BART SIMON is the current director of  TAG and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. His areas of expertise include game studies, science and technology studies and cultural sociology. His game studies research crosses a variety of genres, platforms and modalities  looking at the relation of game cultures, socio-materiality and everyday life. Some of his work is represented in journals such as Games and Culture, Game Studies and Loading. His current research on gestural gaming is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada and he is a network investigator for the Canadian network on New Media, Animation and Games.

Lynn Hughes is co-founder of TAG (and of the Interstices Research Group with Jean Dubois). She teaches at Concordia where she holds a Research Chair in Interactive Design and Games Innovation. She has co-produced two large scale games, CUBID and /Fabulous/ Fabuleux/. Both of these use unusual custom designed physical interfaces and focus on activating the physical environment, and the body, in relation to virtual space and sound. Lynn is passionate about trying to work with people from other disciplines and the community beyond the university.

JASON CAMLOT is a scholar, poet and professor. His critical works include Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic (Ashgate 2008) and Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (co-edited with Todd Swift, Véhicule 2007). His scholarly and critical articles have appeared in such venues as ELH, Book History and Postmodern Culture. He is the author of three collections of poetry–The Animal Library (2000), Attention All Typewriters (2005) and The Debaucher (2008)-and serves as the poetry editor of the Punchy Writers Series, an imprint of DC Books. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford, and teaches Victorian literature at Concordia University in Montreal where he is Chair of the Department of English. His current research focuses on the history of sound recording and literary recitation, and on new media adaptations of nineteenth-century fiction and poetry.

JASON LEWIS is an Associate Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he directs research/creation projects in the use of interactive games to assist Aboriginal communities in preserving, interpreting and communicating cultural histories, devising new means of creating and reading digital texts, developing systems for creative use of mobile technology, and designing alternative interfaces for live performance. Obx Labs is deeply committed to developing intriguing new forms of expression by working on conceptual, creative and technical levels simultaneously. Lewis’s artwork and writing about media have been featured in exhibitions and conferences on four continents. www.obxlabs.net.

ELENA RAZLOGOVA is an Assistant Professor of History and the Director of the Digital History Lab at Concordia University, Montréal. She studied history and cultural studies at Moscow State University, University of California Berkeley, New York University, and George Mason University. The Concordia Lab produces websites and tools that use digital media to encourage popular participation in interpreting and presenting the past. Elena co-produced websites on United States history, contemporary politics, and the Soviet Gulag, and published articles on U.S. radio history and public opinion in American Quarterly and Vectors. She is interested in games as a form of documentary expression and a research tool, on such subjects as historical radio sound and Cold War surveillance.

BERNARD PERRON is an Associate Professor of Cinema at the University of Montreal. He has co-edited The Video Game Theory Reader 1 (Routledge, 2003) and The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (Routledge, 2008). He has written Silent Hill: il motore del terrore (Costa & Nolan, 2006), an analysis of the Silent Hill video game series. He is editing Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play (McFarland, to be published in 2009). His research and writings concentrate on on video games; interactive cinema; on narration, cognition, and the ludic dimension of narrative cinema; editing in early cinema; and comics. More information can be found at his website. [bernard.perron@umontreal.ca]

Fern Delamere is an Assistant Professor and Recreation and Leisure Studies scholar in the Department of Applied Human Sciences. Her research is focused on virtual worlds, computer mediated communities of practice, and the socio-cultural implications of these communities. More specifically, her research explores sociality and the development of communities in online leisure contexts with a primary focus on the intersectionality of marginalized groups based on disability and gender. Her work is also interested in slippage between boundaries and the social implications of ludic activities in and beyond online spaces.

Darren Wershler is an Assistant Professor of English at Concordia, and is also part of the faculty at the CFC Media Lab TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program in Toronto. His expertise is in the area of digital media and media history, with a particular focus on its relationship to the historical avant-gardes. Before joining Concordia faculty, he designed and taught the first Video Game Studies courses in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has also worked professionally as a writer and play-tester in the video game industry. His interests include nonlinear narrative, experimental games, and the allegorical function of video games.

Peter Grogano is a software engineer and computer scientist who is interested in the technical aspects of computer games: computer
graphics, animation, motion planning, collision avoidance, simulation of physical and mechanical systems, and all that stuff. He has developed only one game: the Snooker Simulation.

LISA LYNCH works broadly at the intersection between culture, technology, and political change. Her research areas include emerging media, the changing practices of journalism, the cultural reception of genetics, disaster narratives, visual culture, and human rights. From 2004-2006, she was the director, along with Elena Razlogova of the Guantanamobile Project, a multimedia documentary about the U.S. detention of prisoners at Guantanamo. Her work has appeared in publications ranging from Literature and Medicine and New Literary History to Open Democracy and the Arab Studies Journal. She is currently at work on a book about the document leaking site Wikileaks and is exploring ways in which gaming might be incorporated into online journalism practice.

Amanda Williams is TAG’s postdoctoral researcher. Her research centers on space and mobile bodies, and the ways in which they interpenetrate with, construct, and are reconfigured by computational technologies and media. She deals with tangible interaction,physical/social/spatial embodiment, DIY, and ubiquitous computing in urban environments. Because she has never been able to decide her disciplinary affiliation, she does design and ethnography, software and hardware hacking.

Cindy Poremba is a digital media researcher, creator and curator exploring the intersection of documentary, videogames and interactive art through Concordia University’’s Doctoral Humanities program (Montréal, QC). She is a former faculty member in Simon Fraser University’’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), and has published work in Eludamos, Games & Culture, and several edited collections. Cindy also organizes non-traditional and “new arcade” exhibitions as an independent curator and member of the Kokoromi game art collective.

JOSHUA MURPHY has a BFA in film studies from the Mel Hoppenheim school of cinema at Concordia University, and has recently turned his eye to the field of game studies. He is particularly interested in narrative construction and the creation of meaning in video games. He has recently been studying the nature of trust relationships between players in World of Warcraft. He is a nerd.

Adam van Sertima is an M.A. candidate in the department of Art History at Concordia University. His research interests currently attempt to relate trompe l’oeil and other illusionistic effects in past visual culture, such as Piranesi’s Carceri engravings, with current notions of immersion, especially with games such as Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed. He is interested in the phenomenology of visual perspective, the screen and spaces around and between.

Shanly Dixon is a doctoral candidate in Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Program. She is currently writing her dissertation, which draws upon the disciplines of Sociology, Communications and Education to examine the ways in which new media and technology can transform the spaces and experiences of contemporary childhood. Her ethnographic work explores play, sociality, notions of public and private spaces and crossgenerational divides. She teaches the Sociology of Cyberspace at Concordia University and is co-editor of the book Growing Up Online: Young People and Digital Technologies.

Kelly Boudreau is working on her PhD in Film Studies at Université de Montréal. With a BA & MA in Sociology, her research focuses on the player / avatar relationship in video games as well as on forms of mediated sociality ranging from the dynamics of social identification in online computer games and virtual worlds to the fusion of internet activity and everyday life. She also works as a play-test moderator at EA Montreal, where she animates play-tests and focus groups and delivers research reports for the development teams. http://digitalconversations.wordpress.com

Carl Therrien is currently pursuing a Ph. D. in semiology at UQAM. He has been lecturing on the history of cinema (Collège Jean de Brébeuf), semiology (UQAM) and narration in video games (Université de Montréal). His research focuses on the playful and mediated immersion in fictional worlds, in video games and other media. He has been collaborating with Bernard Perron since 2004 as a research assistant on funded research projects, notably on interactive cinema and on horror video games.

William Robinson is a Master’s student at Concordia University, completing a Special Individualized Program in Video Game Studies. He’s written about players as self-spectating artists, and is currently researching User-Generated-Content and Motion-Control at Concordia’s Technoculture, Art and Games lab. For four years he has been president and co-founder of one of Montreal’s most active Euro-Boardgaming clubs.

Dominic Arsenault is a Ph.D. student at the University of Montreal’s department of Film studies and Art history, and holds a scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Before entering the academic world, he was employed as a game writer for a start-up studio named Evillusion. Since then he has presented, written and lectured on narration in the video game, fictional and systemic immersion, game design and player experience issues, with a hint of thoughts on music for added flavor. He is currently working on the notions of genre, continuity and innovation, and the gaming experience for his thesis, and experimenting with developing a live multiplayer game/music show/art performance prototype based on his 8-Bit Metal musical project(www.myspace.com/8bitmetal). He enjoys some limited internet presence on his website (www.le-ludophile.com).

HEATHER KELLEY is a computer and video game designer based in Montreal and Burlington, Vermont. As moboid, she creates game-based artwork. Heather’s twelve-year career in the games industry has included AAA next-gen console games, interactive smart toys, handheld games and web communities for girls. She is co-founder of the Kokoromi experimental game collective, with whom she produces and curates the annual Gamma game event promoting experimental games as creative expression in a social context.