The Game Developers Choice Awards are awards annually presented at the Game Developers Conference for outstanding game developers and games. Introduced in 2001, the Game Developers Choice Awards were preceded by the Spotlight Awards, which were presented from 1997 to 1999. Since then, the ceremony for the Independent Games Festival is held just prior to the Choice Awards ceremony.
The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for video game developers. The event includes an expo, networking events, and awards shows like the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival, and a variety of tutorials, lectures, and roundtables by industry professionals on game-related topics covering programming, design, audio, production, business and management, and visual arts.
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is a nonprofit professional association whose stated mission is to "support and empower game developers around the world in achieving fulfilling and sustainable careers."
Monochrom is an international art-technology-philosophy group, publishing house and film production company. It was founded in 1993, and defines itself as "an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science and political activism". Its main office is located at Museumsquartier/Vienna.
Johannes Grenzfurthner is an Austrian artist, filmmaker, writer, actor, curator, theatre director, performer and lecturer. Grenzfurthner is the founder, conceiver and artistic director of monochrom, an international art and theory group and film production company. Most of his artworks are labeled monochrom.
Robert Bates is an American computer game designer. One of the early designers of interactive fiction games, he was co-founder of Challenge, Inc., which created games in the 1980s for the pioneering company Infocom. After Infocom's dissolution in 1989, Bates co-founded Legend Entertainment to continue publishing games in the Infocom tradition, but with added graphics. Notable games that he has designed, written, or produced include Unreal II (2003), Spider-Man 3 (2007), and Eric the Unready (1993), listed as Adventure Game of the Year by Computer Gaming World magazine and also included on the 1996 list of "150 best games of all time". In 1998 he wrote the award-winning game Quandaries for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has twice been the chairperson of the International Game Developers Association, which honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. Bates has written extensively about game design and development in works such as the 2001 book Game Design: The Art and Business of Creating Games, which is commonly used as a game design textbook in college courses. From 2011–2014, Bates was Chief Creative Officer for External Studios at Zynga. He continues to work as an independent consultant with various publishers in the games industry.
Brenda Louise Romero, previously known as Brenda Brathwaite, is an American game designer and developer in the video game industry. She was born in Ogdensburg, New York and is a graduate of Clarkson University. Romero is best known for her work on the Wizardry series of role-playing video games and, more recently, the non-digital series The Mechanic is the Message. She has worked in game development since 1981 and has credits on 49 game titles.
Roboexotica is an annual festival and conference where scientists, researchers, computer experts and artists from all over the world build cocktail robots and discuss technological innovation, futurology and science fiction. Roboexotica is also an ironic attempt to criticize techno-triumphalism and to dissect technological hypes.
Jennifer MacLean is known for being the chief executive officer at 38 Studios, an independent game developer, from 2009 to 2012 and the executive director of the IGDA from September 2017 to April 2019.
Justine M. Cassell is an American professor and researcher interested in human-human conversation, human-computer interaction, and storytelling. Since August 2010, she has been on the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and the Language Technologies Institute, with courtesy appointments in Psychology, and the Center for Neural Bases of Cognition. Cassell has served as the chair of the HCII, as associate vice-provost, and as Associate Dean of Technology Strategy and Impact for the School of Computer Science. She currently divides her time between Carnegie Mellon, where she now holds the Dean's Professorship in Language Technologies, and PRAIRIE, the Paris Institute on Interdisciplinary Research in AI, where she also holds the position of senior researcher at Inria Paris.
Kokoromi is a group with the intent of promoting video games as an art form, and experimental gameplay worldwide. The collective consists of independent videogame creators and curators Damien Quartz, Phil Fish, Heather Kelley, and Cindy Poremba. Most of the members met in 2005, working on a small game project for a cultural event in Montreal. The group was a pioneer in what came to be known as the "New Arcade".
Marc Mencher is an American executive in the video game industry, who has written multiple articles and books about gaming careers, such as the 2003 book Get in the Game: Careers in the Game Industry. He is best known as co-founder and CEO of the recruiting agency GameRecruiter.com, and is a frequent contributor to game developer trade magazines and websites such as Gamasutra.
Arse Elektronika is an annual conference organized by the Austrian arts and philosophy collective monochrom, focused on sex and technology. The festival presents talks, workshops, machines, presentations and films. The festival's curator is Johannes Grenzfurthner. Between 2007 and 2015, the event was held in San Francisco, but is now a traveling event in different countries.
Robin Hunicke is an American video game designer and producer. She is a professor of game design at UC Santa Cruz and the co-founder of Funomena.
Jennifer Pahlka is an American businesswoman and political advisor. She is the founder and former Executive Director of Code for America. She served as US Deputy Chief Technology Officer from June 2013 to June 2014 and helped found the United States Digital Service. Previously she had worked at CMP Media with various roles in the computer game industry. She was the co-chair and general manager of the Web 2.0 conferences. In June 2023, she released the book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.
YinzCam is an American software company that builds mobile applications, IPTV platforms and augmented-reality experiences. It specializes in creating applications for professional sports organizations. As of 2018, YinzCam's software had been downloaded over 55 million times and used by 170+ sports properties, including NFL clubs, NBA/WNBA teams, AFL clubs (Australia), La Liga clubs (Spain), as well as in the La Liga official league app and the NBA's G League app and the NBA2k app. The applications generally offer real-time statistics, multimedia, streaming radio, social media. The live video technology offering instant replay, including NFL RedZone, is offered within NFL stadiums.
Matthias Böttger is a German architect and curator.
Mattie Brice is an independent video game designer, critic, educator, and industry activist. Her games and writing focus on diversity initiatives in the games industry, discussing the perspective of marginalized minority voices to publications like Paste, Kotaku, and The Border House. Her games are freeware and do not require programming to create.
Johanna Pirker is an Austrian computer scientist, educator, and game designer at Graz University of Technology and professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich with a focus on games research, virtual reality and data science. Pirker was listed on the Forbes 30 under 30 Europe list in the category Science & Healthcare (2018) for her efforts in improving digital education with virtual reality environments and games. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Her dissertation was supervised by the Austrian e-learning expert Christian Gütl and MIT professor of physics John Winston Belcher. She is involved in various efforts to educate about the potential of video games. This also includes efforts to advocate the background and cultural aspect of video games. In 2020 she received the Käthe-Leichter Prize for her efforts for her initiatives in the field of diversity in engineering and in the games industry. In 2021 she received the Hedy Lamarr Prize.
