Speakers

Grant Howitt

Grant Howitt is a freelance games writer and designer. His live games encompass undead outbreaks in shopping malls, stealing candy from armed police, setting up a vampire-hunting club, and putting ex-zombies on trial for their crimes. His non-live games deal with more serious topics like fighting drunken bears or trying desperately to survive as one of five fatally unlucky goblins.

He’s also written articles for a wide variety of publications and websites. Sometimes they’re even about games, although he’ll cover anything if it sounds like it might be a laugh. This one time he trained to become a Mexican Wrestler for a men’s mag. It was pretty much the best thing he’s ever done.

He runs a weekly Twitter Dungeoncrawl on the @GizmodoUK account, and maintains a personal website at LookRobot.co.uk where he waffles at length in an attempt to make you understand how wonderful games are.

Chris Wright

Founder and Managing Director at Surprise Attack, Chris is a veteran of video games marketing with more than 100 campaigns executed under his care for publishers including THQ, Microsoft, Sega, Capcom, Disney Interactive Studios, and many more. Chris also spent two years as a member of Film Victoria’s Digital Media Assessment Panel, which assesses applications in respect of its Digital Media funding programs, providing recommendations to the Board for final approval.

In 2011, Chris made the leap from AAA to indie, setting up Surprise Attack with the core goal of helping independent game developers achieve commercial success. Since then they’ve worked with more than 50 development teams and recently launched Surprise Attack Games, a publishing label for Australian indies.

Katharine Neil

Katharine was a console developer in the AAA game industry for about 10 years or so, but more recently has been working on small indie titles for herself as Cheap Drunk Games, and for UK-based Lady Shotgun. In 2003 she led a non-commercial game project called Escape From Woomera about the struggle of asylum-seekers within Australia’s mandatory detention system. In the same year, following a long struggle trying to convince local cultural power-brokers to recognise game developers as cultural practitioners worthy of respect, and by then tired of the cronyism and corporatism of the Australian game industry, Katharine, together with Marcus Westbury, devised a plan for an independent game developers’ conference called Freeplay. Katharine lives mostly in France these days.

Saul Alexander

Like many participants in the indie “revolution,” Saul has had to invent his own path into game development – and that path has often wound through and around Freeplay.

He took his first step from game-player to game-maker in 2010, when he attended the festival as a journalist. There, he received a healthy dose of inspiration, and also made contacts and connections which would lead to the formation of SeeThrough Studios, his Sydney-based company. By Freeplay 2012, he found himself on stage, bemusedly accepting the award for “Best Writing in a Game” (for SeeThrough’s Flatland: Fallen Angle – the noir tale of a triangle out for revenge).

This year, Saul hopes to pay forward some of the knowledge he’s dug up over the last three. His current project, Particulars, fuses the science of subatomic particle physics with the story of a woman recovering from trauma. It is available as a pre-release alpha and is currently scaling the Cliffs of Insanity that are Steam Greenlight.

Maize Wallin

At the age of five Maize played guitar and when she grew up, she wanted to be a cross between a programmer and a sculptor. Since then, she’s managed to incorporate those interests into what she does now as a composer, sound designer and interactive-arts curator.

Maize currently works with games and visual art as composer and curator, with stints in music for advertising and film. Her work is predominantly sample-based, utilising found and synthesised sounds and fusing them with traditional orchestral and chamber orchestration. All her music is designed to be triggerable through movement, dance, in games or for interactive environments. She is passionate about creating new things that involve all kinds of unexpected medium to create environments and experiences.

Maize’s biggest work to date is her project Conjunct, which involves dancers, visual artists, sound, music, lighting, projection mapping, and design in a gallery setting. She is currently working on a game that will cross film, theatre and audience interaction and will be a part of a series of works curated by Maize.

Jess Kilby

Jess Kilby is the Pervasive Play Developer for Pop Up Playground, a Melbourne-based collective that makes live games and other playful experiences. She is an interdisciplinary artist who works with performance, game structures, mixed media and (occasionally) technology to create participatory experiences that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, public and private, familiar and strange. Her work is primarily concerned with meaning and identity, and how we as humans construct it – for ourselves, and with each other. Personal mythologies, communal narratives, ritual, symbol, code. Why do we look up at the stars and see constellations? She is also currently fascinated with the idea of urban darknets, hidden cities, and secret societies that hide in plain sight. She holds an MA in Creative Technology from the University of Salford and is currently pursuing a boundary-blurring, practice-based PhD at RMIT where she is attempting to synthesise all of the above. Wish her luck.

Trent Kusters

Writer and designer Trent Kusters is the creative director of Melbourne transmedia and game development studio, Divisive Media, as well as moonlighting as a director of indie game development collective League of Geeks. Since his background in multimedia and games journalism, Trent shipped multiple titles whilst design director at Torus Games (including highly successful licenses such as Scooby-Doo! and Pokemon), has consulted film studios as well as state and federal governments on game development, lectured at universities and conferences, written on gaming culture and development for major publications, is a recurring member of the GCAP advisory boards, and was named one of Australia’s 25 top young achievers in 2010 by Triple J. Trent is also invested in the future of game development; fostering and mentoring students and contributing to the game development community wherever possible.

Tom Apperley

Tom Apperley, Ph.D. is an ethnographer that specialises in researching digital media technologies. His previous writing has covered broadband policy, digital games, digital literacies and pedagogies, mobile media, and social inclusion. Tom is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Australia, where he convenes the Masters degree in Public Relations and Advertising. He is the editor of the open-access peer-reviewed journal, Digital Culture & Education, his open-access print-on-demand book Gaming Rhythms: Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global, was published by The Institute of Network Cultures in 2010. Tom’s more recent work has appeared in Digital Creativity, eLearning and Digital Media, and Westminster Papers in Culture and Communication.

Nathan Antony

Nathan Antony is a musician and freelance composer for games, film, podcasts, and even arcade machines.

In 2007 his alias, Derris-Kharlan, gained mild notoriety around the Internet for the chip music tracks he posted on a website called 8-bit Collective. Since then he has performed all over the East coast of Australia at events such as Soundbytes, Electrofringe, EB Games Expo, Blip Festival Australia, and most recently at Australia’s inaugural Penny Arcade Expo (PAX). Internationally he has performed in Chicago, New York and San Francisco at events surrounding Blip Festival and the Game Developers Conference (GDC). This success pushed him to further develop his composition skills, and contributed to his passion for the worldwide chip music scene, of which he is an active member.

In March 2012 Nathan decided to turn his hobby into something tangible and started seeking work composing music for games. Since then he has written music or contributed sound effects to over 30 projects including games, short film, podcasts, arcade machines and even a wedding invitation! His soundtrack for the highly successful Time Surfer by Kumobius was extremely well received with positive reviews coming from respectable websites such as Kotaku. His soundtrack for They Love You was nominated for Best Audio at Freeplay 2012, and the game also won Best Design and was highly commended in the Best Australian Game category. His work on Doki Doki at the Melbourne Global Game Jam was the recipient of an award for Best Audio.

Beyond his work in games, Nathan has given music workshops at ACMI in Melbourne, talked on panels at Melbourne’s inaugural Penny Arcade Expo, and been an actively involved member of the local game development community.

Laura Crawford

Laura Crawford is a lecturer, consultant and PhD candidate across games, cinema and psychology. Her fields of expertise include the history of the user relationship with screen violence and the psychology of attraction to fantastical violence. She speaks frequently at conferences nationally and internationally on this topic. When not talking at people about horrific on-screen happenings, she teaches game design at Swinburne University of Technology. She is also involved in the International Game Developers Association’s Melbourne chapter and was one of the organisers of the last local Global Game Jam event. This is her second time speaking at Freeplay and she hosted a Re:play session earlier this year on the changing nature of what it means to be an indie developer. She has been gaming since C64s were a thing.

Floyd Mueller

Florian “Floyd” Mueller directs the Exertion Games Lab at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. The Exertion Games Lab investigates the design of exertion games – digital games that require physical effort – in order to understand the opportunities of combining technology, play and the human body; in short, where gaming and sports meet. This research is situated within a broader interaction design agenda that supports people’s values such as an active and healthy life. Floyd has most recently been a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, having worked on the topic of exertion games now across four continents, including at organisations such as the MIT Media Lab, Media Lab Europe, Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto Laboratories, and Xerox Parc. Floyd has also been a Microsoft Research Asia Fellow and has worked at the Microsoft Beijing lab with the research teams developing Xbox Kinect. Previously in Australia, he has worked at the University of Melbourne and was a principal scientist at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), where he led the Connecting People team of 12 researchers.

Floyd’s work has been shortlisted for the European Innovation Games Award (next to Nintendo’s WiiFit), has won the Nokia Mindrek Ubimedia Award, and was commissioned by Wired’s Nextfest. His games were played by over 20,000 players across three continents and were featured on the BBC, ABC, Discovery Science Channel and Wired magazine.