Professor Game Podcast

Michael Matera is an engaging, fun and inspiring nationwide speaker and author, delivering keynotes, workshops and small group professional development to teachers and administration. Additionally, he is a practicing teacher. He ignites both his classroom and professional development audiences with interactive play, passion and purpose-driven learning. He helps us all focus on finding the joy in the journey of life both professionally as well as personally. He is the host and creator of the Hive Summit. As a gamification guru and moonshot thinker, Michael transforms the traditional classroom into a high-energy environment where active student engagement is paramount. Michael is an energetic trainer, who broadly shares his research, teaching methods and technological applications for the advancement of learners, teachers and administrators. As a consultant, he works with educational institutions and businesses to define the needs and build solutions that inspire and lead to effective change. Discover his most recent pioneering endeavors by visiting his website, mrmatera.com, listen to his podcast Well Played or have a look on his YouTube channel and remember to connect.

Sarah Le-Fevre is a Learning design and delivery professional and certified Lego® Serious Play® Facilitator. After tiring of creating programs for blue-chip clients that focused almost solely on growth and profit, Sarah made the decision to keep the same audience but shift the focus to learning around sustainability, human flourishing and tackling systemic wicked problems. With a focus on experiential learning, specifically games and learning in nature, Sarah specializes in creating programs which allow learners time to reflect and create their own learning about complex systemic issues and is in the process of writing a book about a Systems Practice approach to learning design for organizational change. Sarah also runs a bi-monthly online magazine 'Ludogogy', which explores games-based learning, gamification, and gameful and playful design. Sarah can be contacted at [email protected] (or search LI for Sarah Le-Fevre, with a hyphen) and you can visit the magazine at ludogogy.co.uk

Special episode Engagers! This time we have no guest and I dive straight into the very important topic of ethics in our world of game-based solutions and gamification! I talk about some ideas of fellow creators and past guests Andrzej Marczewski -@daverage- of gamified.uk and Nir Eyal. I mention this in the episode but we'll highlight this here as well, we'd love to know what do you think about this! Drop a comment below, reply to an email if you are in the email list, find our social media and tell us what you think about what the ethics are or should look like for this!

Alessandro Canossa is an Associate Professor at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation. He is the Czar of Player Experience at modl.ai and has been straddling between the game industry and academia for many years. He has been an Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, Associate Professor at Northeastern University in Boston and he's now at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In his research, he employs psychological theories of personality, perception, motivation and emotion to design games with the purpose of investigating individual differences in behavior among users of digital entertainment. His research focuses heavily on these topics: a) developing behavioral analysis methods that are able to account for granular spatial and temporal events, avoiding aggregation; b) designing and developing visual analytics tools that can enable any stakeholder to produce user-driven content leveraging advanced statistics and machine learning. He was also Senior User Researcher and Data Scientist at Massive Entertainment a Ubisoft studio, where he enjoyed tremendously investigating occult behavioral patterns and novel player modeling approaches while identifying the best processes for transferring knowledge from academic research to industry practices. He's now involved with Modl.AI, a company providing AI services to the game industry, where he's exploring how to triangulate data-driven insights with surveys and lab observations to advance the field of predictive analytics.

Kathleen Mercury, M.A.T., M.E.T., has been teaching gifted middle school students for fifteen years using design thinking to create functional art from designing tabletop games and RPGs to filmmaking, cosplay, and more. She shares all of her game design teaching resources at www.kathleenmercury.com for free, and loves to collaborate with educators and industry leaders to promote game design curriculum at every level and format. She currently cohosts the podcasts, Games in Schools and Libraries and On Board Games, and is a frequent guest on other podcasts. She has multiple games in various stages of design, development, and publication with the upcoming titles Greece Lightning from Wizkids and Dragnarok from Kolossal. Kathleen thinks happiness comes from being able to create the life you want, and she feels very fortunate that she's been able to do that.

Nicole Lazzaro, immersive media trailblazer, entrepreneur and game industry veteran has run XEODesign for 27 years. She discovered how game mechanics create emotion, designed the 1st iPhone game, and the 4 Keys to Fun used by millions of leading developers worldwide. Her 4 Keys are baked into the AI for the Sims and inspired IBM Watson's sentiment analysis. Her game Tilt World planted 16K trees in Madagascar. Recent XR accomplishments include Follow the White Rabbit as well as Unscramble the Oracle, a choose your own adventure for AR headsets that inspires healthy play walking around the block.

Cédric Pontet is CTO @ Agile Partner, founder @ #play14, EventStormer, Sketchnoter, Happy Salmon guru, Gnome drawing expert, and much more. He is a seasoned software expert and Agile/Lean coach. He started his software engineering career in 2001 and since 2005, has been happily employed at Agile Partner, where he has worked on a large variety of projects, for customers in both the public and private sectors. He is currently CTO of the company. On a daily basis, Cédric is helping teams on matters such as software architecture, cloud computing, agile, lean and DevOps. Defining himself as curious and pragmatic, he is proud to be part of different communities (Agile, Domain-Driven Design, EventStorming, Sketchnoting) and enjoys mixing these influences to bring people together. Cédric is one of the founders of #play14 (play14.org) a worldwide community of like-minded people who strongly believe that playing is the best way to learn, share ideas, and trigger creativity. He is also an international speaker in various software and agile conferences such as Build Stuff, Voxxed Days, KanDDDinsky, Agile Grenoble of FlowCon.

Jesper Juul is a pioneering video game researcher and occasional game developer. With a background in both literature and programming, Jesper has dedicated his life to taking video games seriously as culture and art form. He has published four books on MIT Press, and taught at MIT, NYU, among others. He is currently teaching at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design, in Denmark.

Nick Yee is the co-founder and analytics lead of Quantic Foundry. For over two decades, he has conducted and applied research on the psychology of gaming and virtual worlds using a wide variety of methods. At Stanford University, he used immersive virtual reality to explore how avatars can change the way people think and behave. At the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), he applied social network analysis and predictive analytics to examine large-scale World of Warcraft data. He was a senior research scientist in Ubisoft's Gamer Behavior Research group where he combined data science and social science methods to generate actionable player insights for different game development teams. At Quantic Foundry, he leads the research and development of new tools for analyzing the motivations of game audiences, and leverages these tools to provide actionable insights for game design and marketing. He is the author of "The Proteus Paradox: How Online Games and Virtual Worlds Change Us—And How They Don't".

Adrian Hon is co-founder and CEO at Six to Start, creators of gamelike stories and story-like games including the world's bestselling smartphone fitness game, "Zombies, Run!" with four million players. Six to Start's clients have included Disney, the BBC, Channel 4, and Penguin, and the company has won multiple awards including Best of Show at SXSW.

Adrian is author of A History of the Future in 100 Objects, has spoken at the flagship TED conference, the Long Now, Google, and Mozilla, and has written a column about technology for the Telegraph. He originally trained as a neuroscientist at Cambridge, UCSD, and Oxford.