GDC 2019 welcomes a wonderful group of new Summit advisors!

Now that the call for submissions for the GDC 2019 Summits (as well as the Virtual Reality Developers Conference [VRDC] and Game Career Seminar) has gone out, we're excited to tell you more about some of the new additions to the advisory teams who help shape these programs.

As a reminder, VRDC and the GDC Summits take place the first two days of GDC 2019 (March 18th and 19th), kicking off the weeklong event at San Franciso's Moscone Convention Center, and the Game Career Seminar helps close it out on Friday, March 22nd.

Each program has its own special advisory board which evaluates submissions, and this year we're excited to welcome the following industry leaders who are joining these efforts for the first time. We also have one returning advisor, whom we're very pleased to have back:

AI Summit

Emily Short - Character Engine Product Manager, Spirit AI

Emily Short is a Character Engine Product Manager and an Executive Director at Spirit AI, where she works with natural language processing and generation, character moods and social behavior, and conversation modelling. She was previously the creative director of the Versu project, building interactive iPad stories around AI character agents. She has an extensive background in games writing and narrative design as well as tooling for writing interactive fiction. Her blog can be found at http://emshort.blog.

Community Management Summit

Grace Carroll - Lead Social Media Manager, Creative Assembly

Grace oversees the social media channels for Creative Assembly’s 18-year-old award-winning franchise, ‘Total War’. She’s been working in the industry for the last 3 years and was recently named as MCV’s 30 Under 30, and was a finalist in the 2017 Women in Game Awards. She works to promote Creative Assembly’s ‘Total War: WARHAMMER’ series as well as the historical titles, cultivating a strong community tone of voice and drawing on strategic engagement through her love of puns and memes.

Educators Summit

Miguel Sicart - Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Games, IT University of Copenhagen

Miguel Sicart is an Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Games, IT University of Copenhagen. His research has focused on the ethics of digital games and game design. He teaches courses on game design and experimental digital play design, and was Head of Program for the IT University’s GAMES MsC between 2009 and 2013. His more recent work explores the nature of play, with a particular interest in the ludic aspects of computational technologies. He is the author of The Ethics of Computer Games, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay, and Play Matters (The MIT Press, 2009, 2013, 2014).

Indie Summit

Tanya X. Short – Captain, Kitfox Games

Tanya X. Short is the Captain of Kitfox Games, a small studio in Montreal responsible for such games as ‘Boyfriend Dungeon’, ‘The Shrouded Isle’, and ‘Moon Hunters’. She started in games in 2003 as an intern on ‘iLoveBees’, the ARG leading up to the launch of ‘HALO 2’. She is also a co-founder/co-director of Pixelles, a feminist non-profit, and co-editor of Procedural Generation in Game Design (2017).

Steve Swink – Creative Director, CubeHeart Games

A returning advisor to GDC, Steve Swink is a game designer and occasional author. His current project is ‘SCALE’. He wrote Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation which some people have read.

Mobile Summit

Katrina Wolfe - Studio Operations Manager, Kongregate

After graduating from USC in Classics and Game Design, Katrina jumped into the world of social and mobile games at Grab Games. There she worked on a variety of games and carved a path into production after spending a few years as a game designer. She worked at TinyCo on ‘Family Guy: Quest for Stuff’ before ending up at Kongregate where she works currently. At Kongregate she spent the last few years leading the production charge for ‘Animation Throwdown’. She is now a Studio Operations Manager working with Kongregate’s internal studios.

And as we announced yesterday, the call for submissions is open for GDC 2019’s Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC), GDC Summits, and Game Career Seminar through Friday, October 5th at 11:59 pm Pacific Time! As always, please review the submission guidelines and topics before submitting!

For more details on the submission process or GDC 2019 in general visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

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