Jane McGonigal, PhD is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games — or, games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems.

She believes game designers are on a humanitarian mission — and her #1 goal in life is to see a game developer win a Nobel Peace Prize.

Gabe Zichermann (b. 1974) is an entrepreneur, author, highly rated public speaker and gamification thought leader. He is the chair of the Gamification Summit and Workshops, and is co-author of the book “Game-Based Marketing” (Wiley, 2010) where he makes a compelling case for the use of games and game mechanics in everyday life, the web and business. Gabe is also a board member of StartOut.org and facilitator for the NYC chapter of the Founder Institute.

Swashbuckler, adventurer, slayer of dragons, commando, storyteller, Internet entrepreneur; explorer of rabbit holes

Byron co-authored "Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete." Byron is a Professor at Stanford University and Faculty Director of the Stanford Media X Partners Program. He is a leading expert on the psychology of interactive media, including complex multi-player games, and is co-author of The Media Equation. He has worked at Microsoft Research on consumer and enterprise software, and has helped design software products for several large companies including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Philips, and Schwab.

Leighton co-authored "Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete." Leighton is also a successful entrepreneur, inventor, and investor. He is a General Partner at Alloy Ventures and a founding director of a number of biotech companies, co-founded of Affymax and Aviron, and has won awards as co-inventor of technology underlying the Affymetrix GeneChip™. In 1984, he produced a successful IBM PC game for personal health (DOS 1.0).

Author of Theory of Fun. Deeply entrenched in gaming space

ShuffleBrain is building smart games for a connected world. We're inspired by the recent explosion of Brain Games, and passionate about creating personalized, lightweight, socially connected games that keep you sharp.

Play SCVNGR! It's a game all about going places, doing challenges and earning points.

The profile and portfolio of user experience designer and researcher Sebastian Deterding, specialising in persuasive and gameful design

Prior to starting Schell Games in 2004, Jesse was the Creative Director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, where he worked and played for seven years as designer, programmer and manager on several projects for Disney theme parks and DisneyQuest

Designer, philosopher, critic, and researcher who focuses on computational media—videogames in particular. Author and entrepreneur. Professor at Georgia Tech (a university), a Founding Partner at Persuasive Games (a videogame studio), and a Board Member at Open Texture (an educational publisher).

Tom Chatfield is a freelance writer and the author of three books about digital culture. He has a doctorate from St John’s College, Oxford, and is an associate editor at Prospect magazine, a guest fellow at the Said Business School, Oxford, and a faculty member at the School of Life in London. He writes, speaks and broadcasts internationally on media, arts and technology

Michael Wu - Principal Scientist of Analytics - Lithium Technologies - Michael Wu is the Principal Scientist of Analytics at Lithium Technologies Inc. Michael received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley’s Biophysics graduate program, where he modeled visual processing within the

Keith Smith is the Co-Founder and CEO at BigDoor, the most widely used gamification and loyalty platform. Smith has spoken at numerous events about gamification. BigDoor has more than 300 partners from small web publishers to large companies, including MLB and Dell.

This essay is not yet available online, but you can buy the book from MIT press. Well worth it! The workshop has been running at the GDC since 2001. This lecture talks about the design Oasis, an award-winning downloadable game which was created by Andrew Leker with considerable help from myself.

The Four Keys to Fun: Designing Emotional Engagement and Viral Distribution without Spamming Your Friends Nicole Lazzaro, XEODesign Often ignored by usability,

I had the pleasure to speak at GovCamp Singapore, on 18 November 2011, at the Rock Auditorium, at Suntec City Mall. The title of my talk was The Game of Collaboration: Why Collaboration Fails and How Gamification Can Help. Here are the video of my talk and the slides.

I am the Director of Media Strategy at Cynergy Systems and the inventor of ThinkCube an innovation game. Tweets: Brains, Games, Science, Media, Innovation

The pages within provide a personal look at the life of Dr. Scott Nicholson, who is a professor of library science at Syracuse University School of Information Studies. Scott Nicholson works in the areas of data warehousing, data mining, statistics, and artificial intelligence for libraries, and coined the term Bibliomining for the data mining process in libraries.