Indie Passion

IMGDC 2.0 Speaker Bios

IMGDC 2007 was an enormous success thanks to the many dedicated developers and designers who attended, but largely because of the invaluable information pass on from the speakers. Here you will find information about the IMGDC 2.0 speakers.

IMGDC is no longer accepting speaker proposals. Thank you to everyone who submitted a proposal!

Tami Baribeau - Areae, Inc.

Tami Baribeau is currently employed as the Community Manager for Areae, Inc., working closely with the growing community for the as-yet-unreleased multiplayer platform Metaplace. Her past experience includes working closely with independent game developers to create a sales presence for their games on the Web, and creating multiple communities for like-minded users to coexist and establish online relationships.

Richard Bartle - University of Essex, UK.

Dr Richard A. Bartle co-wrote the first virtual world, MUD, in 1978; he has thus been at the forefront of the MMO industry from its very inception. He divides his time equally between being an industry consultant and an academic (he's Professor of Computer Game Design at the University of Essex, UK). His 2003 book, Designing Virtual Worlds, is the standard, text on the subject, and he is an influential writer on all aspects of virtual world design and development.

Peter Eckert - Brown College

Peter has been in the electronic entertainment industry for the last decade creating titles in both the development and publishing roles. He acted as Producer, Sr. Producer, and Scrum Master at studios such as Atari, Destineer Studios, Stainless Steel Studios and Blue Fang Games. Recently Peter is at Brown College teaching video game design and development, and is co-founder of Brain Farm Entertainment.

Nick Fortugno - Rebel Monkey

Nick Fortugno is a co-founder and President of Rebel Monkey, a NYC-based casual game studio. Before Rebel Monkey, Fortugno was the Director of Game Design at gameLab, where he was a designer, writer and project manager on dozens of commercial and serious games, including lead designing the downloadable blockbuster Diner Dash and the award-winning serious game Ayiti: The Cost of Life. Nick teaches game design and interactive narrative design at Parsons The New School of Design, and has participated in the construction of the school's game design curiculuum. Nick is also a co-founder of the Come Out and Play street games festival hosted in New York City and Amsterdam.

Peter Freese - Hidden Path Entertainment

Peter Freese is currently Lead Programmer at Hidden Path Entertainment, and Conference Director and visionary for the Online Game Development Conference (OGDC). He has been programming computers for over 30 years, and wrote his first compiler and graphics library before the age of 15. Besides shipping many award winning boxed games, Peter has worked on eight different massively multiplayer online games, none of which have yet been successful.

Michael Gjere - Brown College

Michael has 10 years of experience in the publishing and development arenas working on both budget and AAA titles as a producer and in business development at Atari, Activision and Liquid Entertainment to name a few. Recently, Michael moved back to Minneapolis to teach video game production methodologies at Brown College and co-found a development studio, Brain Farm Entertainment.

Brian Green - Near Death Studios

Brian 'Psychochild' Green is an experienced online game developer. He worked on Meridian 59 in 1998 at 3DO and later started a company, Near Death Studios, Inc., to purchase and relaunch the game. More recently, he has done consulting and contract work for various projects, and was editor for the book Business & Legal Primer for Game Development. He also writes the game development blog at http://www.psychochild.org/

Scott Hartsman - Sony Online Entertainment

Scott Hartsman’s entire career has taken place in, on, and around online games, worlds, and the communities that form around them. He’s a 20 year veteran of online gaming whose experience has spanned positions all the way from Game Master to CEO, successfully designing, architecting, and shipping over 30 products from commercial MUDs to big-budget AAA MMOs. He recently left his position running the EverQuest II franchise at SOE to pursue new opportunities.

Kelly Heckman - GamersInfo

Kelly "Ophelea" Heckman began her life in games journalism as a content editor for the MMO, Asheron's Call, with the WarCry Network. Her time at WarCry saw her fill a number of roles, ranging from Tradeskills Editor through to Network Operations Manager where she managed as many as 18 Site Managers covering as many MMORPGs. After WarCry, she worked as an Exclusives Manager for Stratics as well as freelance writer, before co-founding reviews website GamersInfo.net - a site founded on the principle that the game player is as important to the review as the game itself. She has an extensive history in human resources, has worked as a community manager for existing MMOs and provides consulting on various projects within the gaming community.

Erin Hoffman - BetterEULA

Erin Hoffman has been designing video games for over eight years in an assortment of genres including MMOs, action-RPGs, and children's games. She is a freelance contributor at The Escapist, Strange Horizons, and Gamasutra; she also maintains Gamewatch.org. For more details and recent publication credits, visit philomathgames.com. Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds, an essay collection covering player rights in virtual space, will be released this fall, in conjunction with Erik Bethke's BetterEULA project (www.bettereula.com).

Rusty Lee - PX Interactive

Rusty Lee is CEO of PX Interactive, Inc., an independent massively multiplayer game platform provider and publisher. He is a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of combined management, technical, and research experience in the software industry. Rusty is the inventor of multiple US patents in advanced software technology – including patents in Distributed Networking, Artificial Intelligence, and Natural Language Processing, developed based on his original research work at MIT.

Yifan Li - Fudan University

Yifan Li is a doctor candidate in Fudan University, P.R. China. Her research efforts focus on the internet market of Chinese for more than 5 years. Complete the research projects including “Study on Internet Business Mode", “the Empirical Study of Consumer Behavior of Virtual Items Exchange in China", “White Paper of Chinese Internet Games", “The empirical study of motivation of Chinese people going into internet", etc.

Ron Meiners - Multiverse

Ron Meiners has worked in a wide range of online community applications, from casual games to virtual worlds, from HearMe.com and Uru Live to a volunteer position as the Online Community Advocate for the Burning Man organization. His work at Multiverse as Developer Relations Manager brought him in contact with the tremendous creative energy in the Indie Developer and Academic communities. He is passionate about the potential for online communities to foster relationships between participants, and is committed to the exploration of new forms of interaction and collaboration online. His current position is Director of Community at C3L3B digital, a startup working in the casual MMO space.

Jay Moore - The Strategery Group

Jay was previously Dir. of Business Development, Marketing Director & Evangelist for GarageGames, an online tool dev and game publisher. He joined GG in '02 when they were 5 guys crammed into a one-room office. When he left, they were a team of 30+. While at GG, he launched IndieGamesCon, oversaw the online publishing of independent games, and worked to establish Torque as the game engine platform of choice for independent game developers.

Jason Murdick - Simutronics

Jason Murdick is currently a Product Developer for Simutronics Inc., where he works on the HeroEngine and the MMOG Hero’s Journey, Jason began his career working on Horizons: Empire of Istaria. His background in CS, programming and design, vaulted him to Lead Design where he revamped the tutorial and new player experience, worked with writer Peter S. Beagle and led the effort that brought the game to the positive numbers that allowed for its eventual sale.

Serafina Pechan - World Fusion, Inc.

Serafina is currently co-owner of World Fusion, Inc., an independent software developer founded in 1987. World Fusion has a full history of providing software architectural consulting and product development for Fortune 50 companies. In 1995, World Fusion began development on a 3D interface to the World Wide Web. That project eventually evolved into the current project, the massive online game, Atriarch (www.atriarch.com). Serafina is the Lead Game Designer for Atriarch.

Kristofer Pettersson - MySQL

Kristofer Pettersson has been working in MySQL AB since 2005 and has recently begun working as a software developer in Sun Microsystems when the company was purchased. He is currently working in the MySQL runtime team on systems related to as different things as Query Cache, security and Stored Programs.

Eric Rhea - Rhea Studios

Eric Rhea is owner of creative service company RheaSTUDIOS and technology consulting firm ROI. Mr. Rhea is a veteran vagabond, published author, musician, a startup expert who has assisted dozens of companies in launching, and provides industry expertise regarding technology and marketing projects for several national gaming bodies. Mr. Rhea has taken an indie MMOG through the product development life-cycle process, with guns blazing, and lived to tell the tale.

Robert Rice - Neogence

Robert Rice is the author of the book MMO Evolution and the CEO of Neogence Studios. Robert is a visionary pioneer and entrepreneur with close to fifteen years of experience.  Robert is dedicated to pushing the technological and design boundaries for online worlds. Robert is currently developing new technologies that redefine interactive worlds and revolutionize gameplay.

Tony Richards - IndieZen

Tony Richards is CTO and founder of IndieZen, a NYC based game tools, content and technology development company. In 2007, he was the producer, co-artist, and sole programmer for the Fractured Universe MMOG, winning the 90 day MMOG Game Development Competition. His goal is to combine his 30 years of practical hands-on software development experience with radically new ideas in tool chain development to help revolutionize the Indie game development industry. The end result gives a completely new meaning to "programmer art."

Peter Smith - RETRO Lab (University of Central Florida)

Peter is currently employed as Research Faculty at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando Fl. He works at the Universities Institute for Simulation and Training as the resident games researcher, and is also concurrently pursuing his PhD. in Modeling and Simulation. His previous employment as a Serious Games and Simulation Engineer at the Navy's NETC Experimentation Lab exposed him to the field of Serious Games. Peter is also involved as a volunteer with the Serious Games Initiative.

Jonathon Stevens - Last Straw Productions

Jonathon Stevens founded the independent game development studio Last Straw Productions, LLC in 2005, followed by two game launches and an incredibly successful IMGDC 2007. Jonathon is a passionate game designer and developer helping to shape the future of MMOG development. Jonathon always thinks outside the box and passionately strives to redefine boundries in virtual world development and prove that it takes more than a pocketbook to design a virtual world.

Lawrence G. Walters, Esq. - Weston, Garrou, DeWitt & Walters

Lawrence G. Walters, Esq., focuses on censorship and free speech issues. Mr. Walters has earned a national reputation for representing the interests of new media companies, particularly those involved with controversial issues such as erotica, violence, drugs, and gambling. Larry has practiced for over 18 years, and regularly appears as a commentator on national television news networks. He recently launched a site dealing with video game censorship found at; www.GameCensorship.com.

Gordon Walton - BioWare Austin

Gordon Walton has been building computer games for 30 years and MMOs for 13 years. He is currently co-Studio Director at BioWare Austin working on a MMO. Previously he was VP/Exec Producer at Sony Online Entertainment, Maxis, Origin Systems and Kesmai Corporation. He also led development at Konami of America and Three-Sixty Pacific, and his own studios Digital Illusions and Alliance Interactive.

Austin Wintory - Wintory Global Engineering

Austin Wintory is a composer for independent film and video game titles. In the last two years he has worked on more than 130 titles ranging from small student projects like Jenova Chen’s MFA thesis flOw, to massive globally released console titles like… ironically, flOw (also lots others for clients like Multiverse, Sony, USC Gamepipe /Sandia National Laboratory, LightSpace, MTV, NASA, etc).