[game_edu] Complete Keynote Line-Up Announced for Meaningful Play 2016

[winnb at msu.edu]

We are excited to announce two additional keynote speakers for Meaningful Play 2016 (http://meaningfulplay.msu.edu), taking place October 20-22, 2016 in East Lansing, MI, USA.  Michealene Cristini Risley and Dr. Isabela Granic join Richard Lemarchand, Elizabeth LaPensée, Dr. Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Halcyone “Cy” Wise as keynote presenters.

Meaningful Play 2016 is a conference about theory, research, and game design innovations, principles and practices. Meaningful Play brings scholars and industry professionals together to understand and improve upon games to entertain, inform, educate, and persuade in meaningful ways.

The conference will include thought-provoking keynotes from leaders in academia and industry, peer-reviewed paper presentations, panel sessions (including academic and industry discussions), innovative workshops, roundtable discussions, and exhibitions of games and prototypes.

The call for submissions AND games is available NOW and is due July 14, 2016.  Complete details on the conference are available at: http://meaningfulplay.msu.edu/

Keynote Speakers:

--->Michealene Cristini Risley, Human rights warrior, entrepreneur, storyteller

Michealene Cristini Risley is an award-winning writer, director and human rights activist. She has worked with a number of fortune 100 companies such as Sega of America, Zynga, the Walt Disney Company, Marvel Comics, Nike, and Adidas. She ran for the Americans Elect nomination for President of the United States in 2012. Michealene founded and ran the non-profit organization Freshwater Haven from 2002 - 2014 to address the dramatic social change that is required to stop physical, sexual and emotional abuse of women and children.

As an award winning filmmaker, Michealene Cristini Risley co-wrote and directed Tapestries of Hope, a feature-length documentary that exposes the myth behind the belief that raping a virgin cures a man of HIV/AIDS. Her trip to Zimbabwe resulted in her being imprisoned and deported in an attempt by the Mugabe-led government police to quash her telling the story of Betty Makoni, a Zimbabwean child and human rights activist (a CNN top 10 hero for 2009) whose Girl Child Network rescues abused girls and provides them counseling, healing and educational support.

Currently, Michealene continues to focus on merging her corporate life with her work on human rights issues as well as innovative ways to leverage technology and media to create awareness and social change.

--->Isabela Granic, Professor and Chair, Developmental Psychopathology, Radboud University Nijmegen

Isabela Granic received her PhD from the University of Toronto in developmental psychology. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Developmental Psychopathology department at Radboud University, in the Netherlands. She is also co-founder of The PlayNice Institute, an organization that builds evidence-based games that promote emotional health and well-being for children and youth. Her research focuses on the positive effects of playing video games, including the cognitive, emotional and social benefits. By integrating clinical and developmental research with interactive media design, she is creating a suite of evidence-based games that are also commercially viable and can be widely disseminated to slash the prevalence rates of anxiety, depression and bullying in youth. She has published 50 articles with results from two decades of research which have appeared in the highest impact journals in developmental and clinical psychology.

--->Jacquelyn Ford Morie, Founder, CEO of All These Worlds and CTO of The Augmented Traveler Corp

Dr. Jacquelyn Ford Morie is widely known for using technology such as Virtual Reality (VR) to deliver meaningful experiences that enrich people's lives. Starting in 1990, she developed multi-sensory techniques for VR that can predictably elicit emotional responses from participants, for example inventing a scent collar that can deliver scents to a participant within an immersive experience. She is also active in online 3D virtual worlds (social VR) and through her company All These Worlds, LLC, has been bringing her techniques to such worlds for Mindfulness applications, storytelling and stress relief for veterans and soldiers. Along with SIFT (Smart Information Flow Technologies), she has created a virtual world ecosystem called ANSIBLE for NASA designed to provide psychological benefits for future astronauts who will undertake extremely long isolated missions to Mars. ANSIBLE is currently being tested in an analog facility called HISEAS in Hawaii, where a team of six scientists is sequestered for a full year to simulate the conditions of isolation on Mars, including communications delays.

Dr. Morie's other research interests include how space, identity and play in virtual worlds can positively affect our human nature, and she has presented this work at conferences worldwide. She has appeared in 2 films: The Mindfulness Movie (2013) and Dsknectd (2013) as herself. Her newest startup, The Augmented Traveler, is focused on bringing a product to market that will enhance the way people experience travel to all corners of the world.

--->Halcyone "Cy" Wise, Owlmancer, Owlchemy Labs

Halcyone Wise (Cy) is a games industry generalist, consultant, and sociologist residing in Austin, TX. A ten-year games industry veteran, she has worked on award winning MMO titles including Lineage I & II, Guild Wars I & II, Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, and Wizard 101. She returned to the University of Texas in 2012 to complete her studies in Sociology. She specialized in video game communities, internet fandoms, and emergent computer-mediated communications and identities. She has since gone on to work on multiple VR titles including Oculus-exclusive Chronos, and Owlchemy Labs' multi-platform, room-scale title, Job Simulator.

When she is not professionally managing VR communities, she is casually managing VR communities as a co-organizer of VR Austin, the second largest VR meetup in the United States. She can also be found haunting her old university as a guest lecturer, and producing any convention, event, or gathering of minds that will have her. She is currently Owlchemy Labs' multi-hat-wearing designer, marketer, writer and community wrangler, colloquially called "Owlmancer.".

--->Richard Lemarchand, Game Designer and Educator, University of Southern California

Richard Lemarchand is a game designer, an educator, a writer, a public speaker and a consultant. He is an Associate Professor in the USC Games program, and is the Associate Chair of the Interactive Media & Games Division of the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. Between 2004 and 2012, Richard was a lead game designer at Naughty Dog in Santa Monica, California. He led the design of all three PlayStation 3 games in the Uncharted series including Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves - winner of ten AIAS Interactive Achievement Awards, five Game Developers Choice Awards, four BAFTAs and over 200 Game of the Year awards. Richard also worked on Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Jak 3 and Jak X: Combat Racing for Naughty Dog, and helped to create the successful game series Gex, Pandemonium and Soul Reaver at Crystal Dynamics in the San Francisco Bay Area. Richard now teaches game design, development and production in the USC Games program, and is working on a series of experimental game design research projects as part of the USC Game Innovation Lab. His most recent game, The Meadow, a virtual reality art installation game co-created with Martzi Campos, was selected as a finalist in the 2015 IndieCade International Festival of Independent Games.

--->Elizabeth LaPensée, Indigenous Game Designer, University of Minnesota

Elizabeth LaPensée, Ph.D. expresses herself through writing, design, and art in games, comics, and animation. She is Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish, living near the Great Lakes. Most recently, she designed and programmed Invaders (2015), a remix of the arcade classic Space Invaders inspired by art from Steven Paul Judd. She is currently working on Honour Water (2016), an Anishinaabe singing game for healing the water.

Her dissertation in Interactive Arts and Technology from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia shares experiences from the Indigenous social impact game Survivance (2011), which encourages ongoing healing through storytelling and creating art. Continuing this work, she is the Postdoctoral Associate for the University of Minnesota's Research for Indigenous Community Health Center and a Research Associate in the Initiative for Indigenous Futures.

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