Speakers

G.C. “Grim” Baccaris: “If And Only If”: Exploring Variables and Conditional Logic in Interactive Fiction; G.C. “Grim” Baccaris is a writer, game developer, and plague mask collector with an interest in the uncanny and macabre. Grim’s work has been published in sub-Q Magazine, exhibited at the Hand Eye Society’s WordPlay Festival, and is forthcoming from Kaleidotrope. Grim’s other work includes Heretic’s Hope, Excalibur, and the Twine Grimoire series.
Tori Beaty: Unlocking Hidden Rules of Office Hours: A Twine Game Jam on First-Generation College Students’ Experiences
Matt Campbell: Bringing Full Accessibility to Mainstream Narrative Games; Matt Campbell is a visually impaired software developer who has specialized in accessibility for blind and visually impaired people for about 20 years. He has written a screen reader for Windows and worked on the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft. He occasionally plays parser-based interactive fiction; other than that, he has no experience in the games industry or the interactive fiction community.
Nessa Cannon: Once A Pawn A Time: Using Chess As A Metaphor in Narrative; Nessa Cannon is a game writer and narrative designer from Southern California currently working in the video games industry. She’s worked on over a dozen projects ranging from indie to AAA as well as six released Twine games during her 2+ years in the industry. Her favorite video game currently is Sea of Thieves, and she has a dog named Ougi who doesn’t like video games nearly as much as her.
VerBon Cheung: Twine in the Classroom; Dr Wing Yee (VerBon) Cheung is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Winchester. She is a social psychologist who studies the motivational properties of emotions. She has particular interests in teaching research methods and seeks to find ways to circumvent students’ anxiety towards statistics.
Adam Clare: How We Made a Story-Driven Puzzle Game for a Massive Multinational
Dan Cox: Crash Course on ink; Daniel Cox is a PhD candidate at the University of Central Florida. He is the creator and was the primary contributor to the Twine Cookbook (2017) for multiple years, co-authored The Unofficial Ink Cookbook (2020), and wrote Dynamic Story Scripting with the ink Scripting Language (2021).
Jeff Crocker: Building an Interactive Documentary; Jeff Crocker won the World’s Worst Writing contest at California State University, Long Beach in 2001. He created the award-winning interactive show “Escape from Godot” with his partner, Andy. Together they have also created original work for the La Jolla Playhouse’s Without Walls festival and Noah’s Ark at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. He builds museums and theme park attractions. He is the President for the Western North America division of the Themed Entertainment Association. He is a fugitive from the film and television industry, having worked on CSI: New York and Cabin in the Woods. He was previously a member of the Superego podcast. He was born and raised and bar mitzvahed in Los Angeles.
Jarory de Jesus: To the beat y’all: Telling a Hip Hop Story Through Games; A game developer who specializes in narrative design, implementation, and programming. Jarory inspires his colleagues and next generation developers through collaborative projects and teaching game development. As a developer he’s worked on properties such as Madden, Marvel, and Star Wars as both a Narrative and Technical Designer. He dedicates his spare time to a Hip Hop RPG which he describes as a passion project. He has participated in multiple game jams including global game jam and train jam. As a developer of color, he seeks to amplify minority voices through inclusive design, unique perspectives in narrative, community service, and activism. Jarory is also a community organizer for Black in Gaming (BiG) and a member of the Latinx in Gaming community.
Brendan Desilets: Teaching for Transfer with Interactive Fiction; Brendan Desilets has taught in Massachusetts (USA) 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. Brendan’s writings have appeared in The Journal of Reading, The Journal of Teaching Writing, The English Journal, Educational Leadership,The Middle School Journal, Currents in Electronic Literacy, Learning and Leading with Technology, Sundance Publishers’ Analyt series, and the New England League of Middle Schools’ monograph collection. His website, “Teaching and Learning with Interactive Fiction” first appeared in the 1990’s.
Jason Dyer: What I’ve Learned From (Attempting) to Play Every Adventure Game Ever Made
Matthew Farber: Unlocking Hidden Rules of Office Hours: A Twine Game Jam on First-Generation College Students’ Experiences; Matthew Farber, Ed.D. is an associate professor of Educational Technology at the University of Northern Colorado, where he co-directs the Gaming SEL Lab.
Clara Fernandez-Vara: Inform as a Tool to Teach Narrative Design and Game Writing; Clara Fernandez-Vara is a game designer and writer, and Associate Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center, where she teaches narrative design and game studies. She is also the author of book Introduction to Game Analysis, which is now in its second edition.
Karsten Feyerabend: Introduction to articy:draft 3; Karsten Feyerabend is an industry veteran working in games since 2009. Before writing and producing content for Articy Software he’s been wearing many different hats in both indie and AAA studios. Happy to talk games both on and off the clock.
Geoffrey Golden: Inbox Adventure: Email as IF Game Platform; Geoffrey Golden is a narrative designer and game creator based in Los Angeles. Over the past 15 years, he’s written for Disney, Capcom, Ubisoft, and indie studios around the world. His interactive email game, Adventure Snack, is one of the most popular fiction newsletters on Substack.
Josh Grams: Plant Patterns, People Patterns: Design Prompts for Agriculture-Driven Narratives; Josh Grams has been a full-time organic market gardener in rural Maine since 2007, an enthusiastic computer programmer since he was a teenager in 1993, and has somehow never really written fiction despite growing up in a large extended family of word nerds. He toys with game design, classical piano, and machine stenography in his spare time.
Nico Valdivia Hennig: Hawk and Puma: Bringing the “New Chronicle and Good Government” to the Present
Kenton Taylor Howard: Crash Course on ink; Dr. Kenton Taylor Howard is a lecturer in the University of Central Florida’s Games and Interactive Media program. He completed his PhD in UCF’s Texts and Technology program in 2021. His dissertation focused on the notion of “critical modding,” and he built an Ink game prototype, Life in the Megapocalypse, as part of his dissertation project.
Elian E. Jentoft (eveghost): Engaging with Under the Surface at Surface Level or What Happens When Nobody Knows It’s a Game?; eveghost (they/them) is the primary creator of Under the Surface, donning many hats in the project ranging from author to songwriter and musician to web developer to video editor and graphic designer. They are a nonbinary, autistic American Ph.D. fellow currently living in Norway, previously known for their work as a vocalist in the gothic and post punk bands Scarlet’s Remains and Christ vs. Warhol.
Michelle Jolley: Twine in the Classroom
Joey Jones: Introduction to Tracery: Make a Twitter Bot!; Joey Jones is an interactive fiction author (The Chinese Room, Sub Rosa, Trials of the Thief-Taker), PhD research in interactive narrative at Southampton University and creator of many twitter bots. These include @UnlikelyPowers, a generator of joke superhero powers, and @AllWittgenstein, which will eventually tweet the complete writings of Wittgenstein (out of sequence).
Alexis Kim: Inform Bookcamp / Inform Bootcamp Debrief; Alexis Kim is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her research interests are educational game and simulation design. She currently teaches courses on games and general design through the School of Information Science and the Game Studies Program.
Chris Klimas: Intro to Chapbook; Chris Klimas created Twine, an open-source tool for interactive text-based storytelling, in 2009 and continues to lead the project. He’s also the author of several IF works, including the award-winning Blue Chairs, and is a principal at Unmapped Path.
Jonathan Lessard: Adaptative and Generative Text for Unity; Jonathan Lessard is a game designer and researcher. He is a an associate professor at Concordia University (Montréal) where he leads the LabLabLab research group exploring emergent storytelling and natural language interaction.
Kathryn Li: A Hollow-Horned Rumination: Affective Storytelling and Ethical Artmaking; Kathryn is an illustrator, graphic designer, and sometimes writer exploring visual storytelling’s ability to communicate complex ideas with thoughtfulness. She studied illustration at RISD and now spends most of her time designing for children’s books. Goat Game was an entry at IFComp 2021.
William Merchant: Unlocking Hidden Rules of Office Hours: A Twine Game Jam on First-Generation College Students’ Experiences; William Merchant, Ph.D. is an associate professor of Applied Statistics and Research Methods at the University of Northern Colorado, where he co-directs the Gaming SEL Lab.
Katherine Morayati: New Stories, Old Interfaces: Playing, Writing, and Designing Immersive Diegetic Narrative Games; Katherine Morayati is a writer and narrative designer from New York. She is currently collaborating with Josh Grams and Ian Michael Waddell on a game inspired by ’90s shareware. A week ago as of time of writing she realized the title of this conference was a pun, and now you have realized it too.
Stuart Moulthrop: Intro to Chapbook; Stuart Moulthrop is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he coordinates the concentration in Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies and serves as Co-Director of the Digital Cultures Collaboratory in the Center for 21st Century Studies. He is author of several notable works of electronic literature including Victory Garden (1991), Under Language (2008), and End of the White Subway (2016). He has collaborated with Dene Grigar on Traversals (2017), concerning the preservation of early electronic literature, and with Anastasia Salter on Twining (2020), a critical/practical study of the Twine platform.
Gabriel Murray: Morale Is Very Low; Gabriel Murray is a writer and instructional designer living in northern California. He creates fantasy and interactive fiction for adult and young adult audiences. His fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons and his nonfiction at the SFWA and Xyzzy Awards. He lives with a former restaurant cat.
Graham Nelson: The Futures of Inform; Graham Nelson is the author of the Inform programming language for interactive fiction, and is a Fellow of St Anne’s College in the University of Oxford.
Raluca Percec: Introduction to articy:draft 3
Martin Pichlmair: Curiosity Multiplied The Cat: Five AI Writing Experiments To Try At Home; Martin Pichlmair is a researcher, game developer, entrepreneur, and former media artist. He is Associate Professor at ITU Copenhagen, co-founder of the Vienna-based indie games studio Broken Rules, and currently gearing up for a new commercial venture in creative AI. He loves hot food.
Judith Pintar: Inform Bookcamp / Inform Bootcamp Debrief / Educator’s Town Hall and Social; Judith Pintar is the Director of Game Studies & Design at the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She serves on the Board of Directors of IFTF, and is the chair of the Education Committee.
Colin Post: My (Mostly) Frustrated Efforts to Collect Narrative Games in an Academic Library; Colin Post is an Assistant Professor in Library and Information Science at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro. His research focuses on the preservation of digital art and literature in libraries and creative communities.
Charlene Putney: Curiosity Multiplied The Cat: Five AI Writing Experiments To Try At Home; Charlene Putney is an award-winning writer and teacher from Ireland. After working at Google and Facebook in management positions for almost a decade, she turned to the more creative side of tech and began writing for videogames in 2013. Before moving to Denmark, she worked on Divinity: Original Sin 2 and story for the upcoming Baldur’s Gate 3. She’s currently setting up a start-up with her partner Martin Pichlmair to make machine learning more accessible to writers – it’s at writewithlaika.com. She also teaches interactive fiction at university level and yoga on Tuesday evenings. Say hi to @alphachar!
Aaron A. Reed: Keynote: 5 Lessons From 50 Years of Text Games; Aaron is a writer and game designer focused on helping gamemakers and players tell stories together. He is a multi-time IndieCade and IGF finalist, and has spoken about digital storytelling at venues from Google to GaymerX, PAX to WorldCon. His procedural novel Subcutanean was a 2021 Lambda Literary finalist, and his tabletop roleplaying game Archives of the Sky won an ENnie in 2019. His 2009 game Blue Lacuna was voted one of the top five interactive fiction games of all time in a poll by users of the IFDB.
Anastasia Salter: Educator’s Town Hall and Social; Anastasia Salter is an associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida, and author most recently of Playful Pedagogy in the Pandemic: Pivoting to Games-Based Learning (with Emily Johnson, Routledge 2022) and Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives (with Stuart Moulthrop, Amherst College 2021).
Hélène Sellier: Designing a Pattern for Dialogue Choices in Discriminatory Situations; Hélène Sellier is a researcher and a Narrative Designer in the studio The Seed Crew. She works on narrativity and expressivity of games. Her PhD thesis is about the relationships between literature and video games, studying the diverse forms of frictions and hybridizations between the two media cultures.
Valentin SERRI: Building a Desirable Future is Not an Individual Heroic Effort; Valentin Serri is a Game Narrative Designer & Writer on Red Sails, in the studio Fugue Interactive. Convinced of the political impact that the video game medium can reach, he explores and works on the notion of desirable futures and other utopias in relation to their incorporation in these interactive works.
Tanya X. Short: Narrative Tools of Boyfriend Dungeon; Tanya X. Short is the Captain of Kitfox Games and led the design of Boyfriend Dungeon and Moon Hunters. She also was a co-editor of the textbooks Procedural Generation in Game Design and Procedural Storytelling in Game Design, and serves as co-founder and co-director of Pixelles, a non-profit helping more genders make more games and change games culture.
Rebecca Slitt: Choosing Your Happily Ever After: Choice and Agency in Romance IF; Rebecca Slitt is an editor and partner at Choice of Games and Heart’s Choice. For Choice of Games, she is the author of the YA paranormal interactive novels Psy High and Psy High 2; and has edited more than 20 interactive novels, including the Nebula finalists The Martian Job, The Road to Canterbury, and The Luminous Underground. She has also contributed to numerous tabletop and live-action roleplaying games, including Timewatch, Noirlandia, and Geist. With her PhD in medieval history, she can advise time-travelers on where to get the best takeout in medieval London, and how to build your castle to account for dragons.
Christopher J Smith: “Musicologists’ Creed”: Digital Interactive Fiction, Historical Role-Play, and the Pedagogy of Narrative Play; Chris Smith is Professor, Chair of Musicology, and director of the Vernacular Music Center at Texas Tech University. His monographs are The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (2013) and Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History (2019); his next book, with Thomas Irvine, is a global history of the soundscapes of imperial encounter. He is producer, co-host, and showrunner for the podcasts SOUNDING HISTORY and VOICES FROM THE VERNACULAR MUSIC CENTER.
Lee Tusman: Fantasy Filing Systems: Interactive Narratives of the OS; Lee Tusman is a New York-based new media artist, educator and organizer interested in the application of the radical ethos of collectives and DIY culture to the creation of, aesthetics, and open-source distribution methods of digital culture. He creates exhibitions, installations, interactive media, games, websites, bots and podcasts. His work has been shown at museums, galleries, artist-run spaces and virtual environments. He studied at Brandeis University and received his MFA at UCLA. He is Assistant Professor of New Media and Computer Science at Purchase College.
Lee is an organizer with Babycastles, a NYC-based collective fostering and amplifying diverse voices in videogame culture as well as a collaborator with artist-run community Flux Factory. He co-founded Processing Community Day NYC. He is a past organizer at Hidden City Philadelphia, Little Berlin and KCHUNG Radio, and a past resident at Pioneer Works and Signal Culture.
Josh Unsworth: Rapid Research; Josh Unsworth is a game designer and writer at Mohawk Games, working on the historical strategy game Old World. This draws on his past experience studying ancient history and as one half of the micro indie studio Three Knots.
Doug Valenta: Narrative Instruments in Practice
Ian Michael Waddell: New Stories, Old Interfaces: Playing, Writing, and Designing Immersive Diegetic Narrative Games; Ian Michael Waddell is a narrative designer and writer at EA Mobile. He wrote Animalia in 2018, a very silly game. Together with Katherine Morayati and Josh Grams, he is working on an narrative anthology about shareware.
Damon Wakes: Twine in the Classroom; Damon L. Wakes is the author of Ten Little Astronauts and over 300 works of short fiction, but is probably best known for his Twine for Beginners series of tutorials. He also produces interactive fiction of his own, almost all of it using Twine. He is a member of the IFTF Education Committee.
Anna C. Webster: Now You’re Thinking with Parts: Using Internal Family Systems in Narrative Design; Anna C. Webster is a writer and narrative designer for games with a background in the performing arts. Her previous work includes Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 and is currently writing an unannounced title with Well Told Entertainment.
Manda Whitney: Narrative in a Box: Interactive Fiction in the Physical World; Manda Whitney is a Toronto based writer and narrative designer. She has lead narrative design on large scale immersive theatrical escape rooms, take home puzzle box games, and consulted on a variety of escape rooms, video games, and puzzle box games. When she is not madly analyzing every narrative she comes across, she is playing every mystery game she can get her hands on. Her most recent project was Diorama’s Vandermist Dossier.
Kathryn Yu: Putting Words In My Mouth: The Unsilent Protagonist in VR
John Zajac: Narrative Instruments in Practice