Robert J. Bain Jr. earned his masters degree in Comparative Media Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004. Before enrolling at MIT, he served as Project Manager of the MIT/Electronic Arts Creative Leaders Program, a series of workshops led by MIT Humanities faculty and intended to help EA videogame designers integrate deeper narrative into their games. As a student, he worked as a research assistant on the “Education Arcade” project headed by CMS Program Director Henry Jenkins and Research Manager Kurt Squire. Bain currently works in Los Angeles as a producer of documentary and non-fiction programs for television and continues to focus on storytelling and learning via hybrid media genres. His essay on Delta Force: Black Hawk Down is featured in Gli strumenti del videogiocare (2005).

Mia Consalvo is an assistant professor of telecommunications at Ohio University. Her research interests include the critical study of popular culture and new media, most recently the study of digital games. Her other work analyzes sexuality in The Sims, and investigates the role of cheating in gameplay. She contributed to Gli Strumenti del videogiocare with an essay on [‘> iThe Sims Online.

Matteo Bittanti’s research focuses on the cultural, social and theoretical aspects of emerging technology, with an emphasis on the interrelations of popular culture, visual culture, and the arts. Matteo Bittanti has been investigating as the intersection between cinema and videogames, forms of consumerism, and popular narratives. He is a visting scholar at Stanford University and a researcher at Unievrsity of California Berkeley.

Ian Bogost is an academic videogame researcher, game designer, and educational publisher. Ian is Assistant Professor of Literature Communication and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he teaches and researches in undergraduate and graduate programs in digital media. Bogost’s current research interests include videogame criticism (the subject of a forthcoming book from MIT Press, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism) and videogame rhetoric (including the function of ideology, politics, advertising, and education in games). Ian is also the founder of two companies, Persuasive Games, a game studio that designs, builds, and distributes electronic games for persuasion, instruction, and activism and Open Texture, a publisher of cross-media education and enrichment materials for families. He has over a decade of experience in digital media production for film, music, games, advertising, and eBusiness. Ian holds a BA in Comparative Literature and Philosophy from the University of Southern California, and an MA and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA.

Barry Atkins is an academic with degrees (BA, MA and PhD) in English from the University of Leeds. He began as a specialist in American modernist literature, partly because I thought that my interest in science fiction should not be pursued if I ever wanted a job as an academic. After working in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University for seven years he finally took the plunge and committed myself to whatever the future is for Game Studies (or whatever we call it in ten years). He now runs the MA Digital Games at the International Centre for Digital Content at Liverpool John Moores University. He is interested in games and narrative, for which he offers no apologies.

Alex Burns is the mind behind Disinformation. Launched on September 13, 1996, Disinformation was designed to be the search service of choice for individuals looking for information on current affairs, politics, new science and the ‘hidden information,’ that seldom seems to slip through the cracks of the corporate-owned media conglomerates. Ironically, it was funded by one of the largest media companies in the world (TeleCommunications, Inc. (TCI), now part of AT&T), who paid for placement on Netscape’s then ubiquitous search page. His essay on Civilization was included in Civilization. Storie virtuali, fantasie reali.