Speakers

Nick Bush: Designing Narrative Strategy for 4 to 4,000 Players
Cam: Horror Games: Lore VS Gameplay
Joey Centofanti: Joey Centofanti is pursuing a BFA in Game Development at the University of Southern California. His talk is based on a paper which won gold at GDC’s Game Narrative Review. Post-graduation, he is excited to launch a philosophically-dense game company.
Autumn Chen: On Goncharov (1973): Fact and (Interactive) Fiction
Brendan Desilets: Inform and the Writing Process; Brendan Desilets has taught in Massachusetts schools since 1968, at the middle school, high school, and university levels. He currently works as an adjunct professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Brendan’s classes have featured interactive fiction since 1985.
Sasha Fenn: SweepWeave: A Synthesis of Storylets and Simulated Characters
Clara Fernandez-Vara: Take That! The Multicultural Origins of the Ace Attorney Series
Aster Fialla: Thematic Puzzle Design: Learning from Erstwhile, Sub Rosa, and Metamorphoses; A queer illustrator, game writer, poet, and sundry-other-things-doer. Aster likes TTRPG that aren’t D&D, crying at LARPs, and spending too much time on discord.
Diana Flindt: How to End the World: A Post-Mortem of RuneScape 3’s 2022 Season Finale
Luis Garcia: Civil Disobedience in Games
Amanda Gardner: Trust, Lust, and UST: Writing Effective Romance in Games; Narrative Director at the Deep End Games, writer of the award-winning indie titles Perception and Romancelvania, and nationally-recognized wellness speaker, Amanda Gardner loves a good story and a hot cup of tea. As a mother of four, she spends any spare time wrangling her youngsters and taking them to sports, where she then takes notes on her unusual monster fantasies for in-game use. Amanda also teaches yoga and stress-relief techniques to techies and teens.
Edmundo Ruiz Ghanem: The Little Engine That Could: The History of the Adventure Game Studio Engine, Games, and Community; Edmundo Ruiz Ghanem is a software developer based in Philadelphia. A Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center graduate, he previously worked on theme park attractions for Disney and social games at Electronic Arts and Zynga. He is an ongoing contributor and playtester of independent point & click adventure games that include the Ben Jordan series, A Golden Wake, and The Crimson Diamond.
Francisco González: Going Union: How A Basement Indie Hired AAA Talent (And How You Can, Too!); 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. His first game, A Golden Wake, was published in 2014 by Wadjet Eye Games. He made his second game, Shardlight, while working in-house at Wadjet Eye as as a full-time developer. In 2018, he released Lamplight City, published by Application Systems Heidelberg.
Gerben Grave: 6 “Cons” of Worldbuilding: a Practical Approach to Structured Creation
Ian Greener: Beginning with ink: knots, stitches, diverts, conditions and choices; Ian Greener is a social scientist working at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He has worked by himself and in collaboration with students to construct games primarily using ink and Twine.
Martin Hanses: My Game Is A Joke, And I Demand To Be Taken Seriously; Martin Hanses is a narrative designer, writer, and developer from Finland, currently based in Vancouver, Canada. Most recently, he wrote and directed Tails: The Backbone Preludes for Eggnut, and is currently working on his solo project Clam Man 2: Headliner, a narrative role-playing game under the sea. He is known for his focus on organic branching dialogue, comedic writing, and hobbies such as crosswords and playing the banjo.
Jess Haskins: How the West Was Many: Crafting a Culturally Diverse Western Adventure with Rosewater; Jess Haskins is a game editor and narrative designer living in Brooklyn. She teaches game design at the NYU Game Center and provides editing and consulting services for games. Recent titles include idle adventure The Longing, detective adventure Lamplight City, and eco-friendly farm sim Coral Island. With her partner Francisco González, she is co-writer of the forthcoming Western adventure Rosewater. Her work centers on worldbuilding with intention, forging inclusive communities, and exploring interactive storytelling. (jesshaskins.com, paperback-studio.com)
Joey Jones: Introduction to Tracery: Make an Art Bot! / Crafting Interactive Stories With ChoiceScript; Joey Jones is an interactive fiction author (The Chinese Room, Sub Rosa, Trials of the Thief-Taker), PhD researcher in interactive narrative at Southampton University and creator of many bots. These included @UnlikelyPowers, a generator of joke superhero powers, and @allwittgenstein@botsin.space, which will tweet the complete writings of Wittgenstein.
Javeria Kausar: Choices of the Oppressed: Writing Choice-Based Fiction Using Theatre of the Oppressed Methods to Enable Muslim Minorites and Challenge Majority Assumptions; Javeria Kausar is a writer, poet, and PhD (Creative Writing) student. She has won the Damodarshree National Award, the Sweek Microfiction (microlight) contest, and prizes in 3 Writer’s Workout short fiction events, 3 Wordweavers India contests (short fiction and poetry), and the Great Indian Poetry Contest. Her poem “(con)TEXT” was longlisted in the “Opening Up” category of the New Media Writing Prize 2022, and a poem responding to the theme of anti-slavery and lawyers’ role was shortlisted (top 2) in the Newcastle Law School’s poetry contest. As part of her PhD at Newcastle University, she is developing a new interactive form of fiction to help tackle Islamophobia.
KB: Narrative-Based Games for Sexual Health; KB is an artist and lover of nearly all Pokémon games. In addition, she loves weird, tiny, radical games and experiences. She is particularly motivated by the intersection of games and learning; she is interested in games as a tool for education. As a former teacher, KB’s goal is to build learning environments in which players are empowered, responsible, and empathetic. Other things KB is passionate about: sex education, poetry, and cartoons.
Chris Klimas: Shop Talk (IF Educators Talking About Teaching IF)
David Kuelz: When Theater Is A Game
Bjarke Alexander Larsen: “Don’t Try to Explain It” - Why Some Things Should Not Make Sense
Brianna Lei: Keynote: Entering your Villain Era
Yoyu Li: Narrative Meets Multiplayer: Creating a Social Narrative Experience
Beatrice Maggipinto: Building Approachable, Actionable Games to Tackle Ecological Issues; Beatrice Maggipinto is a PhD student in human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. Before coming back to academia, she has worked as creative director in advertising and environmental campaigning. Working on climate action campaigns with NGOs like Greenpeace and WWF, she felt inspired to do research and find a different way of communicating environmental issues, such as through games and transmedia storytelling, to understand more effective ways of empowering audiences to climate action. Bea is also a freediver and her research topic is focused on oceans.
Stacey Mason: Narrative Design in the Age of Twitch
Jim Nelson: According to Cain: From Concept to Completion; Jim Nelson is a software engineer and novelist. His latest book is A Man Named Baskerville.
Judith Pintar: Collaborative Curation of IF Teaching Resources: Introducing the EdCom-IFWiki Project / Shop Talk (IF Educators Talking About Teaching IF) / Volunteer Opportunities at IFTF
Andrew Plotkin: Volunteer Opportunities at IFTF
Colin Post: Cataloging Narrative Games to Expand the Bibliographic Universe; Colin Post is an Assistant Professor in Library and Information Science at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro, where he teaches and conducts research on preserving digital culture.
Erik X. Raj: Designing a Narrative-Driven Video Game to Build Resilience in Children who Stutter; Erik X. Raj is an Associate Professor within the Department of Speech-Language Pathology at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, NJ. His main research agenda examines digital technology and its implementation to speech-language therapy. In addition to developing numerous speech-language therapy-related iOS apps and designing browser-based video games for individuals with communication difficulties, he regularly presents interactive workshops, at the national and international level, where he demonstrates how speech-language pathologists can use digital technology with their their students/clients.
Alejandro Ruiz del Sol: Spontaneously Inspired: How Dadaism May Energize Narrative Design
Luciano Salerno: Endless Stories, Impossible Structures: Character and Plot in Mobile F2P Games; Luciano Salerno is an Argentine writer currently based in Berlin, Germany. Coming from a screenwriting background and formation, he works as a professional writer for the video game 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.
Ben Schneider: Cairns & Keystones: Building Interactive Narrative Non-linearly; Ben Schneider is a video game writer and designer with twenty years of industry experience, and is currently a professor of practice in the Interactive Media and Game Development (IMGD) program at WPI. He has created content for games such as Empire Earth, Titan Quest, Dawn of War, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and Lord of the Rings Online. His creative interests include procedural narrative systems, conventional prose, folklore, and experimental interactive narrative.
Ben Books Schwartz: You Should Be Larping More (If You Want To Exercise Your Interactive Narrative Muscles); Ben Books Schwartz is a nomadic writer and narrative designer of video games and larps, with a particular focus on stories for young adults and procedural narrative generation. They spent many years helping run larp summer camps including The Wayfinder Experience, Trackers Earth, and Magischola Prep, as well as destination larps for adults including College of Wizardry, New World Magischola, Event Horizon, and Changeling: the Dreaming. They’ve worked in mobile games (Lifeline, Puzzle Legends, Gossip Harbor) as well as AAA games (unannounced/NDA), and currently work as a Senior Narrative Designer at The Molasses Flood (a CD Projekt studio).
Katryna Starks: Branching Stories: Twisting Little Passages with Twine; Katryna Starks is a game design instructor and researcher, specializing in interactive narrative, worldbuilding, puzzle crafting, and serious games. She currently teaches at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Hélène Sellier: Representing Disability and Depicting Ableism in Video Games; Hélène is a video game researcher and narrative designer. Her Ph.D. thesis is about the relationships between literature and video games, studying the diverse forms of frictions and hybridizations between the two media cultures. She writes visual novels and expressive games for game studios (Beemoov, The Seed Crew) and teaches Interactive Fiction Writing and Media Cultures.
Fran Tufro: I’m Fran (he/they) and I’m optimizing towards living a creative life. I created Hidden People Club because I needed a wholesome workplace with creativity and cooperation as the main pillars.
Matthew Viglione: Procedural Prohibition: Bringing Story Generation into a Simulation Game
Damon L. Wakes: Something Somewhere Some of the Time: A Live Collaborative Twine Jam; Damon L. Wakes is the author of sci-fi murder mystery novella Ten Little Astronauts and card-based interactive fantasy journey Draw Nine, but is perhaps best known for his series of tutorials: Twine for Beginners. All these things can be found through his website, https://damonwakes.wordpress.com/
Pamela Weidman: “You”: Addressing the Reader-Player-Character in Twentieth-Century Texts; Pamela Weidman is a PhD candidate in English and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She works on theories of character, and teaches an undergraduate course on interactive fiction and other twentieth-century interactive literature.
Avonelle Wing: From Spreadsheet to Playable (High-Tension) Larp in 90 Minutes; Avonelle Wing is the operations manager for the Center for Transformational Play. She brings 25 years of larp writing and convention organization experience to her work in games as a tool for disrupting dominant power structures and building systems to uplift, protect, and empower marginalized populations.
John M. Withers IV: T. Tanzi and Last Match: Immersive v. Interactive Theatre