GDC Announces New and Returning Advisory Board Members for AI, Community Management, Educators, Indie, and Mobile Summits

SAN FRANCISCO – The Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2019, is now accepting submissions for GDC Summits, the Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC), and Game Career Seminar through Friday, October 5th at 11:59 PM Pacific Time. In addition, organizers have added five esteemed new experts and one returning member to the GDC Summits Advisory Boards. These additions will lend their expertise in key areas of game development, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Community Management, Education, Indie, and Mobile games. GDC 2019 returns to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, March 18-22, 2019, VRDC and the GDC Summits take place the first two days of GDC (March 18-19).

The full list of GDC 2019 Summits that are accepting submissions includes:

• AI Summit

• Community Management Summit

• UX Summit

• Game Narrative Summit

• Educators Summit

• Mobile Summit

• Independent Games Summit

• UX Summit

VRDC advisors are accepting submissions for talks which explore virtual reality and augmented reality spaces, and they may pertain to both game and non-game experience development. Organizers of the popular Game Career Seminar at GDC are also taking submissions for talks focused on building careers in the game industry. Those looking to propose a potential session can review the submission guidelines and topics before submitting.

Each program has its own specialized advisory board to evaluate submissions. This year the organizers are welcoming a few new faces and one returning member to the advisory team. These advisory board members will lend their invaluable insights into guiding the content tracks and offering key feedback in the creation of sessions at each of the GDC Summits.

GDC 2019 is welcoming the following people to their respective GDC Summit Advisory Boards:

AI Summit

Emily Short – Character Engine Product Manager, Spirit AI

Emily Short is a Character Engine Product Manager and an Executive Director at Spirit AI, where she works with natural language processing and generation, character moods and social behavior, and conversation modelling. She was previously the creative director of the Versu project, building interactive iPad stories around AI character agents. She has an extensive background in games writing and narrative design as well as tooling for writing interactive fiction. Her blog can be found at http://emshort.blog.

Community Management Summit

Grace Carroll – Lead Social Media Manager, Creative Assembly

Grace oversees the social media channels for Creative Assembly’s 18-year-old award-winning franchise, ‘Total War.’ She’s been working in the industry for the last 3 years and was recently named as MCV’s 30 Under 30, and was a finalist in the 2017 Women in Game Awards. She works to promote Creative Assembly’s ‘Total War: WARHAMMER’ series as well as the historical titles, cultivating a strong community tone of voice and drawing on strategic engagement through her love of puns and memes.

Educators Summit

Miguel Sicart – Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Games, IT University of Copenhagen

Miguel Sicart is an Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Games, IT University of Copenhagen. His research has focused on the ethics of digital games and game design. He teaches courses on game design and experimental digital play design, and was Head of Program for the IT University’s GAMES MsC between 2009 and 2013. His more recent work explores the nature of play, with a particular interest in the ludic aspects of computational technologies. He is the author of The Ethics of Computer Games, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay, and Play Matters (The MIT Press, 2009, 2013, 2014).

Indie Summit

Tanya X. Short – Captain, Kitfox Games

Tanya X. Short is the Captain of Kitfox Games, a small studio in Montreal responsible for such games as ‘Boyfriend Dungeon’, ‘The Shrouded Isle’, and ‘Moon Hunters’. She started in games in 2003 as an intern on ‘iLoveBees’, the ARG leading up to the launch of ‘HALO 2’. She is also a co-founder/co-director of Pixelles, a feminist non-profit, and co-editor of Procedural Generation in Game Design (2017).

Steve Swink – Creative Director, CubeHeart Games

A returning advisor to GDC, Steve Swink is a game designer and occasional author. His current project is ‘SCALE,’ a unique first person reality manipulation game. He wrote Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation which some people have read. Steve Swink previously did design work at Flashbang Studios, Blurst.com, and on Tony Hawk’s Underground.

Mobile Summit

Katrina Wolfe – Studio Operations Manager, Kongregate

Katrina is the Studio Operations Manager at Kongregate, working with the publisher’s internal studios. After graduating from USC in Classics and Game Design, Katrina jumped into the world of social and mobile games at Grab Games. There she worked on a variety of games and carved a path into production after spending a few years as a game designer. She worked at TinyCo on ‘Family Guy: Quest for Stuff’ before ending up at Kongregate where she works currently. At Kongregate she spent the last few years leading the production charge for ‘Animation Throwdown’.

The initial call for submissions, which includes the Main Conference Tracks and day-long tutorials, have been closed since Thursday, August 16th.

For more details on the submission process for  the Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC), GDC Summits, and Game Career Seminar visit the GDC’s official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS. The GDC Vault website – www.gdcvault.com – offers access to a wide variety of GDC and VRDC@GDC 2018 lectures and sessions, including speaker slides, synchronized video and presentations for select sponsor lectures, as well as a broad range of free conference videos. GDC All Access Pass holders and individual Vault subscribers will get access to hundreds of video sessions from this and previous GDC shows. Official photos are available via the Official GDC Flickr account: www.flickr.com/photos/officialgdc/.

Related: GDC 2019 INDEPENDENT GAMES FESTIVAL Opens Call for Submission thru Oct. 1

Nathan Stevens

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I have always enjoyed playing video games and am a programming team lead for a video game company. I co-founded Gaming Cypher because I enjoy the gaming community and would like to provide the best news service around. Feel free to ask me any questions and I will make sure to get back to you quickly.

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