Mattie Brice is an artist and design researcher working with play and games to engage social issues and create new cultural practices. Her approach is interdisciplinary, mixing theoretical research with critical practice with a focus on grassroots activist change. She began her career as a media critic in games journalist publication like Kotaku and Paste speaking to the experiences of marginalized players and creators while introducing alternative narratives of design to contemporary industrial practices. Mattie participated in DIY movements that distributed tools and resources for marginalized people to be able to make games without programming knowledge or formal game design training and began making her own work, the first being Mainichi which toured exhibition spaces internationally. She also organized community events around diversity and games such as the Queerness and Games Conference that focused on bringing together marginalized voices into a community of practice and thought. Currently Mattie teaches design research at NYC universities such as NYU and The New School and is developing play experiences and methodologies for creating interventions for power abuse and discrimination in professional and intimate networks.

Pippin Barr is a videogame maker, educator, and critic who lives and works in Montréal. He is the Associate Director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Lab, Canada's premier games research centre and part of the Milieux Institute for Art, Culture and Technology and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University where he teaches courses in programming, videogame design and expressive uses of web technologies. Pippin is a prolific maker of videogames, producing work addressing everything from airplane safety instructions to contemporary art to the nature of videogames and videogame technologies. He has collaborated with diverse figures such as performance artist Marina Abramović, Twitter personality @seinfeld2000, and the International Federation for Human Rights. Pippin holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand with a dissertation that examined the presence and mediation of values in videogames. Pippin is a well-known figure in the independent and artistic videogame scenes, maintains a process of radically transparent videogame design and development via his presence on GitHub, and his book, How to Play a Video Game, introduces the uninitiated and culturally curious to the world of video games. Pippin's website, www.pippinbarr.com, organises his diverse activities into a central location.

Jason Tagmire is a game designer from South Jersey and the founder of Button Shy Games. On the design side, Jason started out his adventure by winning The Game Crafter's Resource Game Design Contest with his family-friendly resource management game, Sandwich City. Shortly after, he reduced our 16th president to 16-bits in his card game, Pixel Lincoln. He's also the designer of the AEG card-throwing game, Maximum Throwdown, the Philly Geek Awards 2016 Game of The Year, Pretense, and Eagle Gryphon's Seven7s. Additionally, Jason founded Button Shy Games, a family publishing company that focuses on small games that can fit in your pocket. All games are hand assembled in the Tagmire household by Jason, Carolyn and the rest of their family, then shipped directly to the customers, allowing for a personal connection in every single game. Some of Button Shy's biggest success stories are Sprawlopolis, Circle The Wagons, and Avignon: A Clash of Popes, which together have sold over 12,500 copies without any retail presence.