Contributor Bios

Jeremy Douglass
Brenda Bakker Harger
Shelley Jackson
Michael Mateas
Jane McGonigal
Nick Montfort
Scott Rettberg
Andrew Stern

Jeremy Douglass
Jeremy Douglass is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His research focuses on interactive fiction and reader response to textual new media. He is a founding member of Writer Response Theory , an online collective dedicated to the exploration of digital character art, and a database/web developer for numerous projects, including the academic search engine Voice of the Shuttle.

Brenda Bakker Harger
Brenda Bakker Harger is a professor of Entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University who is a director (MFA Carnegie Mellon Drama) and an improviser. Harger has focused most of her directing in developing new plays; her new association with technology has presented a new forum of exploration. In addition to having performed as an improviser for the Pittsburgh Chapter Theatresports, and for many years as part of SAK Theatre, she has taught improv in workshops nationally and internationally, and until recently was the Entertainment Director for the Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival.

Shelley Jackson
Shelley Jackson is the author of the short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, the hypertext classic PATCHWORK GIRL, several children¹s books, and "Skin," a story published in tattoos on the skin of 2095 volunteers. Her first novel Half Life is forthcoming from HarperCollins. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at the New School. Her website: <http://www.ineradicablestain.com>.

Michael Mateas
Michael Mateas is an assistant professor at Georgia Tech in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture and in the College of Computing. His work in expressive AI involves developing new forms of art and entertainment while also advancing AI research goals. His projects include Office Plant #1, Terminal Time, and, with Andrew, the interactive drama Façade.

Jane McGonigal
Jane McGonigal is a Ph.D. candidate in performance studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where she is also a researcher with the Alpha Lab for Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. She is a game designer for 42 Entertainment, where her work on pervasive gaming projects like I Love Bees (2004) and Tombstone Hold 'Em(2005) has been recognized with awards from the International Game Developers Association, the International Academy for Digital Arts and Sciences, and by the New York Times' Year in Review. Both her research and design practice focus on massively collaborative play and performance in everyday spaces. Jane takes play very seriously. Her website: <http://www.avantgame.com>.

Nick Montfort
Nick Montfort is a poet and computer scientist who lives in Philadelphia. He wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction(MIT Press, 2003), co-edited The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003), and collaborated on several literary projects, including The Ed Report, 2002, Implementation, and Mystery House Taken Over. His interactive fiction includes Winchester's Nightmare(1999) and Ad Verbum (2000). His website: <http://nickm.com/>.

Scott Rettberg
Scott Rettberg is assistant professor of New Media Studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and associate professor of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is the co-founder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization. He is co-author of The Unknown, a hypertext novel, co-author of Implementation, a sticker novel, and the author of the email novel Kind of Blue. His website: <http://retts.net>

Andrew Stern
Andrew Stern is a designer, researcher, writer and engineer of personality-rich, AI-based interactive characters and stories. Previous to co-developing the interactive drama Fa�ade, Andrew was a lead designer and software engineer of the award-winning Virtual Babyz, Dogz, and Catz from PF.Magic, which sold over 2 million units worldwide. Andrew's work has been presented and exhibited at venues such as the Game Developers Conference, SIGGRAPH, ISEA, DAC, DiGRA and AAAI symposia, and has been written about in the New York Times, Newsweek, Wired and AI Magazine. Andrew blogs at grandtextauto.org.

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