The Serious Games Summit Advisory Board is made up of distinguished professionals in the education, government, military, and corporate fields. Board members volunteer their time to develop the sessions offered to attendees and ensure that the quality of the content is pertinent, high-level, and timely.
Ben Sawyer is the producer of Virtual U. a million dollar plus foundation funded project to build a university management simulator. Virtual U, now shipping Version 2.1, was a 2000 Independent Games Festival finalist. Sawyer is also the author of Serious Games: Improving Public Policy through Game-Based Learning and Simulation Whitepaper for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and was a contributor to Game Developer magazine. Sawyer also has author of two books on gaming for Coriolis Group Books and is developing a book on simulations with Paraglyph Press. He has published several research reports on the games industry for DFC Intelligence.
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Jerry Bush is a program manager for Cisco Systems and is responsible for the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certification program, the company’s largest program which has certified more than half-million people around the globe. In his tenth year at Cisco, he is an instructional designer by profession and has been in high-tech corporate training for over 14 years. Previously, Jerry was responsible for the success of Cisco’s on-line testing system, which he managed for three years and, which has delivered half a million tests. He also develops and manages learning games which supplement training programs at Cisco. These games have been used worldwide by tens of thousands of students. Jerry earned his masters degree in Education from San Jose State University in California.
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Ian Bogost, Ph.D. is Founding Partner at Persuasive Games, where he designs experimental games about social and political issues, and Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he researches on videogame criticism and rhetoric and teaches in the undergraduate program in Computational Media and the graduate program in Digital Media.
Bogost is interested in the function of ideology, politics, advertising, and education in games. He is the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press 2006), Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (forthcoming from MIT Press), and author of over 50 articles, book chapters, and conference presentations on videogames, digital media, literature, and film. Bogost is co-editor (with Gonzalo Frasca) at Water Cooler Games, the online resource about videogames with an agenda. His videogames have been played by millions of people and exhibited at artistic and cultural venues worldwide.
Bogost holds a BA degree in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, and an MA and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Jan Cannon-Bowers, Ph.D. holds MA and Ph.D. degrees in Industrial/ Organizational Psychology from the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL. She recently left her position as the Navy's Senior Scientist for Training Systems to join the School of Film and Digital Media at the University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL as an Associate Professor. As the team leader for Advanced Training Research for the Navy, she was involved in a number of research projects directed toward improving performance in complex environments. These included investigation of training needs and design for multi-operator training systems, tactical decision-making under stress, the impact of technology on learning and performance, training for knowledge-rich environments, human-centered design, human performance modeling and development of knowledge structures underlying higher order skills.
At UCF, Dr. Cannon-Bowers is continuing her work in technology-enabled learning and human performance modeling. Her goal is to leverage and transition DoD's sizable investment in modeling, simulation and training to other areas such as entertainment, workforce development and life-long learning and education. To date, she has been awarded several grants to support this work, including a recent award by the National Science Foundation under their Science of Learning Center program. Dr. Cannon-Bowers has been an active researcher, with over 100 publications in scholarly journals, books and technical reports, and numerous professional presentations. She is a Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (Division 14 of the American Psychological Association).
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Noah Falstein is the President of The Inspiracy (www.theinspiracy.com), a consulting firm specializing in game design and production. With over 25 years designing and managing entertainment and educational software for companies such as Williams Electronics, LucasArts Entertainment, The 3DO Company, and Dreamworks Interactive, Falstein has worked on everything from toys to CD-ROM games to edutainment to location-based entertainment. Falstein has led brainstorming sessions for well-known game designers, writers, and even film directors such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
The Inspiracy does original design and design review for both established game companies and those looking to apply game design technique to education and corporate training.
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James Paul Gee is the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his PhD in linguistics in 1975 from Stanford University and has published widely in linguistics and education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacies Studies," an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades.
His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003) offers 36 reasons why good video games produce better learning conditions than many of today's schools. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His new book, Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul, shows how good video games marry pleasure and learning and have the capacity to empower people.
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Mark Long is Zombie's Co-CEO and Executive Producer of more than 20 titles. Prior to founding Zombie, Long had a Research and Development career that spanned three laboratories: the Sarnoff Research Center, the University of Texas Institute for Advanced Technology, and General Dynamics' Combined Arms Systems Engineering Laboratory. While at Sarnoff, Long and Joanna Alexander led a team that developed a virtual reality game console for Hasbro. Prior to Sarnoff, Long was a senior engineer at General Dynamic's CASE laboratory where he led a large scale simulation of Desert Storm and reported its results to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Long has served on a number of technical advisory boards and government committees. He was a member of the Silicon Graphics Technical Advisory Board, advising SGI on requirements for their next-generation virtual reality systems. He collaborated with the National Science Foundation, the University of Washington Human Interface Laboratory and the University of Illinois to produce a summary report for the Congressional Task Force on Virtual Reality. The Task Force presented its work to then-Senator Al Gore. Long was Co-Chair, with NASA and the Stanford Research Institute, of a conference on next-generation virtual reality research held at the Sarnoff Research Center. Long received his BS at the University of Texas, where he also received his commission in the US Army.
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Elaine M. Raybourn, Ph.D. (intercultural communication with an emphasis on human-computer interaction and social-process simulations) brings an expertise in understanding culture and communication to the design of simulations, games, and groupware. Her research concerns adaptive training systems, intercultural agents, collaborative virtual environments, social simulations and games for training, and intercultural learning.
Elaine is working on her second serious game title and currently leads a training game project for DARPA. Recent efforts have included the Adaptive Thinking & Leadership (ATL) game for U.S. Army Special Operations Forces, storytelling in context-aware groupware systems, creating cultural signposts in knowledge-sharing environments, addressing cultural dynamics in agent and avatar behaviors, and designing learning applications and simulation/games that stimulate intercultural awareness and cognitive agility. Elaine has been an ERCIM (European Consortium for Research in Informatics and Mathematics) fellow (2001-2003) and is listed in Who’s Who in Science and Engineering (2005). She is currently a principal member of the technical staff of Sandia National Laboratories, and a National Laboratory Professor at the University of New Mexico’s Department of Communication & Journalism, Institute for Organizational Communication.
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Business/Mgmt Track
