Tom Apperley, PhD  is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. He conducts research on digital games and playful technologies with an emphasis on their impact and influence on culture, particularly areas such as social policy, pedagogy and social inclusion. Tom’s more recent work has appeared in Games and Culture, New Review of Multimedia and Hypermedia, and Mobilities.

Megan Condis, PhD is an assistant professor of Communication Studies at Texas Tech University.  Her book, Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture, was published in 2018 by the University of Iowa Press.

Jason Cox, PhD is an assistant professor of Art Education and head of the Art Education program at the University of Toledo in Toledo,  Ohio. His games and research represent his interest in exploring the tensions between individuals, ideals, and communities.

Joshua Goldfond is a professional writer living in New York City. He has worked in advertising and journalism, and has written for film, TTRPG sourcebooks, graphic novels and literary fiction. His graduate thesis at NYU Steinhardt, The Digital Mask, contrasted TTRPGs and MMORPGs to study the role that online anonymity plays in self-representation and relationship building. He’s been playing role-playing games since the Great Old Ones were young. His website is https://www.joshuagoldfond.com.

Alex Hogue, PhD is Assistant Professor of German at Coastal Carolina University where his classes focus on film, games, and issues of interculturality and social justice in Germany. His research centers on conceptions of consciousness and robots in posthumanism and German philosophy.

Matt Horrigan is a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts, living and working on unceded territories belonging to the Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish and Musqueam first nations. Coming from a background as a musician, theatre maker and multidisciplinary artist, Matt’s research examines the social infrastructure of art scenes through the lens of game studies, and games through the lens of social theory. Matt lives in one of Vancouver, BC’s many collective houses.

Miles Hubble is a second year PhD student at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His interests span film, video and tabletop games, reality television, and multimedia art, but his work always centers on one principal question: how are the “real” and the “authentic” indexed by cultural productions and rhetorics? Miles’s current research interests include “realism” in new media, especially with regard to survival video games, and the rhetoric of alternative political movements, including the alt-right and the so-called “primitive living” movement.

Jonathan Rey Lee, PhD is a comparatist who currently researches material play media, especially toys and board games.  He has published articles on LEGO, Catan, and the Star Wars CCG and his book Deconstructing LEGO: The Medium and Messages of LEGO Play was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. Jonathan received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Riverside, where he studied nineteenth-century British and Russian realist literature and philosophy (especially Wittgenstein). He currently teaches interdisciplinary humanities and writing courses in Seattle for the University of Washington and Cascadia College.

Josh Aaron Miller is a PhD candidate at Northeastern University where he studies game-user interaction and transformational games. His work combines game design principles with the psychology of learning and motivation to create seamless and engaging user experiences in non-game contexts. He designed Descent Into Madness, a Lovecraftian horror one-shot RPG system published in the Indiepocalypse anthology, and he is currently the lead game designer of Foldit, the protein-folding game.

 
 
Niklas Nylund, PhD is a museum researcher and curator working for the Finnish Museum of Games in Tampere, Finland. His PhD Game Heritage: Digital Games in Museum Collections and Exhibitions (2020) deals with the heritagization of games in museums and hobbyist heritage communities. He is also an avid role-player who is also interested in the history of role-playing game conventions and past practices. His other research interests include game preservation, game history, exhibition design and questions of cultural heritage and inclusivity.

Roger SG Sorolla, PhD writes on the theory and practice of imaginative games as an avocation, starting with his 1996 online essay on text adventures, “Crimes Against Mimesis”, and continued since 2010 through his blog, Roles, Rules and Rolls. Through this blog he has released a graphic presentation of his fantasy heartbreaker roleplaying ruleset, The 52 Pages, and has returned to his teenage activity of Dungeon Mastering throughout the past ten years. From 2006 to 2015 he was a playtester, designer, and rules editor for Alderac Entertainment Group.  He is also a regular entrant and multiple prize-winner in the annual One Page Dungeon Contest, and has also contributed to such collaborative creative enterprises as Secret Santicore, the Petty Gods compilation and the Henry Justice Ford Monster Manual. Hailing from suburban Connecticut in the northeastern United States, Sorolla currently lives in Canterbury, England, where his more lucrative career as a professor of psychology has taken him.

Sarah Stang, PhD recently received her PhD from the Communication & Culture program at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is the editor-in-chief of the game studies journal Press Start and the former essays editor for the academic middle-state publication First Person Scholar. Her published work has focused primarily on gender representation in digital games and has been featured in journals such as Games & Culture, Game Studies, Human Technology, and Loading. Her current research explores the intersection of gender, hybridity, and monstrosity in science fiction and fantasy games and other media.

Ian Sturrock, PhD is a Senior Lecturer at Teesside University, as well as having written for and designed tabletop roleplaying games for Green Ronin, Guardians of Order, Cubicle 7, Modiphius Entertainment, Pelgrane Press and others.

Daniel Warmke is a game designer and PhD student at Ohio University’s School of Media Arts & Studies. He teaches about game design and programing, works on VR experiences for the Ohio University’s Game Research and Immersive Design (GRID) Lab, researches rules phenomena, and writes paper and pencil RPGs. His next paper and pencil RPG, Cartomancy, has successfully Kickstarted. Daniel’s dissertation work is on emergent gameplay in tabletop and digital games.