Freeplay 2019 Speakers

Keynotes

Hannah Nicklin

Hannah Nicklin is a writer, narrative/game designer, academic and artist working at the confluence of games, activism, and digital art. Her work centres on finding the best forms and techniques to allow a story, theme, or source materials to flourish in a compelling and original manner.

She has worked with and for organisations such as Santa Ragione, Draknek, Die Gute Fabrik, Twisted Tree Games, The Royal Shakespeare Company, The V&A, The Wellcome Collection, Rock Paper Shotgun, Alphr, The Space, Hide & Seek, and Coney.

Richard Lemarchand

Richard Lemarchand is a game designer, an educator and a consultant. He worked at Naughty Dog for eight years where he led or co-led the design of all three PlayStation 3 games in the Uncharted series. He also helped to create the game series Gex and Soul Reaver at Crystal Dynamics.

He is now an Associate Professor in the USC Games program, working out of the Interactive Media & Games Division of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

International Guests

Holly Gramazio

Game designer, writer and curator with an interest in site-specific games, often working as half of game design studio Matheson Marcault. Director of Now Play This, a festival of experimental game design at Somerset House as part of London Games Festival.

Recent projects include: “PARK PARK”, games installed on hoardings in King Edward Memorial Park; “Art Deck”, a card game about drawing collaboratively; writing for the upcoming videogame “Dicey Dungeons”; editing Bernie DeKoven’s upcoming book “The Infinite Playground”; and “An Instructional Guide to Awkward Moments”, a collection of game poems for the Science Gallery, Dubline.

Gwen Foster

Gwen is a game developer based in the Philippines. A board member for IGDA PH – Manila Chapter, Executive Committee for Global Game Jam 2019, and director of local game showcase called Indie Fiesta.

She loves penguins and cats, and helps to champion the local developer scene to give independent developers better exposure and publicity on the global stage.

Rosa Carbo-Mascarell

Rosa is a freelance game designer and producer. She was behind the UK viral election hit CorbynRun, created the map of The Chinese Room’s Dear Esther, and has released many personal games on itch.io. Her games have been exhibited at the Somerset House in London and Babycastles in New York.

She is one of Develop’s 30 Under 30, a published academic in DiGRA, MCV’s Campaigner of the Year 2018, GamesIndustry.biz Top 100 upcoming talent, a member of BAFTA Crew and a London Tech Advocate.

Conference Speakers

Jaz Hee-jeong Choi

Jaz Hee-jeong Choi is a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. As a transdisciplinary researcher, her approach to urban sustainability recognises ‘play’ and ‘care’ as the core of transformational encounters in cities as complex cyberphysical networks. She is currently exploring care-full design for liveable and equitable urban futures across three inter-related domains: self-care and mutual aid; creative and impactful research methods, and; co-creative urban transformation.

Phoebe Watson

Phoebe is a proud Yarrer Gunditj woman of the Maar Nation. She is currently in her second year of study in the Bachelor of Design (Games) degree at RMIT University.

Duncan Corrigan

Duncan is a game designer with an interest in creating expressive games that inspire playfulness. Frequent games jammer and playful arts festival goer, Duncan spends a lot of his time thinking about how cool games are. He currently works as a level designer at SMG studio in Sydney where he dances at his desk. He also hopes everyone is having a great day.

Meghann O’Neill

Meghann O’Neill, after getting a ways through the recruitment process for a studio overseas (without actually landing the job) was told she had ‘gumption’. It has served her well, while reviewing videogames for PC Powerplay, teaching videogame composers at The Australian Institute of Music, making music for games including Wildfire, by Sneaky Bastards, and writing incremental hints for Thimbleweed Park. She’s also working on kidsaregamers.com, a positive resource for parents of gamers.

Gemma Mahadeo

Gemma Mahadeo is a Melbourne-based poet and reviewer and occasional musician. Their work has appeared in Archer Magazine, the Australian Poetry Journal, Comcrete Queers zine, Cordite, F*EMS zine, and Rabbit. They’ve featured at the Emerging Writers’ Festival, the Queensland Poetry Festival, and Freeplay. They currently edit reviews for the Melbourne Spoken Word website, and work as a writing tutor at Creative Write-It.

Ian MacLarty

Ian MacLarty is a full-time game developer living in Melbourne, with an interest in small-scope, experimental designs. Most of his games are pay-what-you-want, but he’s also released several successful commercial games such as Boson X (2013) and Dissembler (2018). His abstract art game The Catacombs of Solaris (2016) won the 2018 Freeplay Award and has been exhibited around the world. His most recent release, JUMPGRID, received an honourable mention for Excellence in Design at the 2019 Independent Games Festival (IGF).

Tegan Webb

Tegan Webb is a writer, zine and digital art maker from Melbourne. Her work has appeared in various literary publications including Ibis House, Scum Mag and Concrete Queers. She has also performed her work at a number of festivals and events, including her twine piece ‘Sign In / Sign Out’ for the 2018 Freeplay ‘Parallels’ showcase. She writes mostly about strange creatures who have a lot of feelings and tweets sometimes.

Imogen Baker

Imogen Baker is a writer from Melbourne with a devastating secret* and a sparse bio. By day she works as a humble copywriter and by night she works as an even more humble amateur Twine scientist. She’s interested in finding ways to make short stories more interactive on The Internet, although she hasn’t quite figured out how to do that. You can see her Twines at washland.com.au

*once ate housemate’s cheese without permission.

Creatrix Tiara

Creatrix Tiara uses writing, performance art, games, media, and other forms to explore the personal & political intersections of identity, liminality, and community. Tiara’s most recent project is Queer Lady Magician, intersecting stage magic, social justice, and autobiographical storytelling. CreatrixTiara.com

Mia Sereno

Mia is a designer and developer working to deliver digital products that help regional communities and businesses grow. Outside her day job, she’s an artist who has been nominated for the British Science Fiction, Ditmar, and Hugo awards. She has been gaming for over two decades and her current obsession is Starcraft Remastered.

Lain Veres

Lain is a serial gamejammer and uni student working on a bachelor of design. He is a portrait artist and has dabbled in game design. He is also a submissive in a d/s relationship, which is an important part of of his lifestyle.

Nikki Imberger

Nikki is a Ravenclaw and a library technician. She has been a stage crew member in non-professional musical theatre for 6 years and an avid convention volunteer for 5. Hobbies include sleeping, knitting and playing games on easy mode because normal mode is too hard.

Alayna Cole

Alayna Cole is the managing director of Queerly Represent Me, a not-for-profit championing queer representation in games. Alayna is also an associate producer at Defiant Development, co-chair of the IGDA LGBTQ+ special interest group, and is an award-winning games journalist and game developer. She was featured on the 2016 and 2017 MCV Pacific 30 under 30, and the 2017 MCV Pacific Women in Games lists.

Jess Zammit

Jess Zammit is a director at Queerly Represent Me, working with the company as a data analyst and content producer since 2016. In addition to writing for QRM, she is a freelance games journalist and researcher in the field of psychology, and has spoken at numerous conferences on the subject of diversity. She is passionate in her fight for improving representation in games, particularly of bisexuality and mental health.

Dakoda Barker

Dakoda Barker is a teacher, researcher, and award-winning game designer. His critical and creative work explores the interplay between videogames and chronic health conditions, and seeks to challenge the status quo. He is a director of Queerly Represent Me, a not-for-profit championing diverse representation in videogames, where he also works as a consultant on representation of indigenous Australians and chronic health conditions.

Maize Wallin

Maize Wallin is a Melbourne based composer, sound designer, and audio programmer. Their focus is in 3D spatialised audio, and dynamic music. Maize consults in Australia and around the world on these topics, and is heavily engaged in the game development community, and in activism and representation within it.

Maize’s work focuses on dynamic and adaptive audio systems, and novel experiences of musicianship – through these skills, they’re able to make games solo as well as on larger teams.

Jacob Leaney

Jacob is a songwriter and game designer who loves K-Pop and indie games. Notable design work includes We Happy Few VR (Compulsion games), and with Signal Space Lab (Civilization series) on various VR, AR, and console projects. He is currently focused on a pop music x videogame band called Monster Mansion, where he develops video games for his original music.

Prior to games, Jacob worked with artists such as Tina Arena and Jet. He has also toured nationally in an emo rock band as front-man.

Jade Stewart

Jade is a woman of many dresses: Contract writer. Narrative designer. Systems designer. Ex-MMA gladiatrix. Amateur historian. Woman in progress. As a game developer, Jade focuses on chicken-soup experiences and human interaction in her spare time. Right now, she is working with indie start-up Goblin Hammer Games on their flagship title, Harvest Hands.

Jini Maxwell

Jini is a poet, writer, and illustrator. They are currently an editor for The Lifted Brow. Jini is deeply invested in making and facilitating sincere, experimental, playful work, and in promoting community, inclusivity and accessibility in the Arts. Their work has appeared in The Lifted Brow, Dumbo Feather, and Cordite Poetry Review.

Hugh Davies

Hugh Davies is an artist, curator, and researcher exploring the city as game-board. As a postdoctoral fellow at RMIT University, he researches cultures of games and play in the Asia-Pacific Region. Hugh has recently returned from fellowships at Tokyo Art and Space in Japan and at M+ and the Hong Kong Design Trust.

Olivia Guntarik

Based at RMIT’s School of Media and Communication, Dr Olivia Guntarik has a passion for the history of our cities. Her digital work unearths stories of the past through the natural, built and cultural heritage. Her expertise is in location-based augmented reality designs and downloadable audio walks.

Carolyn Briggs

N’arweet Carolyn Briggs is a Boonwurrung elder from Victoria who is recognised as a keeper of the history and genealogies of her people. N’arweet is a language and linguistics expert and is dedicated to recording her Boonwurrung language in oral and written form.

Troy Innocent

Innocent is an artist, academic, designer, coder and educator. As a recent Melbourne Knowledge Fellow, he developed Playable City Melbourne, a three-year project transforming the city through an inventive blend of live art, game design and public art, and continues this work as a Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University.

Chad Toprak

Chad is an independent curator and award-winning experimental game designer. He is the current director of Freeplay, and is also ½ of Hovergarden and curator of Contours. He was named in Develop Pacific’s inaugural 30 Under Thirty list for 2018. Chad is a first generation Turkish-Australian Muslim immigrant. His Turkish given name is too hard to pronounce.

Georgia Symons

Georgia is a theatre maker, game designer and installation artist. She is interested in using playful, interactive forms to “play through” complexities. She also works extensively in youth arts, most frequently with St Martins Youth Arts and Western Edge Youth Arts. Georgia holds a Master’s of Writing for Performance from the VCA (2014) and is currently the creative director of PlayReactive.

Morgan Meehan-Lam

Morgan is an artist and designer living in Melbourne and from Hobart. She found games after not really fitting into fine art and after a longer journey in not-art. She’s been described as a ‘creepy, not-quite-right’ artist. While she has a deep interest in dark art and gothic themes, she’s a highly emotional person with an active inner-child. Her world exists in the pastel-goth reality between Disney and Edward Gorey.

Fraser Brumley

Fraser Brumley is an independent game designer from Melbourne. His approach to design is to try to draw players in to doing weird and particular things. These may include throwing chairs through windows, cooling your house down in summer or kicking over furniture to reveal hundreds of hidden cockroaches. He also secretly wants to be a professional wrestler.

Hien Pham

Hien Pham is a digital artist specializing in gentle and optimistic queer comics. He grew up in Vietnam on war stories before moving and finding a home in Australia. His work revolves around respite, around caring and loving and being loved and cared for.

Jennifer Lade

Jen is an artist, a researcher and a senior lecturer in B.Des Games at RMIT University. Her current research interests lie in combining physical and digital media for playful and participatory explorations. I am interested in future directions of combining art and games.

Aspen Forster

Aspen is a 3D Artist and Technical Artist from Melbourne. She spent 4 years working at Firemonkeys EA and during that time discovered a passion for creating tools to improve the lives of artists. She has a knack for translating between artist and programmer-speak and gets very excited about workflow/pipeline improvements, low poly modelling techniques, and cats. She is currently doing a Masters in Software Engineering and teaching games art students how to program at RMIT University.

Paulina Samy

Paulina is an independent game designer, artist, and the Creative Director of DragonBear Studios. She is a passionate advocate of accessibility and diverse representation across industry. Best known for her work on the upcoming game Chaos Tavern, Paulina is enjoying the complexity of using narrative design to explore serious social issues within the context of humour and adorable art styles.

In the past she has worked in a few industries across in government, NGO, and private sector (including founding her first company). In her leisure time Paulina can be found practising historical sword fighting, and playing RPG & tabletop games.

Online Session Speakers

Pritika Sachdev

Pritika Sachdev is a community manager who has a passion for all forms of narrative. She loves storytelling and believes that extends to how developers engage with their players. Pritika’s worked in all sorts of areas of games, from 3D artist to producer, and is currently the social media manager for CheckPoint, and co-producer for Contours. Outside of work, Pritika has a passion for video games academia, specifically within feminine and character representation within games.

Chad Toprak

Chad is an independent curator and award-winning experimental game designer. He is the current director of Freeplay, and is also ½ of Hovergarden and curator of Contours. He was named in Develop Pacific’s inaugural 30 Under Thirty list for 2018. Chad is a first generation Turkish-Australian Muslim immigrant. His Turkish given name is too hard to pronounce.

Alison Huang

Alison Huang is a developer with a well rounded set of skills from Art to Writing to Production. She has a love for narrative in games, especially queer narratives. When she isn’t participating in game jams, Alison is one of the moderators of the GDAU (Game Developers of Australia) community. She also writes D&D content, having contributed to the first volume of the bestselling Uncaged Anthology.

Charlie Francis Cassidy

A self proclaimed queer (cyber)punk with ever changing hair and 30 piercings, Charlie Francis Cassidy is a queer non-binary trans masc programmer and game developer with bipolar. Charlie currently works for Mighty Games in Melbourne across a number of super cute titles. They also spend their spare time working on games that cover and promote mental health, queer and trans experiences.

LeeYing Foo

LeeYing Foo is the UI artist for Kaigan Games a Malaysian indie game company, She’s the primary artist for her first game that was released in Oct 2017 – SIMULACRA (a found phone horror game). It has since won many awards locally and internationally alike. She and her team run a community hangout called WiGout for women and underrepresented folks in games based in Kuala Lumpur.

Brigitta Rena

Brigitta Rena is a game artist from Surabaya, Indonesia. One of the co-founders of Mojiken Studio, creator of She and The Light Bearer and A Raven Monologue. Rena understands that by making a video game, she could easily communicate any of her personal thought and unspoken words. In her spare time, she is a part-time fangirl, coffee lover, and nature enthusiast.

Javi Almirante

Javi Almirante is a game developer from the Philippines, and a graduate of BS Computer Science at the University of the Philippines. He’s worked for companies such as Most Played Games, where he designed silly mobile games like Master Shaker. Through his games like Duloga, which is about the ongoing war against drugs in his home country, he wants to tell the stories of the struggles some people face everyday.

Muhammad Hanif Bin Ghazali

Having co-founded Joysteak Studios right out of university, Hanif wears many hats in his team of three. He’s now a game designer, writer, and composer for their upcoming title, Songbird Symphony, a super-cute musical adventure game featuring birds. Born and raised in Singapore, he strives to put Singapore on the indie gaming map, together with his fellow local game developers.

Saleem Dabbous

Saleem Dabbous is the co-founder and studio director of KO_OP, an artist run and owned game studio. He runs the business at KO_OP and acts as producer on most of the studio’s projects. At KO_OP Saleem founded KOLAB, a grant given to upcoming game makers to create small games that no one else would fund. He was also a co-organizer of the Mount Royal Game Society, a not-for-profit organization that aimed to provide a base of support for independent and aspiring Montreal-area game developers.

Mateja Simovic

Mateja Simovic is an organiser for Game Workers Unite Australia. He’s written about games, movies and geek media over the years for Capsule Computers. His current project involves gathering together resources for game workers to form co-operative game studios. He’s also agitating for change outside of the games industry as a wobbly and works full-time as a legal transcriptionist on the side.

Jennifer Reuter

Jennifer Reuter is a German-born, Melbourne-raised visual storyteller, using illustration, comic art and animation to interpret a variety of stories. She is always working on something; recently self-published a short comic ‘Katabatic’, produced an animatic ‘Invaded by Memories’, and collaborated on the branching narrative game ‘Orunge’. Her online moniker is ‘Jar O’ Dragon’, because she actually likes puns and word games, so beware.

Hien Pham

Hien Pham is a digital artist specializing in gentle and optimistic queer comics. He grew up in Vietnam on war stories before moving and finding a home in Australia. His work revolves around respite, around caring and loving and being loved and cared for.

David Harris

David Harris is a lecturer and teacher at Swinburne University in games and interactivity. Alongside his academic background, David is an avid theatre maker who specialises in interactive and immersive works of performance art. From strange 200 player hospital escape rooms, to intimate one on one experiences about ethics.

David has most recently finished working on a development project with Parks Victoria based in Yarra Bend Park.

Workshop Hosts

Melissa McGlensey

Melissa McGlensey is a comedian from Orange County, California. She has studied and performed improv with theaters all across the world including the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater (NYC and LA), The Improv Conspiracy, Laugh Masters Academy and The Second City (Chicago). Melissa is a company member of Melbourne’s Soothplayers: Completely Improvised Shakespeare and Completely Improvised Potter. When not studying, teaching or performing comedy, Melissa is a contributing writer for Reductress and Comedy Wire.

Gemma Mahadeo

Gemma Mahadeo is a Melbourne-based poet and reviewer and occasional musician. Their work has appeared in Archer Magazine, the Australian Poetry Journal, Comcrete Queers zine, Cordite, F*EMS zine, and Rabbit. They’ve featured at the Emerging Writers’ Festival, the Queensland Poetry Festival, and Freeplay. They currently edit reviews for the Melbourne Spoken Word website, and work as a writing tutor at Creative Write-It.

Game Workers Australia

Game Workers Australia is looking to build a union for game developers in Australia and work in tandem with all branches of Game Workers Unite to bring about effective change in the industry.

We are run exclusively by workers (non-employers), but we actively encourage employers, academics, and others to engage in the community and help support the organization’s direct action efforts both materially and through their visibility.

Ian MacLarty

Ian MacLarty is a full-time game developer living in Melbourne, with an interest in small-scope experimental designs, often with a visual focus. His abstract art game The Catacombs of Solaris (2016) won the 2018 Freeplay Award and has been exhibited around the world. His most recent release, Jumpgrid, received an honourable mention for Excellence in Design at the 2019 Independent Games Festival (IGF).

Cecile Richard

Cecile Richard is a Melbourne-based graphic designer, illustrator and comic artist. They also recently started making tiny games for fun – the first of which is called Novena, that people seem to like. They like birds, going to the footy with friends, and thinking about the TV show LOST.

Izzy Gramp

Izzy is a game developer and photographer based in Melbourne, Australia. She’s currently working on the game Intergalactic Space Princess as a solo indie. She travels a lot because of that. Her favourite things to take photos of are depressing landscapes and the Independent Games Development Scene. She’s was named runner up of Capture Magazines Emerging fine art photography, and has worked with editors appearing in Polygon, Develop, Giant Bomb, VentureBeat, KillScreen, CNET, and Pocket Gamer.

Freeplay acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the Lands upon which the festival takes place.
We pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the wider community and beyond.
Sovereignty was never ceded, and this always was and always will be Aboriginal land.