Caryl Shaw: With over 14 years of experience building online communities, Caryl most recently managed the websites for The Sims and Simcity before creating and launching the website for The Sims 2. Her current project is Spore, where she is the Pollinated Content Producer - designing and developing the ingame, behind-the-scenes content sharing features. Prior to working at Maxis, Caryl was on the launch team for PlanetOut and then worked at HotWired - the online arm of Wired Magazine.

Working with communities that center around content creation has shown Caryl that given the chance users will make creative choices that push the original game design into new and interesting directions. And that game developers can apply the learnings from those emergent behaviors to make better games.

John Passfield: John is currently the Creative Director of Pandemic Studios Australia and was co-founder of Krome Studios. He was co-lead designer in the creation of Krome’s TY the Tasmanian Tiger franchise and has also played a significant role in the development of casual games with the creation of titles such as Halloween Harry.

Kenneth D. Forbus: Ken is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Education at the US Northwestern University. His research interests relate to artificial intelligence in such areas as: in computer game design, the roles AI, and especially articulate software, can play in creating better game engines and synthetic characters; in human-computer interaction, the use of sketching as an interface modality to knowledge-rich systems; and in cognitive science, understanding how analogy and similarity work, including the roles they play in cognitive and perceptual processes.