Judges

The judges for Let's Change the Game bring a huge amount of experience from all areas of the ARG genre and the game industry, from writing and game design to business, technology and community. Every game design that's submitted will be looked over carefully by each of the judges, a number of whom will go on to support and mentor the winning team throughout the development process.


Adrian Hon

Founder

Adrian Hon is one of the world's leading alternate reality game designers and the Chief Creative Officer at Six to Start. Previously, Adrian was Director of Play at Mind Candy, where he designed and produced Perplex City, the world's first commercially successful ARG. Perplex City used the web, email, SMS, mobile phones, radio, skywriting, helicopters and live events in London, New York and San Francisco to tell a story to hundreds of thousands of people.

Before becoming a games designer, Adrian studied neuroscience at Cambridge University and Oxford University, and campaigned for the human exploration of Mars. Adrian also writes a weblog at mssv.net.


James Wallis

Co-organiser

James Wallis is an Origins Award-winning games creator and publisher. He has designed online narrative games for clients including the BBC, the Home Office and Endemol Digital, two of his tabletop games appear in Hobby Games: The 100 Best (Green Ronin Press, 2007), and he is one of three designers to have ever had an RPG published by MIT Press. He is a former TV presenter and Sunday Times journalist, has written 13 books and writes a weblog.


Kevin Hemenway

Kevin Hemenway, coauthor of a few O'Reilly books, contributor and tech-editor to a dozen others, is better known as Morbus Iff, the creator of disobey.com, which bills itself as "content for the discontented." Publisher and developer of more home cooking than you could ever imagine, he obsessively strives to stick his fingers in as many pies as possible. His latest is 60 Blank White Cards, a melding of various game forms he's come to love over the decades (including ARGs and CCGs).


Randall Holl

Randy Holl has been involved in computers and gaming since the technology bear skins and stone knives era. Shortly after the advent of the PC in the mid 80’s, Holl created a naval warfare simulator (the US Navy would never call it a 'game') based on over 100 networked PC 'tactical stations', a system still in use today for naval cadet and young officer competitions. Holl also ran a large, multi-line BBS in the pre-internet era and views ARGs as the best fusion of online gaming with positive social engineering. Professionally, Holl has led the development of high tech systems across a wide span of technology sectors, holding senior technical and management positions in companies such as IBM, Ernst & Young, and Hyperion as well as a number of high tech start-ups. He is currently VP Engineering with a health systems company working to transform the US healthcare delivery system. He also served as a qualified submarine officer in the U.S. Navy.


Rhianna Pratchett

Rhianna Pratchett works as a scriptwriter, story designer and general narrative paramedic for the videogames industry. Her most recent titles include the PS3 epic Heavenly Sword for Sony and Codemasters' twisted fantasy game Overlord. Currently wrestling the wild beasts of games narrative for Electronic Arts on their newly announced contemporary, action-adventure Mirror’s Edge, Rhianna also works with the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and the IGDA Writers’ SIG to help improve the lot of games writers and the perception of interactive narrative.


Sean Stewart

Sean Stewart has been the lead writer and co-designer on a series of groundbreaking projects, including The Beast and ilovebees, that pioneered new forms of web-based storytelling and helped create the ARG genre. He is also a novelist with ten published books, for which he has received multiple awards. His most recent novel, the New York Times Bestseller Cathy's Book, marries multi-media storytelling to a traditional book format. Cathy’s Book has been sold into more than 10 languages worldwide; the sequel, Cathy’s Key, will be published in the Spring of ’08.


Jonathan Waite

Jonathan Waite is the owner and senior editor at the Alternate Reality Gaming Network (ARGNet) and host of the ARG Netcast, a weekly podcast dedicated to discussion of the latest trends in cross-media marketing and chaotic fiction. He has played ARGs since 2001 and is an administrator at the Unfiction forums, an ARG community resource. Jonathan has been affected by cancer through friends, colleagues and family members, and hopes that his efforts here contribute to further research towards treatments and cures.


Cameo Wood

Cameo Wood has always loved the odd and the puzzling; Perhaps this is why she studied Symbolic Systems in at Bennington College and Simon's Rock College of Bard. She has worked on a very diverse number of projects, from the Neurosciences institute to a Privacy report to the Japanese Government with Lawrence Lessig. She was formerly the CTO of Free World Dialup and the Director of Operations at eDial before she started her current job at LiveOps.