Shaowen Bardzell
Shaowen Bardzell, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Human-Computer
Interaction/Design in the School of Informatics at Indiana University. She
specializes in social and cultural computing, fusing traditional HCI,
ethnography, and critical theory to understand the relationships among
computing and emotional, intimate, and/or embodied experiences. Her recent work has focused on the experience of embodied space in virtual worlds as well as distributed collaboration in virtual environments, affective interactions in Internet search behaviors, and designing for intimacy and emotion in non-western homes.
Barry Brown, UC San Diego
Barry is a associate professor at the University of California, San Diego. His recent work has focused on the sociology and design of leisure technologies - computer systems for leisure and pleasure, broadly conceived. Recent publications include studies of activities as diverse as games, tourism, museum visiting, the use of maps, television watching and sport spectating. He has also edited books on music consumption (with Kenton O’Hara), and mobile phone use (with Richard Harper and Nicola Green). Before coming to California he was a research fellow on the Equator project at the University of Glasgow and a research scientist at Hewlett-Packard's research labs in Bristol.
Melissa Cefkin, IBM Research
Melissa was dragged into Virtual Worlds (kicking and screaming) through a project engagement to explore means of supporting rehearsal practices in work contexts - the best of which would merely be reflective iterations of otherwise already occurring work practice. Virtual Worlds, particularly Second Life, were gaining significant attention. Some colleagues become convinced of the utility of using these environments for what we were trying enable. Skeptical, I was nonetheless quickly mesmerized by certain dimensions of what I saw there, reawakening interests from much early introductions to research in MUDs and MOOs and identify formation in online lives (e.g., Turkle, Taylor) - now applied to questions of people's work and life as organizational members. More recently I've been particular interested in questions of whether and how VW's re-introduce experiences of place and space that are otherwise becoming increasingly fragmented and fleeting in our mobile and digital lives.
Pavel Curtis,
Microsoft/LambdaMOO
Pavel Curtis was one of the founders, in the early 1990s, of both the Jupiter collaboration project at Xerox PARC and the AstroVR project at CalTech. Later, he co-founded PlaceWare, a company providing web-conferencing services that was purchased by Microsoft in 2003. Now, he works on fundamental data-replication technology, both for collaborative editing and for ubiquitous user- and system-data replication and backup.
Bruce Damer, DigitalSpace
One of the early proponents of 3D virtual worlds, Damer founded the Avatars Conference series in 1996 and produced the first cyber-conference hosted in a virtual world in 1998. He is the author of Avatars! Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet, the first book dedicated to the subject of avatars and their worlds. His recent work includes creating virtual worlds for NASA mission simulation and the EvoGrid, part of Project Biota. Damer will highlight prior instances of the blurring of work and play and discuss how these were leveraged in the past to support edutainment and collaborative world and event building.
Julian Dibbel
Julian Dibbell has, in the course of over a decade of writing and publishing, established himself as one of digital culture’s most thoughtful and accessible observers. He is the author of two books about online worlds — Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot (Basic, 2006) and My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (Henry Holt, 1999) — and has written essays and articles on hackers, computer viruses, online communities, encryption technologies, music pirates, and the heady cultural, political, and philosophical questions that tie these and other digital-age phenomena together.
Nicolas Ducheneaut, PlayOnGroup, PARC
Nic's research focuses on understanding the social dynamics of virtual worlds. Towards that goal, he co-founded the PlayOn project and conducted the largest study of player behavior in massively multiplayer online games to date, collecting data about the social networks created by more than 500,000 characters over two years in World of Warcraft. More recently he also started investigating how virtual world platforms, like Sun's Wonderland, can be modified to better support distributed collaboration."
Jason Ellis, IBM Research
Jason Ellis is a researcher in the Social Computing Group at the IBM T.J.Watson Research Center in New York. His research focuses on the design, implementation, and analysis of social software that facilitates collaboration among diverse user populations. Examples include online gaming communities, inter-generational communication, and the grassroots teams in open source. His current research includes building serious games that leverage the emergent properties of virtual worlds to help distributed teams work together more effectively. He has published in conferences such as ACM CHI, CSCW, DIS and learning sciences conferences CSCL and ICLS. Jason earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech. http://jellis.org
Randy Farmer
Sean Hansen, Case Western
Claudia l’Amoreaux, Linden Lab
Claudia L'Amoreaux is a Community Developer at Linden Lab, creators of the trailblazing virtual world, Second Life. Before joining Linden Lab, Claudia ran her own e-Learning consulting company, providing leadership on internet projects in the U.S., Brazil, Fiji, Europe, and the Middle East since 1985. She started using one of the first networked 3D worlds--Worlds Chat--in 1995. She helps organizations navigate the blurring boundary of globally distributed work and play, with a focus on innovation, creativity, and learning
Rhonda Lawry, Turner Broadcasting
Liz Lawley, RIT
Liz Lawley is a professor in the Information Technology department at RIT, where she teaches classes in web development, game design, computer-mediation communication, and social computing. She is also the founder and co-director of RIT's Lab for Social Computing. Her first computer game experience involved typing the code for Hunt the Wumpus into a TRS-80 tricked out with a fancy cassette tape drive, but her gaming passions today are focused on MMOs, pervasive gaming (ARGs), and haptic interfaces (from DDR to Rock Band to WiiFit). When not at RIT, she can often be found working as a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research. She uses the time she used to spend watching television blogging--at her personal blog, mamamusings, as well as the Terra Nova weblog on virtual worlds research, and the Many-2-Many weblog on social computing.
Silvia Lindtner, UC Irvine
Silvia is a Ph.D. student in the department of Informatics in the school of Information and Computer Sciences in Irvine. Her research interests lie at the intersection of online gaming, ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, playful interactions in and between physical and digital spaces, as well as urban (and suburban) computing. Last summer, Silvia spent 6 weeks in Beijing and Shanghai to conduct ethnographic research on online gaming in Internet cafes and other public spaces. She is particularly interested in the multi-dimensional interplay that emerges between digital and physical spaces as part of everyday practice. At UCI, she can usually be found here: LUCI, the laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing. http://www.ics.uci.edu/~lindtner
Thomas Malaby, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
I am a cultural anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My principal research interest is in the relationships among modernity, unpredictability, and technology, particularly as they are realized through games and game-like processes. My book about Linden Lab, Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life (Cornell University Press, forthcoming), explores how games are re-shaping the relationship between technology and authority in modern institutions, specifically those (like Linden Lab) in a position to architect digital society.
Katherine Mancuso, Georgia Tech
Yong Ming, UC Irvine
Bob Moore, Multiverse
Bob Moore is a sociologist and game designer at Multiverse. He designs virtual environments for player sociability and usability. Prior to Multiverse, Dr. Moore worked as a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he founded the PlayOn project. PlayOn examined social life in multiple virtual worlds using micro interaction analysis, virtual ethnography and social network analysis. Dr. Moore has also served as a virtual worlds evangelist within PARC and Xerox, where he consulted on business and educational applications of virtual world technologies. He has published several papers on the design of avatar interaction systems and virtual public spaces in academic journals and has spoken at numerous conferences on virtual worlds.
Jacquelyn Ford Morie, Institute for Creative Technologies, USC
I blame Celia. In 2004 she showed me an online virtual world called Second Life and I was hooked. Even being a long-time practitioner and often accused zealot for immersive VR technologies (think big head mounted displays), I found something delightfully fun in cavorting around an expansive, persistent virtual world, even through my tiny computer screen. I realized very quickly that while I was doing real work in these worlds, I was, in fact, playing! Now I have over two dozen distinctive avatars in Second Life alone, and many more in other world scattered around digital universes far and wide. When in the real world, I work as a senior researcher at ICT, leading projects that expand the ways in which we deal with, interface to, and learn within virtual worlds. My research also challenges the insular nature of online worlds by connecting them to aspects of real life, such as body sensors that can affect what happens in-world, and events from the digital realm that have real consequences in physical space. In 2007, I completed my PhD in immersive environments from the University of East London SmartLab Centre, and am also one of the four co-founders of the Ludica womens game collective. Links to my art and publications can be found at: www.morie.ict.usc.edu/~morie
Chip Morningstar
Chip Morningstar has been involved in the development of large-scale,
multi-user interactive systems for over 25 years. At Lucasfilm Ltd. in the mid 1980s he was the designer and project leader for Lucasfilm's Habitat, the world's first large scale commercial multiperson online graphical virtual world, for which he shared (with Randy Farmer) the 2001 IGDA First Penguin Award. After leaving Lucasfilm he became the Vice President for Software Development at the American Information Exchange, a division of Autodesk, an online marketplace for information that pioneered the field of electronic commerce. He was one of the founders of Electric Communities (aka Communities.com), where, as Chief Scientist, he was the lead architect of communications protocols and advanced object technology which they developed to facilitate commercial and social interaction over computer networks. As Chief Architect at State Software he lead the development of servers and protocols for delivering highly interactive stateful applications over the web, a technology now known in the industry as "Ajax". Most recently, at Yahoo! he lead teams developing platforms for handling user reputation and identity. He has also worked as an image processing researcher, programming language designer and backwoods grocery store manager. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan.
Bonnie Nardi, UC Irvine
Bonnie Nardi is an anthropologist in the Department of Informatics in the School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine. She has studied many forms of social life on the Internet including blogging, instant messaging, and gaming. She has been conducting participant-observation research in World of Warcraft since December 2005, examining collaboration, learning, and work-play interplay. She is also interested in the use of virtual worlds in the workplace. Bonnie's latest book, co-authored with Victor Kaptelinin, is Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design (MIT Press, 2006). She's trying to write a book on WoW, but it's so much more fun to actually play...
Byron Reeves, Stanford University/Seriosity, Inc.
Celia Pearce, Georgia
Celia Pearce is a game designer, author, researcher, teacher, curator and artist, specializing in multiplayer gaming and virtual worlds, independent, art, and alternative game genres, as well as games and gender. She began designing interactive attractions and exhibitions in 1983, and has held academic appointments since 1998. She received her Ph.D. in 2006 from SMARTLab Centre, then at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. She currently is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Tech, where she also directs the Experimental Game Lab and the Emergent Game Group. Her game designs include the award-winning virtual reality attraction Virtual Adventures (for Iwerks and Evans & Sutherland) and the Purple Moon Friendship Adventure Cards for Girls. She is the author or co-author of numerous papers and book chapters, as well as The Interactive Book (Macmillan 1997). She has also curated new media, virtual reality, and game exhibitions and is currently Festival Chair for IndieCade, an international independent games festival and showcase series. She is a co-founder of the Ludica women’s game collective.
Kate Rosier, Georgia
I'm an undergrad student at Georgia Tech in my fourth of five years. I'm student assisting for this workshop. As far as MMOGs go, I've done a small amount of research in the form of an independent study project on the other player impacts in World of Warcraft, but for the most part, I'm just a MMOG fan girl who loves the social aspects of these games, both as play and as material for research/study.
Walt Scacchi, UC Irvine
Walt has been involved in research and development of computer game culture and technology since 1999. His focus started with examination of game modding as a world of work where open source software development practices and computer game play come together. Starting in 2004, his interests grew to include science learning games, and to the development and deployment of such games through partnerships with regional science centers in different parts of the world. I have also been involved as an expert in litigation surrounding patents in game software and hardware technologies. Last, he also serves as the Research Director for the UCI Game Culture and Technology Laboratory.
Susan Stucky, IBM Research
David Shaffer, University of Wisconsin,
David Williamson Shaffer is a former teacher, curriculum developer, gamer and game designer. He is Assistant Professor of Learning Science in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Department of Educational Psychology and a Game Scientist at the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning CoLaboratory. Dr. Shaffer studies how new technologies change the way people think and learn. His most recent book is "How Computer Games Help Children Learn," available in December 2006 from Palgrave Press.
T.L. Taylor, IT University of Copenhagen
T.L. Taylor is associate professor in the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen where she also heads the Multimedia Technology and Games graduate program. As a sociologist, she has been working in the field of internet and multi-user studies for over fifteen years and has published on topics such as values in design, avatars and online embodiment, play and experience in online worlds, gender and gaming, pervasive gaming, and intellectual property in MMOGs. Her book Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006) uses her multi-year ethnography of EverQuest to explore issues related to play and game culture. She is currently researching the professional computer gaming scene.
Nicholas Yee, PlayOn Group, PARC
Nick Yee is a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center. His research in the psychology of virtual worlds has touched on the intersection of work and play in several ways. At Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, his dissertation work focused on how transformations of self-representation can lead to behavioral changes in virtual environments. At PARC, he worked with the PlayOn Group to data-mine server data from World of Warcraft to examine, for example, the guild metrics that best predict survivability. And at the technolog startup, Seriosity, he worked on a project sponsored by IBM that explored how leadership in online games can help inform the future of leadership in increasingly virtualized corporations.
