Speakers
Antonio Andrade ⇗
(Crafting the Texture of a City in Project Abigail)
Isabelle Smith, Antonio Andrade, and Biagi Calicchia are game developers who attended NYU’s Game Center MFA program.
Jacqueline Ashwell ⇗
(IFComp 101: A Newcomer’s Guide)
Jacqueline Ashwell is an award-winning interactive fiction author and a longtime organizer in the IF community. Her work The Fire Tower was featured in Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games. She is the founder of ClubFloyd, the longest-serving organizer of IntroComp, and has been the lead organizer of IFComp since 2018.
June Audirac Kushida ⇗
(Berlin Passages: Exploring History Through Interactive Storytelling in Twine)
June Audirac Kushida is a historian, writer, and designer specializing in interactive storytelling and digital humanities. She holds a B.A. in History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and an M.A. in Open Design from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is the creator of Berlin Passages, a historical interactive autofiction, and the author of Zeit/Dreams, a self-published dystopian novel. Her work integrates historical research, creative writing, and narrative design, using digital and interactive formats to explore new ways of telling both fictional and non-fictional stories.
Stanley Baxton ⇗
(Anonymously Submitting Transgressive Transsexual Trauma to IFComp)
Stanley is a narrative games dev making experiences that are satirical, horrifying, or queer, and sometimes all at once. He makes games for exactly 3 people to lose their minds.
Rose Behar
(Writing Absorbing Stories for Short Attention Spans)
Rose Behar is a narrative designer at Scopely working on a new IP. Her previous work is featured in games like Longleaf Valley, Ashe Cove, and Cell to Singularity, among other projects. She puts out a free roundup of resources and job listings for narrative designers monthly on Substack called Narrative News.
Richard Bisso ⇗
(CRISPR for Game Storytelling: Contextual Injection and Narrative Assembly in Epic Tavern)
Richard Bisso, Shawn French, and Yoshitomo Moriwaki are veteran, Emmy and BAFTA-Winning game developers whose credits include the classic Spider-Man 2, Boom Blox, Medal of Honor, The Incredible Hulk, and more. Rich and Tomo own the award-winning game development consultancy Hyperkinetic Studios, based in Los Angeles. Shawn is an expert freelance writer with dozens of successful projects to his credit.
Mike Blackney ⇗
(Dead Static Drive’s “Novella” Narrative Engine for Unreal)
Leena van Deventer and Mike Blackney made Dead Static Drive. They are based in Melbourne, Australia.
Elana Bell Bogdan ⇗
Elana Bell Bogdan is a technical game designer, currently working with queer indie studios Unquiet Games and Bolero Game Studio, after a decade in the tech industry. She is usually the voice in the room advocating for accessibility, inclusion, and narrative-driven design. Her work has been featured at the Wonderville arcade in Queens, and she has spoken and exhibited at events like New York Comic Con, Play NYC, Waffle Games, Mysterium - and NarraScope 2024!
Wojtek Borowicz ⇗
(The Platform is the Message: Storytelling with System-Specific Affordances)
Wojtek is a writer, narrative designer, and an award-winning dungeon master. He spent a decade in instructional writing and now brings this experience to video and tabletop games. Originally from Poland, he currently lives in Ireland.
Xander Brewer
(Can Haunted Houses be Immersive Fiction?)
Xander (he/him) is an NYC-based poet, musician, performer and storyteller. He has released music as The Ringer and performed spoken word at slams and poetry events around the country. His narrative work lies at the intersection of software, music and performance, inviting you into the performance as an active participant, blurring the lines between artist and audience. He holds a BA from Boston University in Music and Computer Science and an MM from NYU in Music Technology, with a focus on improving hearing assistive devices for hearing impaired musicians.
Paris Buttfield-Addison
(Mathematically Proving Your Stories Have No Bugs)
Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison is the co-founder of independent game development studio Secret Lab, and tools studio Yarn Spinner. For both, he serves as producer, and helps to maintain the popular open source interactive dialogue system, Yarn Spinner. Secret Lab is best known for working on Night in the Woods, the BAFTA- and IGF-winning adventure game (powered by Yarn Spinner). He’s currently working on I Feel Fine (written by Ryan North), and Leonardo’s Moon Ship (written by creator of Pixar’s Ratatouille, Jim Capobianco). Paris has written nearly 30 technical books on game development, machine learning, mobile apps, and rocket science for O’Reilly Media, and has a PhD in why people’s desks are messy. He lives in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.
Biagi Calicchia ⇗
(Crafting the Texture of a City in Project Abigail)
Isabelle Smith, Antonio Andrade, and Biagi Calicchia are game developers who attended NYU’s Game Center MFA program.
Matt Carney ⇗
(Finding the Pixel: Information Seeking Behaviors Towards Holistic Narrative Design)
Matt Carney is an editor and narrative consultant living in California. He previously worked on the adventure game NORCO and is currently working on Perfect Tides: Station to Station. He has a Master of Library and Information Science degree from San José State University.
Autumn Chen ⇗
(Social Democracy: A Postmortem for an Alternate History)
Autumn Chen is an interactive fiction writer whose works include The Archivist and the Revolution and Social Democracy: An Alternate History. In her games, she hopes to transcend the binary between narrative and mechanics.
Philip Conklin
(Inferring Intent or Agency Without Traffic Lights)
Chris Crawford ⇗
(Analysis of Le Morte d’Arthur Storyworld)
Chris Crawford earned a master’s degree in physics, but began designing games shortly afterwards. He managed games research at Atari, then built games for the Macintosh in the 1980s. Since the 1990s, he has worked on interactive storytelling, and failed for nearly 30 years before finally succeeding with Le Morte d’Arthur in 2023. He lives in the forests of Oregon.
Jessica Creane ⇗
Jessica is the founder of IKantKoan Play/s, Professor of Game Design at Drexel University and CUNY City Tech, and is a contributing author to The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to Teach in a Burning World. She is a 2022 Arctic Circle Artist-in-Residence, has worked with The National Parks Service, and recently as Writer and Chief of Play on an upcoming London-based Immersive piece on Combating Misinformation. Jessica has spoken at TEDx, GDC, Beyond Opera (Helsinki), The World Economic Forum DQ Symposium on Xr+ (NYC), Next Stage Immersive Summit (L.A.), and Games for Change (NYC).
Jim Dattilo ⇗
(Representing Physical Disabilities in Interactive Fiction)
Jim Dattilo has been writing interactive fiction for Choice of Games for the past twelve years, with titles including Zombie Exodus, A Wise Use of Time, and Vampire: The Masquerade — Out for Blood. His work focuses on deep narrative choices, character-driven storytelling, and exploring diverse perspectives within interactive fiction.
Zach Dodson ⇗
(Hyperprint: From Novels to Games and Back Again)
Dr Zach Dodson is the author of the illuminated novel Bats of the Republic (Doubleday, 2015), which The Washington Post called “a glorious demonstration of what old-fashioned paper can still do.” He founded Featherproof Books, publishing over 30 genre-bending books. He’s designed many more, including Riddance by Shelley Jackson (Patchwork Girl). He teaches narrative design to creative writing and game students at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, where he founded the Visual Narrative Lab. His game studio, Interactive Tragedy LTD, will release his first game, Sub-Verge, with a companion novella, in 2025.
Kaelan Doyle Myerscough ⇗
(Playful Worldbuilding: Using Play and Game Mechanics for Better Collaborative Imagination)
Kaelan (they/he) is a game designer and PhD candidate in media studies at the University of Chicago. Kaelan’s dissertation focuses on developing experimental methods for playful worldbuilding inspired by ecofeminist theories. They develop games about strange collaborations in vivid worlds as part of the nascent studio Never Done Games. Kaelan is also the lead organizer of the Queerness and Games Conference (QGCon), an event at the intersection of LGBTQ+ issues and games.
Jess Erion ⇗
(Bring Your Own Workflow: Creating Better Narrative Production Processes for Indies)
Jess is a writer, game designer, and business owner focused on subversive and thoughtful storytelling through interactive media. Currently, Jess is working as a narrative designer on various projects for clients like Carnegie Hall and Studio Chyr. They recently worked with Red Thread Games on their action adventure title, Dustborn, and continue to work with them on as yet unannounced projects.
Tony Errichetti
(From Interactive Fiction to Immersive Learning: The Gaming Dynamics of Patient Simulation)
Tony Errichetti, PhD, is a medical educator, simulationist, narrative medicine practitioner and qualitative researcher. As the founding director of dprograms at multiple medical institutions, he developed innovative methods for assessing doctor-patient communication, including the development of evaluation tools used in national licensing exams. He has held key positions, including Director of Doctor-Patient Communication Assessment at the National Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners and Chief of Virtual Medicine at NYIT-College of Osteopathic Medicine. His work extends globally, consulting on English proficiency and communication training for international healthcare professionals. Dr. Errichetti founded the Simulationist Narrative Medicine Community and facilitates workshops at Columbia University and internationally. His research and publications explore the intersections of simulation, medical education, and humanistic competence. Chief of Virtual Medicine at NYIT-College of Osteopathic Medicine. His work extends globally, consulting on English proficiency and communication training for international healthcare professionals. Dr. Errichetti founded the Simulationist Narrative Medicine Community and facilitates workshops at Columbia University and internationally. His research and publications explore the intersections of simulation, medical education, and humanistic competence.
Heidi Erwin ⇗
(Puzzle Process: Making Games At The New York Times)
Heidi Erwin (she/they) is a game developer and puzzle designer. She has been working on The New York Times Games team for the past several years designing and prototyping new games. She loves trick questions, mystery, and committing to the bit. Heidi also makes comics. Or does she?
Daniel Franke
(Bedquilt: Bringing IF to Rust and Rust to Glulx)
I discovered Colossal Cave Adventure in 1992 while playing around on my dad’s Compuserve account; through the superpower of having the mind of a 7-year-old I solved the dragon puzzle too quickly to realize it was even a puzzle. Now I’m a semi-retired security architect, formerly of Akamai and Amazon Web Services, who’s done a bunch of stuff at the intersection of cryptography and time synchronization. I live with my two foxhounds in yonder frozen woodlands of NH.
Shawn French ⇗
(CRISPR for Game Storytelling: Contextual Injection and Narrative Assembly in Epic Tavern)
Richard Bisso, Shawn French, and Yoshitomo Moriwaki are veteran, Emmy and BAFTA-Winning game developer whose credits include the classic Spider-Man 2, Boom Blox, Medal of Honor, The Incredible Hulk, and more. Rich and Tomo own the award-winning game development consultancy Hyperkinetic Studios, based in Los Angeles. Shawn is an expert freelance writer with dozens of successful projects to his credit.
Ari Gass ⇗
(Democracy, Now!: Participatory and Co-Creative Design for Collective Liberation)
Dr. Ari Gass is a scholar-practitioner with a focus on feminist and queer theoretical approaches to computational media. They are an assistant professor in the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design at Drexel University. Their research draws on methodologies and perspectives from media studies, videogame studies, queer and feminist theory as well as devised, ensemble-based performance and performance studies. They received their PhD from the University of Chicago in English and Theater and Performance Studies in 2022 and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Film, Media, and Theatre Department at Georgia State University. They are also a worker-owner of Philadelphia-based live performance group Obvious Agency, where they bring game design techniques and technologies into live theatrical scenarios that center player agency and collaboration and aim to diversify participation in the fine and performing arts.
Dave Gilbert
(Indie Marketing Then and Now)
Dave has been interested in adventure games ever since 1986, when his mother made the mistake of buying him a copy of Infocom’s Wishbringer. Twenty years later, he decided that making games was too much fun to do anything else for a living, and formed Wadjet Eye Games in 2006 to do just that. In the years since, Wadjet Eye Games has developed a reputation for writing and producing award-winning and critically acclaimed adventure games. Amongst their portfolio is the Blackwell series, Unavowed, Hob’s Barrow, and the recently-released Old Skies.
Francisco González ⇗
(Tabletops and Twine: Adventures in Adventure Game Proto- and Telotyping)
Francisco González 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 as Grundislav Games. He is the developer of A Golden Wake, Shardlight, Lamplight City, and Rosewater.
Meredith Gran
(Punches That Land: Approaching Games Narrative Through Panels)
Meredith Gran is a game developer, cartoonist and animator living in Philadelphia. From 2007-2017 she authored the webcomic Octopus Pie, which drew a large and dedicated following, with numerous accolades from the comics industry. Her first game, Perfect Tides, a Y2K-era point n’ click teen memoir set in a small coastal town, was released in 2022. The game has been praised for its honesty, indie-comic sensibility, and moments both scarring and sublime. A sequel, Perfect Tides: Station to Station, is currently in development, and will document the ups and downs of big-city college life in the year 2003.
Emily Hartford
Emily Hartford (she/her) is a theatre and media director, intimacy director, creator, artistic leader, and educator. She serves on the faculty of Playwrights Horizons Theatre School-NYU Tisch. With Will Lowry and Corey Allen, Emily co-created the interactive, telephonic choose-your-own adventure experience, Our Options Have Changed. Currently in post-production: Metra: A Climate Revolution with Songs – a new, climate justice musical podcast, coming to all podcast platforms in summer 2025. Metrathemusical.com
Jess Haskins ⇗
(Tabletops and Twine: Adventures in Adventure Game Proto- and Telotyping)
Jess Haskins is an editor, narrative designer, educator, community organizer, and proprietor of The Game Editors, an editorial, consulting, and voiceover production firm for game devs. She is co-writer of Lamplight City and Rosewater. Her work centers on worldbuilding with intention, forging inclusive communities, and exploring interactive storytelling.
Alex Hera ⇗
(Revisiting “Chaotic Fiction”: Chaotic Play in the Slenderverse Blog Community)
Alex Hera is a writer and film director focused on horror, immersive media, and documenting artistic communities. In 2024, they released ‘Slenderverse: A Documentary Film Series’, a trilogy archiving the history of found footage horror legend Slender Man.
Samira Herber
Samira Herber is a game studies scholar and designer holding an MFA in Game Design from New York University. Research interests include game communities, pro-social behavior, and civic engagement and games, which have also informed Samira’s thesis game QUANTUM TIES, a role-playing game about people trying to build trust and relationships under an authoritarian system that encourages them to accuse, report, and betray each other.
Charles H Huang
(Journaling Games: A History and Design Framework for Unlocking Player Creativity)
Charles H. Huang (he/him) is a game programmer, game writer, narrative designer, and community organizer. His work has been covered in Rock Paper Shotgun, PC Gamer, and Critical Distance. He has exhibited at Magfest, Play NYC, PixelPop Festival, LA Zine Fest, and Different Games. He ran Unparty at GDC and co-founded 501(c)3 nonprofit Friendship Garden, before receiving his MFA from NYU Game Center in 2021. He is based in NYC. He is a fan of Mr. Rogers, Jim Henson, and Hayao Miyazaki.
Jeremy Miles Johnson ⇗
Jeremy Miles Johnson is an independent game developer and Assistant Professor of Video Game Development at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX. He primarily teaches game design, production, and interactive storytelling. His work with students tends to focus on the development of educational games or games for social justice. This past semester, the students in Senior Game Studio collaborated with the Department of Counseling to develop a roleplaying game campaign for use in group therapy. Jeremy’s own creative works include board games, gamebooks, and video games.
Natalie Kendrick ⇗
(Mother of Frankenstein: Innovative Design in Game-Based Learning)
Natalie Kendrick is a Senior Interactive Learning Designer for the University of Oklahoma’s K20 Center, creating educational video games for Oklahoma Public Schools and beyond.
Hugo Labrande ⇗
Hugo Labrande organized the annual French IF competition between 2015 and 2019, and has written over 70 articles and tutorials for Fiction-interactive.fr. His own interactive fiction work includes romance visual novels for mobile devices, narrative games for Twitch, and parser games for the Commodore 64. IF technologies that Hugo has contributed to include Vorple for Inform 6, and various localization tools.
Alex M. Lee ⇗
(Crafting Kissable Characters (Whether Your Game has Romance in It or Not!))
Alex M. Lee crafts narrative games and illustrations for sad romantics with a taste for the absurd. Through a queer East Asian lens, she explores themes of girlhood, grief, and inter-dimensional romance. Her recent visual novel work challenges existing preconceptions within nerd subcultures as well as the dating simulator canon, pushing definitions of attraction and desirability in both. Whether they are a centuries-old skeleton lord in BARD HARDER! or genderqueer aliens in need of therapy in Kiss/OFF, she thrives when creating unconventional characters that players will still want to kiss - painted in a vibrant, stylish anime-influenced look.
Alexandra Leonhart ⇗
(Ergodic Narrative: A Brief Exploration of Multimodal Video Game Engagement)
Alexandra Leonhart is the current Director of Aesthetic Technologies and LiveX chair at Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, where she does nerdy things and occasionally teaches courses in physical computing, sound art, and video game history. In her free time, Alexandra enjoys composing music and making games for her partner and cat.
Sulu LeoNimm ⇗
(Democracy, Now!: Participatory and Co-Creative Design for Collective Liberation)
Artistic Director of Theatre of the Oppressed NYC. Sulu LeoNimm (they/them) has worked with TONYC since 2011 as a Joker facilitating Forum Theatre Troupes, Joker Trainings, and workshops, and formerly as Program Director. They have a BA in Theatre Studies from Yale. Sulu has been a Brooklyn-based theater artist and physical theater performer since 2003, enthralled with making ensemble-devised work. They created and toured work as co-founder of Pack of Others, and performed with various ensembles in NYC, Denver and Seattle. They are a collaborator on Obvious Agency’s 2024 project, Space Opera.
Daniel Lichtman ⇗
(Immersive Collage as a Medium for Collective Storytelling Across Time)
Daniel Lichtman’s research and creative work centers around community-oriented processes of interactive storytelling. Lichtman is particularly interested in how diverse communities can use techniques of game design to tell stories about their own culture and heritage, and to speculate upon their possible futures. Lichtman’s work has been presented at BRIC Arts and Media House, The Queens Museum, ICA (London), CICA Museum (Korea) and other national and international venues. Lichtman is currently Assistant Professor of Game Development and Emerging Media at St. John’s University in New York.
Will Lowry ⇗
(Consent and Agency in Narrative Development)
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 150 scenic, costume, lighting, and media designs for theaters 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).
Jordan Magnuson ⇗
(How to Make a Game Poem: Game Design as Short-Form Personal Expression)
Jordan Magnuson is an experimental game designer with deep roots in the independent gaming community. He founded The Independent Gaming Source once upon a time, and is author of the book Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice. Jordan’s serious games, art games, “notgames,” and “game poems” have been featured by Wired, PC Gamer, Le Monde, and others, shown at festivals and exhibitions around the world, and nominated for a variety of awards including the New Media Writing Prize and the IndieCade Grand Jury Award.
Rebecca McCarthy ⇗
(Walking with Death: Learning Holistic Game Design through Adventure Games)
Rebecca McCarthy is a Senior Writer/Narrative Designer at Playtonic Games working on Yooka-Replaylee.
Roger Matthews
(From Stanley Parable to Severance: The Growing Influence of Games on Pop Culture)
Roger Matthews is a Cinematic Designer who specializes in using Unreal to create 3D layouts, Blueprint tools, and scripted cinematic sequences for games, television, and film.
Robin Mendoza ⇗
(Big IF: No More Jockeys and the Legacy of the Car Game)
Robin Mendoza is a game designer and writer living in New York. He’s written on narrative design, abandonware, lo-fi culture, and indie esports, and is currently writing an ontology library for the IF authoring engine Dialog and a parser game about postural hypotension.
Nat Mesnard ⇗
(World Building, World Breaking: Designing a GM-Less TTRPG Amid Capitalist Ruins)
Nat Mesnard is a game designer and writer based in NYC, and a co-founder of Scryptid Games and Unquiet Games. They have published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Autostraddle, Blackbird, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. Nat’s game Banned Together, co-designed with Elana Bell Bogdan, is a member of the NYU Game Center Incubator 2024-25 cohort, and their TTRPGs have won multiple ENNIE Awards. They teach interactive fiction and game design at Columbia University, Pratt Institute and Rutgers University–Camden, and for the literary magazine One Story.
Julia Minamata ⇗
(Making The Crimson Diamond: How I Put the Words In, and How I Got the Word Out)
Julia Minamata is a solo indie game developer based in Toronto. She self-published and released her first game, The Crimson Diamond, in August 2024. Julia is also a pixel artist (she’s worked on Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, Witch Strandings, Recommendation Dog!!, and Bass Reeves Can’t Die, all with Strange Scaffold) and she streams art and retro games on Twitch. Recently she gave a micro talk at GDC 2025, sharing her experiences as a solo indie developer, for the Independent Games Summit.
Shelby Moledina
(Writing Absorbing Stories for Short Attention Spans)
Shelby Moledina is a seasoned game industry leader who has shipped 30+ titles on mobile and console at Double Loop Games, WB Games, DeNA, and Roblox. As co-founder and Game Director at Double Loop Games (2019-2023), she secured multiple funding rounds and industry awards for the mobile studio. These days, she’s the founder of Glowy Pixels Entertainment, pioneering narrative experiences that bridge film and games while advocating for increased VC funding for women founders.
Yoshitomo Moriwaki ⇗
(CRISPR for Game Storytelling: Contextual Injection and Narrative Assembly in Epic Tavern)
Richard Bisso, Shawn French, and Yoshitomo Moriwaki are veteran, Emmy and BAFTA-Winning game developer whose credits include the classic Spider-Man 2, Boom Blox, Medal of Honor, The Incredible Hulk, and more. Rich and Tomo own the award-winning game development consultancy Hyperkinetic Studios, based in Los Angeles. Shawn is an expert freelance writer with dozens of successful projects to his credit.
Maxwell Neely-Cohen ⇗
(The Magazine Model: Lessons From The HTML Review)
Maxwell Neely-Cohen is a writer and designer based in New York City. His nonfiction and essays have appeared in places like The New Republic, SSENSE, and BOMB Magazine. His work in theater, technology, video games, and performance has been acclaimed by The New York Times Magazine, Frieze, and The Financial Times. He is the author of the novel Echo of the Boom. He is currently the publisher of The HTML Review and a fellow at the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab.
Nicholas O’Brien ⇗
(Re-Learning Narrative Design Lessons from Children’s Books)
Nicholas O’Brien is a game designer, artist, and founder of the solo-studio Essay Games. He makes nuanced, story-driven games about complex issues pulling from extensive research or personal experience. His work has been featured in Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, NOW PLAY THIS!, Wordplay Festival, MAGFest, Rhizome at the New Museum, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and the New York Times.
Dylan Ogden
(How (and Why) to Bore Your Players)
Dylan Ogden is a writer, academic, and game developer with a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. He is fond of cats, mice, and experimental art across various media.
Sam Oppenheimer
(Teaching Writing and Critical Inquiry through TTRPGs)
Sam Oppenheimer is a PhD student at the University at Albany specializing in Composition and Rhetoric. Her dissertation is titled Reacting to an Uncertain Future: Collaborative Simulation in the College Writing Classroom. She also works as a Project Lead for ITECA, the Institute for Transformational & Ecosystem-based Climate Adaptation, developing a game called EarthQuest. EarthQuest is a hybrid table-top/virtual role-playing game that both teaches students about climate change, and motivates them to do something about it.
A. E. Osworth
A.E. Osworth is a transgender novelist. Their debut, WE ARE WATCHING ELIZA BRIGHT, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and was long-listed for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and The Tournament of Books. Their next book, AWAKENED, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing in April 2025. They are a lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing where they teach fiction, interactive fiction, and new media.
Daniel Park ⇗
(Democracy, Now!: Participatory and Co-Creative Design for Collective Liberation)
Daniel Park (he/him) is a queer, bi-racial, theatre and performance artist, movement facilitator, and organizer for racial and labor justice in the cultural sector. Through all of the above, his work brings people together to understand and experiment with their individual and mutual roles in bringing about the liberation of all people. Since moving to Philadelphia in 2014 Daniel has become a leader for radical thought in the local creative ecosystem and a trusted national source for guidance on the intersection between cooperatives and the arts.
Judith Pintar ⇗
(Immersing the Mind’s Eye: Is there a place for IF in VR?)
Judith Pintar is the Director of the Game Studies & Design program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a sociologist and a long time IF author. She served two terms on the Board of Directors of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, and is the current chair of the IFTF Education Committee.
Everest Pipkin ⇗
(Like the Last 20 Minutes of a Movie: Adapting the Falling Action of Cinema for Games)
Everest Pipkin is a game developer, artist, and educator who works in games and software tools across the handmade web– as well as on paper through books, zines and drawings. They have shown and spoken at The Design Museum of London, The Texas Biennial, The XXI Triennale of Milan, The Photographers Gallery of London, Center for Land Use Interpretation, and currently teach game design at the Pratt Institute.
Ashley Poprik ⇗
(Cringe to Career: How Fanfiction Creates Great Game Writers)
Ashley “Ash” Poprik is a senior narrative designer on Destiny 2. She is a writer who is known for video games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. Ashley values creating narratives that reflect human experiences that audiences can resonate with and learn from.
Alyssa J Rodriguez ⇗
(Your Dating Sim Doesn’t Need to Subvert the Genre)
Alyssa J Rodriguez is a Latine Indigenous 2D artist and narrative designer. Through collaborations with the American Museum of Natural History and Anima Interactive, she has designed games and interactive installations that aims to connect and explore cultural narratives within natural science.
Benjamin Rosenbaum ⇗
(Absurdly Elaborate Tools and Techniques For ChoiceScript Development)
Benjamin Rosenbaum is the author of the Nebula Award nominated Jewish historical fantasy interactive fiction game “The Ghost and the Golem” (Choice of Games, 2024) as well as The Unraveling (Erewhon, 2021, Otherwise Honor List), a far-future coming-of-age novel of love and social unrest; the short story collection The Ant King and other stories (Small Beer, 2008); and the Jewish historical fantasy tabletop roleplaying game Dream Apart, which was published together with Avery Alder’s Dream Askew, launching the “Belonging Outside Belonging” family or roleplaying games (Buried Without Ceremony, 2019). His work has been translated into over 20 languages, and nominated or shortlisted for Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Sturgeon, World Fantasy, Locus, and Ennie Awards. He lives near Basel, Switzerland with his family, and serves on the board of Migwan, Basel’s Liberal synagogue.
Edmundo Ruiz Ghanem ⇗
Edmundo Ruiz Ghanem is a seasoned developer and the chief at Clickpulp, a studio focused on creating intuitive and accessible user experiences for the web, mobile, and video game consoles. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Harrisburg University’s Interactive Media and Game Design programs.
Dain Saint ⇗
(Local Hero Keynote, Democracy, Now!: Participatory and Co-Creative Design for Collective Liberation)
Dain Saint (he/they) is a storyteller and artist based in Philadelphia. Their work imagines an abundant world without hierarchies. As co-founder of Cipher Prime Studios, he produced ambient games as part of Philly’s indie game scene for over ten years. As an journalist with the Philadelphia Inquirer, he used his tech skills to direct Emmy-awarded stories and make information more accessible to the public. They are currently building Futurefull, a collaborative studio telling stories about better futures and the roads we take to get there. He is a frequent speaker on the topics of philosophy, technology, and social change, and would really, really like this bio to be over already oh my god.
Mori S.C. ⇗
Mori is a fiction writer, game developer, visual novel aficionado, and champion of all artists, everywhere! His stories tend to be about queer characters overcoming strange and twisted scenarios with the goal of showing that there’s always meaning in life and you are never alone. His debut project, “Perchance to Dream”, uses dating sim mechanics to tackle complex issues of mental health ethics, necropolitics, queer identity, and more!
Luciano Salerno ⇗
(The Middle Ground: Writing for the Masses While Keeping Your Soul)
Luciano Salerno is an Argentine writer currently based in Los Angeles, California. Coming from a screenwriting background, he works as a professional writer for the video games 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.
Rebecca Slitt
(Help! I Accidentally Wrote A Sequel!)
Rebecca Slitt is an editor and publisher of interactive fiction for Choice of Games and its spinoff romance label Heart’s Choice. She has edited over 30 interactive novels, including Nebula finalists The Luminous Underground, The Martian Job, and The Road to Canterbury. As an author, she has written the YA Psy High series for Choice of Games, and has contributed to several tabletop roleplaying games, including Timewatch, Noirlandia, and Geist. With her PhD in medieval history, she can find you the best takeout in twelfth-century London and make sure that your dragon combat follows the rules of chivalry.
Isabelle Smith ⇗
(Crafting the Texture of a City in Project Abigail)
Isabelle Smith, Antonio Andrade, and Biagi Calicchia are game developers who attended NYU’s Game Center MFA program.
D Squinkifer ⇗
(Intrinsink: Building an Open-Source Interactive Theatre Web App)
D. Squinkifer, often known as Squinky, is a transgender and neurodivergent multidisciplinary artist who cofounded Soft Chaos, a Montreal-based worker cooperative game studio. When not designing and programming games and other interactive experiences, they play the euphonium and dote on their beloved cat, Neko.
Josh Stead-Dorval ⇗
(“Can I Borrow Your Shoes?” The Theory and Practice of Empathy in Video Game Narratives)
Josh Stead-Dorval is a writer and narrative designer passionate about telling stories in new and unique ways. Freshly graduated from the University of Rochester, he’s been accepted to masters programs in Game Development and Interactive Storytelling Design by institutions in the US and UK, and he currently works with a team at MAGIC Spell Studios on Peaceland: Choose Your Memory, a game about empathy building in post-war zones. He is also an amateur physicist, a battle-hardened viola player, an aspiring pickleball champion, and obsessed with The Stanley Parable.
Zoyander Street ⇗
(Intrinsink: Building an Open-Source Interactive Theatre Web App)
Zoyander Street is a neuroqueer and disabled artist based in South Yorkshire, England. Their transdisciplinary practice includes live theatre with game-like interaction and videogames for gallery spaces. They are a Sheffield Theatres supported artist, and fellow of the Imaginary College at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination.
Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro ⇗
Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro began his journey in game development in 1996, working on various projects before earning widespread acclaim with his directorial role on Deadly Premonition. Released in 2010, the surreal horror-adventure gained a Guinness World Record as the “Most Critically Polarizing Survival Horror Game,” establishing SWERY’s reputation for innovative storytelling. Building on this success, he founded White Owls Inc. in 2016, where he created narrative-focused titles such as The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, praised for its bold themes, and The Good Life, notable for blending life-simulation with mystery elements. Throughout his career, SWERY has consistently challenged genre conventions, which led to his recognition at various international festivals. Most notably, he received the 2024 IndieCade Trailblazer Award, an honor celebrating his influential contributions to independent game development. Looking ahead to 2025, SWERY continues to expand his creative horizons with two highly anticipated projects: the horror-themed Death Game Hotel, exploring virtual reality and psychological tension, and Hotel Barcelona, a collaboration with Goichi “Suda51” Suda that promises another eccentric twist on the horror genre. Committed to pushing boundaries in design and narrative, SWERY remains a leading figure in the global gaming community, inspiring both players and developers alike.
Tristan J Tarwater ⇗
(Lost and Found in Translation: Converting TTRPG Experiences into Video Games)
Originally from NYC, Tristan J. Tarwater now lives in the Pacific Northwest. When not writing the words that come between the beep boops, they like to eat good food, do karaoke and teach ESOL to adults. AKA backthatelfup, they sometimes write fiction, TTRPG stuff and comics. You can find out more about them and their work at: www.backthatelfup.com
Hannah Tinti ⇗
(The Superhero Test: Designing Dynamic Characters)
Hannah Tinti is the author of three works of fiction: The Good Thief, Animal Crackers, and The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, which is in development for television. She teaches creative writing at New York University’s MFA program and co-founded the award-winning literary magazine One Story, which will begin featuring Interactive Fiction in 2025. For more info visit: one-story.com
Leena van Deventer ⇗
(Dead Static Drive’s “Novella” Narrative Engine for Unreal)
Leena van Deventer and Mike Blackney made Dead Static Drive, and Leena sits on the board of the IFTF. They are based in Melbourne, Australia.
Jet Vellinga ⇗
(Inara’s Banquet: Serving Ancient and Interactive Drama)
Jet Vellinga is a transmedial storyteller, specialized in non-linear screenwriting, worldbuilding, and immersive theatre. She’s the founder and director of Illuyanka Studios and her first commercial title, The Evil Ex Game, is set to release this year. She holds an MFA from New York University’s Game Center and an MA in Classics and Ancient Civilizations from Leiden University. She is a full-time lecturer in games and screenwriting at the University of East London. She has also held positions at NYU and Parsons School of Design.
Baudelaire Welch ⇗
(Sometimes Love is the Wrong Dialogue Choice: Designing Interactive Romance for Games)
Baudelaire Welch is the Creative Director of Perfect Crime Games, currently making a true-story gothic comedy adventure game. They also are writing for Half Mermaid’s next games, a module for Fallen London, and previously worked as companion character narrative lead on Baldur’s Gate 3. They got their start making text adventures for Choice of Games, and then writing medieval gags for Crusader Kings 3.
Camerin Wild
(Lost and Found in Translation: Converting TTRPG Experiences into Video Games)
Camerin Wild is a writer whose journey through storytelling has taken them from documentary film to games and beyond. With contributions to titles like Usual June, God of War Ragnarök, South of Midnight, and Winter Burrow, they hope to help resonant stories find their place in the world. Their favorite things include all black clothing, crafting, and their Shih-poo with the soul of a human man.
Rowan Williams
(How to Make Art When the World is Ending)
Rowan is a nonbinary narrative designer and writer with over a decade of industry experience. They have worked at many story-forward companies, championing for the importance of cohesive gameplay and story.
Brigitte Winter ⇗
(This Game Is Garbage: How Form Can Inspire Play in Diceless TTRPGs)
Brigitte Winter is an author, photographer, and award-winning narrative game designer. She is also a Co-Founder of Scryptid Games. She was a 2023 Dicebreaker Tabletop Awards Finalist for Designer of the Year, and her first full-length TTRPG, Psychic Trash Detectives, won the 2024 CRIT Award for Best Indie TTRPG and Best Cover Art. The capacity of storytelling to connect, inspire, and incite is central to Brigitte’s art and her activism, and she consumes and creates stories that are queer, feminist, intimate, and deliciously weird.