Phil Salvador is a librarian, digital archivist, and video game historian who runs The Obscuritory, a blog about unusual and under-discussed old video games. His work has been featured on Rock Paper Shotgun, Motherboard, Critical Distance, and the Fringe Game History Podcast. But most importantly, he is a friend to all birds.
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Anne Ladyem McDivitt is the Digital Humanities Librarian for the University of Alabama Libraries. Her personal research is on the history of the video game industry in the 1970s and 1980s, with a particular interest in gender. She received her PhD in History with a minor in Digital History from George Mason University and her MA in Public History from the University of Central Florida. You can follow her on Twitter @anneladyem or on her blog at anneladyem.com
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Alexander Mirowski is a Ph.D. candidate in the Informatics Department of the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University. He is a historian of technology, and in particular of video games. He is also the founding director of the Informatics Game Research Group at IU, whose mission is to bring together scholars across disciplines to study games and to contribute to the continued growth of game studies.
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Javon Goard is a Ph.D. student in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington. Goard obtained a B.A. in Sociology with Honors from the University of Maryland, College Park and his Masters in Informatics from his current institution. Goard’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach in studying aspects of videogame culture by working in the domains of Sociology, Informatics, and Media Studies. His current work focuses of African American/Blacks within the fighting videogame community. His blog, jstonee.wordpress.com, bridges the gap between academic discourse and personal anecdotes discussing a wide range of topics from gender, race, economics as they relate to virtual spaces.
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Reyan Ali is a writer from Columbus, Ohio. His work has been published by Wired, Spin, The Atlantic, The A.V. Club, and alt-weekly papers across the country. Born in Dallas, he grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, where he devoured '90s NBA action almost exclusively through trading cards, Beckett Basketball magazine, and NBA Jam: Tournament Edition on the Sega Mega Drive II.
Whitney Pow is a doctoral candidate in Screen Cultures and a member of the Presidential Society of Fellows at Northwestern University. Their research examines the elided history of queer and transgender video game and software programmers and locates queer and transgender life in histories of computing. Whitney’s research has been generously supported by the Sexualities Project at Northwestern's Dissertation Fellowship, The Strong Museum of Play’s Research Fellowship, and the University of Chicago’s Game Changer Chicago Design Lab Research Fellowship.
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Laine Nooney is an Assistant Professor of Media and Information Industries in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she specializes in the history of American personal computing and computer gaming. She’s been featured in popular venues such as The Atlantic, The Internet History Podcast, The Next Billion Seconds, NPR, and Gizmodo, and has spoken about the past, present, and future of the game industry at forums like Indiecade, GDC, and the the World Economic Forum. She is a founding editor of ROMchip, the first open access, scholarly journal of video game history, and organizes the leading annual conference for historians of computing as part of her work with the Special Interest Group in Computing, Information, and Society (SIGCIS).
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Rachel Simone Weil is an artist and video game historian whose work centers on preserving and reimagining femme aesthetics in 8- and 16-bit console gaming. She brings girly and glitchy visuals to obsolete hardware and game consoles, creating interactive electronic art that has been shown internationally in venues ranging from chipmusic festivals to fine art galleries. In 2012, Weil founded FEMICOM Museum, a physical and online collection of twentieth-century games and electronic toys for girls.
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Kevin Bunch is a science writer and video game historian focused on the early days of the medium. He is the creator of the Atari Archive video series on YouTube, which looks at each game for the Atari 2600 in release order with occasional tangents into related topics, such as the history of the RCA Studio II.
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Carly A. Kocurek is the author of two books about the history of video games: Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and Brenda Laurel: Pioneering Games for Girls (Bloomsbury, 2017). With Jennifer deWinter, she cofounded and co-edits the Influential Video Game Designers book series for Bloomsbury. She is an associate professor of digital humanities and media studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and she is currently co-authoring a book on the Ultima game franchise.
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As digital games curator at The Strong, Andrew Borman coordinates the museum’s efforts related to digital preservation of electronic games. He holds both an undergraduate and master's degree in Information Science, with a concentration in school media, and he has taught library classes for students in Kindergarten through 12th grade. He has long taken an active role in game preservation, focusing on the preservation of unreleased game prototypes and development material.
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