PLAY16 - Creative Gaming Festival » Award Jury

Alistair Aitcheson

vera marie — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 18:07:01 +0000

Alistair Aitcheson is a UK-based indie developer making games and installations about physical contact, communication and creative cheating. His work has involved dressing people up in costume to become human game controllers, and included Tap Happy Sabotage, a party game for up to 52 people on one giant touchscreen. His games have been award-nominated at festivals including IndieCade, A MAZE Berlin and EGX, and have been installed in museums in Germany and the UK.

Amelie Künzler

Christina Kutscher — Tue, 30 Aug 2016 12:32:50 +0000

Amelie Künzler, born in 1988 in a village between Bremen and Hannover, started designing her own projects and objects in the age of 16. Since studying this in her Master, she is hooked. A few internships and freelance projects showed her the beauty of doing what one likes to do. Thus, she founded “Urban Invention” with Sandro in 2014. She is responsible for design and everything that can be touched.

Eric Jannot

Christina Kutscher — Tue, 30 Aug 2016 11:49:30 +0000

After studying journalism, Eric Jannot worked in the gaming industry for more than ten years. He was a public relations executive, freelancer and Senior Game Designer at The Games Company. From 2010 to 2012 he worked as Head of Design at Noumena Studios and was responsible for the creative lead of Demonicon, that was awarded with the Deutscher Entwicklerpreis.

Since 2012 he is CEO and Creative Director of waza!, for which he creates and produces games about journalism and serious games. He is especially interested in ethics in games, which is why he became involved with the GameOverHate campaign of the European Council against discrimination in interactive media.

Melanie Taylor

Christina Kutscher — Sun, 16 Oct 2016 11:49:29 +0000

Melanie is lead artist and business manager at Osmotic Studios as well as one of the three co-founders.
It is her passion to turn great ideas into something visually stunning and emotionally thrilling. Osmotic Studios is committed to making games with narrative and personal resonance that challenge players to reflect on the world around them. After winning the German Computer Game Award for their student projects “GroundPlay” and “Scherbenwerk” in 2013 and 2014, Michael Kluge (programming), Melanie Taylor (art and business) and Daniel Marx (game design and production) have spent the last two years making their first full game, Orwell, which explores contemporary themes of security, privacy, and our interpretation of online information in a way that only a game can, due for release late 2016.

Sebastian Kalemba

Christiane — Tue, 27 Sep 2016 13:11:22 +0000

Sebastian Kalemba is Animation Director at CD Projekt RED with 10 years experience in the industry. At the same time he is tutor at iAnimate – animation online school.

During over 10 years of work as a professional animator he participated in production of adverts, cinematics and movies to finally settle on directing animation in AAA games. For him, as he often says, story is the most defining thing in the animation. He always puts the strongest focus on the concept, that the way the character moves is defined by his (or her) backstory, motivation, and the role he or she has in the plot. The second thing is the quality – he has an ambition to provide the same quality which is known from cinematic animation to gameplay animation. Right now he focuses mainly on directing and that’s what fascinates him the most in the animation process. Apart from that he loves leading and managing teams, it helps him a lot in making right production decisions.

Sky LaRell Anderson

Christiane — Fri, 07 Oct 2016 17:35:05 +0000

Dr. Sky LaRell Anderson has a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Minnesota, and he works as a visiting assistant professor of Communication at Denison University in Ohio, USA. His research investigates how gaming spaces, behaviors, hardware, websites, and other non-game elements influence how we understand games.