Scott Adams was born in Miami, Florida, and is now living in Platteville, Wisconsin. Scott was the first person known to create the first commercial adventure-style game for personal computers with his first game, Adventureland (1978). His company, Adventure International, released games for many major computer platforms throughout the 1980s. Adams worked as a senior programmer for AVISTA in Platteville until 2016. Scott founded Clopas, the “PLAY the game! LIVE the adventure! CREATE your story!” company in 2017, with his wife of 30 years, Roxanne. Scott and Team Clopas are currently working on Adventureland XL, a Conversational Adventure™ game, in celebration of the original’s 40th anniversary, with a holiday 2019 release. [scott.adams@clopas.net]
Lily Alexander, PhD, has taught in New York since 2003, including at NYU and Hunter College, CUNY. She has a Master’s degree in Drama and Film, and a dual doctorate in Anthropology and Comparative Cultural Studies. Her research interests include symbolic anthropology, semiotics of culture, creative algorithms, and evolution of consciousness. She has taught world mythology, history and theory of narrative media, comparative literature, genre studies, science fiction, comedy, story structure, screenwriting, interactive storytelling, and world-building. She has presented at 40+ conferences, including the MIT Media in Transition series and the forum Cognitive Futures. She wrote for the History Channel, henryjenkins.org, The Journal of Narrative Theory, Cinema Journal, and Cinema Art. Her publications also appeared in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Canada, Russia, and Israel. She contributed to book collections Filmbuilding (2001), Revisiting Imaginary Worlds (2017), and The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds (2017). Lily Alexander authored a book set, Fictional Worlds: Traditions in Narrative and the Age of Visual Culture (2013/2014). Her website is: storytellingonscreen.com. [lily.alexander@hunter.cuny.edu]
Helen Conrad O’Briain was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, but has lived most of her adult life in Dublin where she is adjunct Professor of Old English and Old Norse at Trinity College. She has published on Augustinian theology in early insular Latin literature, the Middle English “Breton” Lais, and Trinity Vergil incunabula, as well as on the works of M. R. James, Dorothy Sayers, and Phyllis McGinley. She is the author, with Laura Cleaver, of the forthcoming catalog of Trinity and Chester Beatty Psalter manuscripts. [conrado@tcd.ie]
Christopher Hanson is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Syracuse University, where he teaches courses in games studies, digital media, television, and film. His book Game Time: Understanding Temporality in Video Games was published by Indiana University Press in spring 2018 and his next book project is on game designer Roberta Williams. He previously worked for a number of years in video game and software development. His work has appeared in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Quarterly, the Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (2014), and LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon (2014). [cphanson@syr.edu]
Jennifer Harwood-Smith has a PhD from Trinity College Dublin, and is researching world-building in science fiction. She has contributed two chapters to Battlestar Galactica: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up?, “I Frak, Therefore I Am”, and “Dreamers in the Night”. She has also co-authored “‘Doing it in style’: The Narrative Rules of Time Travel in the Back to the Future Trilogy” with Frank Ludlow, published in The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films. Her essay “Fractured Cities: The Twinning of Tolkien’s Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis” has been published in J.R.R. Tolkien: The Forest and the City. She is the 2006 winner of the James White Award and has published fiction in Interzone and with Ether Books. [harwoodj@tcd.ie]
Andrew Higgins is a Tolkien scholar who specializes in exploring the role of language invention in fiction. His thesis “The Genesis of Tolkien’s Mythology” (which he is currently preparing for publication) explored the interrelated nature of myth and language in Tolkien’s earliest work. He is also the co-editor with Dr. Dimitra Fimi of A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages (HarperCollins, 2016). Recently he has had papers published in A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honour or Verlyn Flieger (Gabbro Head Press, 2018) and Sub-creating Arda (Walking Tree Publishers, 2019). He has also taught an on-line course on language invention for Signum University/Mythgard Institute and is a Trustee of Signum University and the UK Tolkien Society. He is also Director of Fundraising at Glyndebourne Opera in East Sussex England. [asthiggins@me.com]
Matt Hills is Professor of Film & TV Studies at Aberystwyth University. He is the author of Fan Cultures (2002) and Triumph of a Time Lord (2010) among other titles. His work has been published in the Journal of Fandom Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Science Fiction Film and Television, Participations: The Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, and the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures. His latest book is the edited collection New Dimensions of Doctor Who (2013), and he’s currently working on a new monograph, Sherlock — Detecting Quality Television. [mjh35@aber.ac.uk]
Edward James is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at University College Dublin, working on early medieval European history. A long-term SF fan, he began writing about science fiction in the 1980s, and for fourteen years was editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction. He has won many of the awards in the field, including the Eaton Award (for Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century), the Pilgrim Award, the Hugo Award (for The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, co-edited with Farah Mendlesohn), the BSFA Award for Non-Fiction (for his website on Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers in the Great War), and most recently the IAFA’s Distinguished Scholarship Award. His most recent book is on Lois McMaster Bujold. [edwardfjames@gmail.com]
Kara Kennedy is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Canterbury studying the representation of women in Frank Herbert’s Dune series. She has published on the significant role that names play in the world-building in Dune. She also researches in the field of Digital Humanities and is looking to analyze 20th-century science fiction in new ways through digital technology. [dunescholar@gmail.com]
Lars Konzack is an Associate Professor at The Royal School of Library and Information Science in Denmark. He has an MA degree in information science and a PhD degree in Multimedia. He is working with subjects such as ludology, game analysis and design, geek culture, and subcreation. He has, among others things, published “Computer Game Criticism: A Method for Computer Game Analysis” (2002), “Rhetorics of Computer and Video Game Research” (2007), “Video Games in Europe” (2007), and “Philosophical Game Design” (2008). [mtw296@iva.ku.dk]
Edward O’Hare is a PhD student at Trinity College Dublin. After studying for a Degree in Philosophy, he completed anMPhil in Popular Literature in 2009. Since 2012 he has been working on a thesis on Antarctic Gothic Literature, focusing on the Polar Fictions of writers including Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, and John W. Campbell Jr. A regular contributor to The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, he has published articles and reviews on a range of subjects. His research interests include Victorian Gothic Fiction, Imaginary Voyage Narratives, Ghost Stories and other Supernatural Fiction, the Weird Tale, British and American Horror and Science-Fiction of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and Cult Cinema and Television of the past and present. [ohareer@tcd.ie]
William Proctor is a lecturer at the University of Sunderland, UK, where he teaches in Film, Media, and Cultural Studies. His PhD thesis examines the reboot phenomenon in comics and film and was published by New York University Press in 2015. William has published articles and book chapters on The Walking Dead, Batman, and the fan reaction to the Lucasfilm takeover by Disney alongside a number of articles on the reboot phenomenon. His next pursuit is an audience research project focusing on fantasy fans in collaboration with Martin Barker and an edited collection which explores the impact of Nordic Noir. [billyproctor@hotmail.co.uk]
Mark J. P. Wolf is a Professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University Wisconsin. His books include Abstracting Reality: Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age (2000), The Medium of the Video Game (2001), Virtual Morality: Morals, Ethics, and New Media (2003), The Video Game Theory Reader (2003), The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond (2007), The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (2008), Myst and Riven: The World of the D’ni (2011), Before the Crash: Early Video Game History (2012), Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming (two-volume First Edition, 2012; three-volume Second Edition, forthcoming), Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (2012), The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (2014), LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon (2014), Video Games Around the World (2015), the four-volume Video Games and Gaming Cultures (2016), Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology (2017), Video Games FAQ (2017), The World of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (2017), The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds (2017), The Routledge Companion to Media History and Obsolescence (2018), 101 Enigmatic Puzzles: Fractal Mazes, Quantum Chess, Anagram Sudoku, and More (2020), World-Builders on World-Building: An Exploration of Subcreation (2020), and two novels for which he is looking for a publisher. He is also founder and co-editor of the Landmark Video Game book series from the University of Michigan Press and the founder of the Video Game Studies Scholarly Interest Group within the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. He has been invited to speak in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Second Life; has had work published in journals including Compar(a)ison, Convergence, Film Quarterly, Games and Culture, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Projections, Religions, and The Velvet Light Trap; is on the advisory boards of Videotopia, the International Arcade Museum Library, and the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations; and is on several editorial boards including those of Games and Culture and The Journal of E-media Studies. He lives in Wisconsin with his wife Diane and his sons Michael, Christian, and Francis. [mark.wolf@cuw.edu]