHack NYC, Narrascope, and on Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games newsletter. Geoffrey is chronicling his post-capitalist gamedev adventures in the newsletter EquipStory.com.
Erin Gray: Stories to Get Us Through the Night: An Experiment in Using Branching Narratives for Theatre
Marcia Byron Hartwell: Building Empathy Through Interactive Fiction in the Video Game Peaceland: Choose Your Memory.; Marcia Byrom Hartwell is a researcher, practitioner, author, adjunct professor whose expertise includes identifying underlying dynamics in post conflict transitions, political cooperation between former enemies; civil-military relationships in volatile environments, and processes of violence and peace. Her current work focuses on the role of digital technologies, also known as PeaceTech (which includes video games) in supporting sustainable peace building from a bottom up, locally led perspective. “Peaceland” (Choose Your Memory), a video game inspired by her observations in the Balkans features the key role that individual and group memories play in facilitating long term peace or re-instigating conflicts decades later. It directly links to her earlier research and fieldwork in Northern Ireland, Serbia, South Africa examining perceptions of justice, identity, forgiveness, revenge in early post-conflict transitions. She holds a DPhil (PhD) in International Development from the University of Oxford and MSc London School of Economics, BA Economics and Government from Smith College. She has written numerous articles, book chapters, papers, and book, Negotiating Civil-Military Space, Redefining Roles in an Unpredictable World (2016).
Trent Hergenrader: Refracting Freytag’s Pyramid: Aleatory Elements and Interactive Fiction to Teach Narrative Design; Dr. Trent Hergenrader is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he teaches classes in fiction writing, worldbuilding, and game-based fiction. He is the author of Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers and co-author of a forthcoming book, The Worldbuilding Workshop: Teaching Critical Thinking Through World Modeling, Simulation, and Play. He is the Director of the Center for Worldbuilding and Storytelling in the College of Liberal Arts at RIT.
Jocelyn Ibarra: The Time Travel Agency’s DATTOPIAS; The Time Travel Agency operates under the cover of a speculative design studio in the Nordics, the Americas, and online; Joss is the studio’s founder, showrunner, and design lead. The Time Travel Agency is a response to hopelessness about the future. They help to build optimistic futures in which people feel happy to be alive and possess agency; this happens by combining narrative design, immersive experiments, world-building, prototyping, participatory experiences, and emerging tech. Their clients include governments, cultural institutions, tech companies, and Universities. Read more about them via thetimetravel.agency and https://www.instagram.com/thetimetravelagency/.
David Kuelz: Building Captivating Character Psychology using the Enneagram; David Kuelz is an award-winning narrative designer and public speaker. He has written or consulted for over a dozen games, comics and films, including Starship Commander (Dreamhack 2018: Best VR/AR Experience), AVARIAvs (GDC Play 2018: Best in Play) and Into The Dark: Nakaran (Bit Awards 2018: Mobile Game of the Year). Kuelz has spoken at Princeton University, TED, Montalvo Arts Center, and The Srishti Institue of Art, Design, and Technology. Beyond that, David teaches video game writing for The Gotham Writers’ Workshop, is an avid theater geek, and also a rabid devotee of The Great British Baking Show.
Deena Larsen: Teaching IF: or How to Talk Into a Classroom with a Bunch of Red Balloons and Walk Out With a Story; Deena Larsen began writing storytelling interactive poetry after her teen-age love affair with Spoon River Anthology morphed into Marble Springs (Eastgate 93). Her PIE (participatory, interactive, ergodic exploration) addiction has lasted decades, with over 30 works published in various places (including the Iowa Review Web, Drunken Boat, New River Journal). Winner of the 2023 Electronic Literature Organization’s Maverick award, she has been leading the electronic lit community in and out of surreal situations for longer than it is good to remember. She runs the Second Tuesday Salons and Third Thursday Elit in Wikipedia editathons.
Zed Lopez: What the Glulx? The Inform Tech Stack; Zed Lopez is a contributor to Inform 7.
Will Lowry: Germinating Playwriting from The Quiet Year; Will Lowry is a scenographer, an Associate Professor of Theatre at Lehigh University (PA), and a Creative Partner with Flux Theatre Ensemble (NYC). He received his MFA in Design from UNC Greensboro. He has created over 140 scenic, costume, lighting, and media designs for theatres along the East Coast of the U.S. and beyond. In NYC, he designed over twenty off-off Broadway productions, and he contributed to multiple Broadway productions as a studio assistant. He also led the creation of the interactive streaming production GPS (Lehigh), and co-created the immersive audio experience Our Options Have Changed (Flux).
Douglas Luman: Choose Your Own Ed-venture: Multi-User Dungeons and Computer Science Education; Douglas Luman is an antidisciplinary legacy technologist. They are an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Allegheny College, and the author of two books: The F Text (Inside the Castle, 2017), and Rationalism (Sublunary Editions, 2021).
Hélène Lupa: Genre As A Lens: A Holistic Genre-Driven Approach to Game Narrative Analysis; Hélène Lupa (ell-ENN LOO-pah) is a game designer and writer currently based in Washington, DC. Hélène has an MFA in Game Design & Interactivity from American University, and a BA in Cinema & Media Studies from the University of Chicago. She can usually be found pondering the nature of games, films, or television shows (and if not one of those topics, then probably lunch).
Sophie Mallinson: How Belgian Reality TV Made Me a Better Game Designer
Nat Mesnard: Big Story, Tiny Engine: Hacking Bitsy to Tell Rich, Puzzle-Driven Stories; Nat Mesnard (they/them) is a writer and game designer who has published TTRPGs, short fiction, and poetry. They aspire to create innovative fiction that spans the intersection of lit culture and nerd life.
Scott Nicholson: It’s Still Too Complicated: Developing a Storytelling Game System for Low-Resource Classrooms; Dr. Scott Nicholson is a professor of Game Design from Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. He is focused on creating games for education and training, with an emphasis on games in the physical world like escape rooms, board games, and live-action roleplaying games. He was the lead author (with Liz Cable) of Unlocking the Potential of Puzzle-based Learning: Designing Escape Rooms and Games for the Classroom, and is the creator of EscapeIF, a system to help teachers in low-resource classrooms facilitate and create branching narrative games.
Nicholas O’Brien: Nicholas O’Brien is an artist, writer, game designer, and founder of Essay Games, a narrative-focused indie games studio based in Brooklyn, NY.
Tabitha O’Connell: Strong Characterization in Short Games; Tabitha O’Connell is a historic preservationist and writer of queer fiction, both interactive and traditional. Eir favorite things include animals, abandoned places, alliteration, long walks, and long sentences. Find eir short stories and novellas at tabithaoconnell.com and eir interactive fiction at alyshkalia.itch.io.
Judith Pintar: Interactive Fiction as Embodied Storytelling: Why We Need to Think about Immersive Player Types; Judith Pintar is the director of Game Studies & Design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the chair of the Education Committee, and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation.
Colin Post: Interactive Fiction in the Library / Let’s Keep Talking About Collecting Narrative Games in Libraries; Colin Post is an Assistant Professor in the department of Information, Library, and Research Sciences at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro. His research and teaching focus on the preservation of digital culture in libraries, archives, and creative communities.
Tim Rattray: Teaching About Mental Illness through Play; Tim Rattray is a multidisciplinary writer currently exploring how mental health can be conveyed through acts of play. His work has been published on Nintendo Life, RPGFan, Crunchyroll, Slide to Play, Anime News Network, and beyond.
Ben Schneider: Between the Story and the World: Better Interactive Worldbuilding; Currently a Professor of Practice in Narrative Design for Games at WPI’s Interactive Media & Game Development program, Ben Schneider has twenty years of game development experience. He worked as a narrative designer on games such as Titan Quest, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and Dungeons & Dragons Online, and was Lead Designer of Lord of the Rings Online.
Ziba Scott: Make the Player Do the Writing; Ziba Scott is the owner of Popcannibal, a tiny game studio in Boston.
Isabelle Smith: Stories to Get Us Through the Night: An Experiment in Using Branching Narratives for Theatre; Isabelle Smith is a game developer, playwright, and educator based in Brooklyn. She is currently in her first year of NYU’s game design MFA. She received her BA from UCLA’s theatre program, specializing in playwriting and arts education. Her fiction writing can be found in the Living Room Zine. She is the developer of Swallowed by the Subway and The Happiest Place to Give Birth, which you can play at imissmywisdomteeth.itch.io.
April Soetarman: The End of the Day: Turning a Solo RPG into an IRL Public Art Installation; April Soetarman is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and writer who creates installations, games, public art, and immersive theater. Her site-responsive works play with the language of everyday objects and speculative institutions to explore complex human emotions. Her projects have been exhibited by museums and public spaces, as well as anonymously installed in dozens of urban spaces across the country. April is also behind WeirdSideProjects.com, her series of ongoing experiments in code, text, and street art. Notable projects include The Museum of Almost Realities (2017), The Department of Emotional Labor (2019), and The End of the Day (2020).
Michael Stage: Using IF Tools for Introductory Astrophysics Tutorials; Michael Stage has taught astronomy and physics, and sometimes run observatories, at UMass, Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, and Westfield State University, and lead digital tutorial and homework content development teams for McGraw-Hill Higher Education. He sometimes turns up to The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction (Boston) meetings.
Katryna Starks: Architectural Storytelling: Worldbuilding through Time; Dr. Katryna Starks is a games researcher, game design lecturer, and game designer. Her experience includes the development of an Interactive Narrative Minor, co-development of a Bachelor in Serious Games, participation on several grant proposals, and teaching game design at graduate and undergraduate levels. Her research area is games for social good, including the design of games for behavior change, self-efficacy, and identity. Her curriculum design and teaching endeavors include a Serious Games curriculum, game design courses, interactive narrative, worldbuilding, and puzzle creation.
Josh Stead-Dorval: Building Empathy Through Interactive Fiction in the Video Game Peaceland: Choose Your Memory.; Josh Stead-Dorval’s passion is for telling captivating stories in new and unique ways. He currently studies physics at the University of Rochester and is actively working as a narrative designer on the “Peaceland” project at RIT’s Magic Studios. He is a creative writer and TTRPG Game Master, and in his spare time he plays the viola and nerds out about The Stanley Parable.
Rick Stemm: The Art of the Shitty First Draft; Rick helped originate the Design Manager role at PikPok, and founded and grew their narrative team. A prolific speaker, Rick has presented at PAX, GenCon, Dramatists Guild, artistic workshops, game dev meetups, and most NZ universities. Rick was a keynote speaker at FINS, New Zealand’s first games narrative conference. But even in design and narrative, Rick’s work is mostly about people – helping them connect, care, and collaborate.
Joseph Sutton: It’s All in the Cards: Tarot, Pattern Language and Player Agency
Alexander Swords: Hope in the Transcendental; Alexander Swords is a writer, narrative designer and director in video games and interactive experiences. He’s also the creator of the Forest Paths Method for Narrative Design, a player-first approach to understanding story in an approachable and collaborative way, used internationally by developers and educators. Advising government, arts organisations, and educators, he’s an advocate for diverse stories and their writers, and is currently teaching at the National Institute for the Dramatic Arts (NIDA), a resident practitioner at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and on the Interactive and AI Committees for the Australian Writers’ Guild.
M. Kristana Textor: Building Empathy Through Interactive Fiction in the Video Game Peaceland: Choose Your Memory.; M. Kristana Textor teaches in the Digital Media Studies and Writing Speaking & Argument Programs at the University of Rochester. Her research focuses on belonging, video games, interactive media, informal learning, and play. Textor has collaborated with the UR’s Breaking Boundaries with Video Games, The Strong Museum of Play, The Center for Learning in the Digital Age, RIT’s MAGIC Center, EYEBEAM, NYC Public Schools, and Games for Curious Scholars. She is keen on supporting undergraduates as they advance in their research and creative pursuits.
Jet Vellinga: Telling Stories Through Translation: The Trials and Tribulations of Using Language Translation as a Game Mechanic; Jet Vellinga is a game writer and Assyriologist from The Netherlands, based in New York City. She’s specialized in worldbuilding and interactive storytelling and synthesizes her design experience with a mastery of ancient cultures, texts, and history. Her main interest lies in the intersection of performance and play, looking at both from an artistic and anthropological point of view. She currently teaches at NYU and Parsons School of Design.
Matthew Vimislik: A Game Design Analysis of Improv Theater; Matthew Vimislik is currently a Project Manager at Workinman Interactive, a game studio that works with brands like Disney, Sesame Street, Nickelodeon, and Atari to create games for the youth entertainment market. In his spare time, he makes award-winning visual novels like Romancing Flesh and King of the Cul-de-Sac, and creates tutorials on how to write, program, and produce visual novels on his youtube channel, "Visual Novel Design".