Game Career Seminar
March 27, 2009
Moscone Convention Center
San Francisco, CA
Meet the Speakers:
Brenda Brathwaite
Game Designer and Head of Game Design at Savannah College of Art and Design
Brenda Brathwaite is a game designer, game consultant, professor of game design at Savannah College of Art and Design, and holds a seat on the IGDA board of directors. She has worked on 22 internationally known titles, including Def Jam: Icon, Playboy: The Mansion, and the award-winning Wizardry series. Brenda is the longest, continuously serving woman in video game development today according to an August 2007 Next Generation article. Brenda is the chair and founder of the IGDA’s Sex SIG and has extensively studied and consulted on sexually themed video games. She has also written a book on the subject, Sex in Video Games, published by Thomson Learning in 2006. She is a passionate anti-censorship advocate and a proponent of parental rating awareness. In 2006, Brenda was named one of the 100 most influential women in the game industry by Next Generation magazine and her peers, and Nerve magazine cited her as a “New Radical” -- one of “the 50 artists, actors, authors, activists and icons who are making the world a more stimulating place.” In the spring of 2007, she was awarded the Presidential Fellowship at Savannah College of Art and Design to develop an exhibit and presentation titled, “What You Don't Know About Video Games...”
Jill Duffy
Editor-in-Chief, GameCareerGuide.com
Jill Duffy has been writing about and reporting on the video game industry for five years. As editor-in-chief of GameCareerGuide.com, she is dedicated to helping people launch their careers as successful and professional video game developers. She is also senior contributing editor of Game Developer magazine, the official trade magazine of game developers in North America, and a writer for Gamasutra.com.
Darius Kazemi
President of Orbus Gameworks
Darius Kazemi runs Orbus Gameworks, a small company that builds game play data metrics tools to help developers keep track of what their players are doing in-game. Before Orbus, Darius analyzed gameplay metrics at Turbine, Inc., for MMORPGs, including Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online. He is also a technology officer for the IGDA Education SIG and a coordinator for the Boston IGDA Chapter. He writes about networking and how to break into the game industry on his blog, Tiny Subversions.
Emil Pagliarulo
Lead Game Designer and Writer at Bethesda Game Studio
Emil Pagliarulo worked for several years as a journalist before going to work as a designer at Looking Glass Studios, where he contributed to Thief Gold and served as a designer on Thief 2: The Metal Age. He followed the Thief series to Ion Storm Austin, and continued work as a senior designer on Thief: Deadly Shadows. He has been at Bethesda Game Studios for the past several years. At Bethesda he served as a senior designer on the Bloodmoon expansion to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, named 2006 Game of the Year and RPG of the Year — he was responsible for the Dark Brotherhood and Arena quest lines. He served as lead designer and writer of Fallout 3, named 2008 Game of the Year and RPG of the Year.
Sam Petro
PC Engineer at Namco Networks
Sam Petro graduated from DeVry University under the Games and Simulations Programming degree in June 2008, then began work as a junior PC games engineer at Namco Networks of America the following August. So far, she has worked on two titles for the PC, as well as one unannounced title still in development. In Petro’s day-to-day job, she programs anything from graphics and animations to menuing systems, to data structures, and mathematical calculations. Her favorite game genres are puzzle, fighting, and RPG, with No More Heroes and Legend of Legaia being her favorites.
Jim Rivers
Hiring Manager at Obsidian Entertainment
Jim Rivers is the hiring manager at Obsidian Entertainment, a game studio (Neverwinter Nights 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2) in Orange County, Calif.
Rivers previously worked as a career advisor at The Art Institute California-Orange County, assisting animation and game development students. He’s also an Art Institute alum.
James Schomer
Systems Designer at Cryptic Studios
James Schomer is a systems designer at Cryptic Studios and an alumnus of The Guildhall game development masters program at Southern Methodist University. He worked for a brief stint at an Activision Studio before landing his current position. Despite the tumultuous nature of the industry, Schomer says he loves it and doesn’t ever plan to go back to his previous profession in chemistry, about which he says, “Yuck.”
Grant Shonkwiler
Game Programmer and Associate Designer at Merit Entertainment
Grant Shonkwiler started designing games after losing his data on a copy of Pokémon. The loss of the game data enraged him so much that he wrote a design document with a friend called Pokémon Killer. After realizing no one in his right mind could publish this game, he began to delve into the game industry, as much as he could as a 12-year-old, designing levels for PC games for his friends to play and reading everything he could find on the industry. After graduating high school, Shonkwiler attended Full Sail University, where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Game Development. While at Full Sail, he fell in love with both programming and working on a game team. After graduation, he accepted a job at Merit Entertainment where he is a game programmer and associate designer. He has also written for GameCareerGuide.com and is a forum moderator on the site, helping students and future game. His website is gshonk.com.
Tom Sloper
Game Designer and Producer and Educator
Tom Sloper has been a game producer and designer for more than 25 years, having designed and produced games for most major console platforms from the 2600, 7800, and Vectrex on up to the PlayStation, Dreamcast, Xbox 360, and Nintendo DS, as well as games for PC, Mac, Internet, and interactive television. He's worked for Sega, Atari, Activision, and Yahoo!. An author and speaker, Sloper has contributed to several books on games and the industry (Secrets of the Game Business, Game Design Perspectives, Introduction to Game Development), and teaches at the University of Southern California about video game design, producing, and quality assurance. He is an internationally recognized author and expert on the classic Chinese game of mah-jongg.
