Keynote Speakers

Bio. Emily Short works in interactive fiction, narrative design, and conversation modeling, and was a creative director for three years at Failbetter Games, a British studio focused on narrative. She has worked with Firaxis, Riot, Monolith, Paradox, Niantic, E-Line Media, Eko, Big Fish Games, Telltale Games, ArenaNet, ngmoco :), Nerial, Six to Start, and Fusebox Games among others. She was the creative director of the Versu project, building interactive iPad stories around AI characters. She has written over two dozen works of interactive fiction and is part of the design team for Inform 7, a tool for creating parser-based IF. Her blog can be found here.

How Many Storylets Are Enough? Scoping Your Systemic Narrative. Drawing on past procedural narrative projects, this talk addresses how to analyse the state space of a systemic game, identify narratively meaningful conditions, scope a minimum viable amount of content, and plan for iteration, testing, and launch.

Bio. Farrukh Rahman is focused on visual understanding and representation learning at Microsoft’s QuAIL (Quality AI Lab). Prior to QuAIL, Farrukh worked on deep learning for time series analysis in healthcare. This role followed his work in the surgical robotics industry where he worked on robotic end effector control methods and visual inspection systems. He attained a Master's degree in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he specialized in Machine Learning (ML). Farrukh's journey reflects his broad interests in perception and control, emphasizing the complementary relationship between the two.

Beyond the Pixels: Advancing Visual Quality Assurance in Gaming with Computer Vision. Visual quality is central to creating immersive virtual experiences. This talk explores how machine learning and computational perception are revolutionizing visual quality assurance in gaming, delving into current research, practical applications, and the future potential of these technologies.

Bio. Everest Pipkin is a game developer, writer, and artist from central Texas who lives and works on a sheep farm in southern New Mexico. Their work both in the studio and in the garden follows themes of ecology, tool making, and collective care during collapse. They hold a BFA from University of Texas at Austin, an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and 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 other spaces. When not at the computer in the heat of the day, you can find them in the hills spending time with their neighbors— both human and non-human.

Like Synchronous Fireflies: playing together in the connective structures of online space. How do we draw the boundaries of what is and isn't play? How do we collaborate with others through distance and time? What is it to be "online now"? Eschewing common examples of embodied multiplayer (or even classically networked) games, this talk will instead look at the fundamental togetherness of online space and how this lends itself to play. Pipkin will discuss design strategies from their own past projects (which use hyperlinks, iframes, synchronized clocks, and conversation as the building blocks of social interactivity) as well as broader examples from the internet at large. From fan forums to email chains, Wikipedia talk sections to home pages, we will consider the substructure of the playful internet– and how the quiet connectivity of being online is never being completely alone.