roundtable discussion on industry perspectives

Aida Navarro Redón is an architect, having graduated with honours from the School of Architecture of Valencia (ETSAV) in 2012. She earned her Ph.D. in Architecture, awarded Summa Cum Laude, from the School of Architecture of Madrid in 2020 with her thesis on virtual spaces, using video games as a case study. Additionally, she holds a Master of Research (M.Res) in Architecture from the School of Architecture of Madrid (ETSAM, 2014) as well as a Master in Computer Sciences for Video Games from Complutense University (UCM, 2019). It has allowed her to work in various video game studios, including C77 Entertainment, the Bafta-winner Herobeat Studios, and Calathea Game Studio. Notably, her work on Inner Ashes, a game addressing Alzheimer’s Disease, earned a PlayStation Talents Award. Also, as a game and level designer she joined Activision-Microsoft, working with the Maps Team at Digital Legends on Call of Duty. 

Currently, she holds a postdoctoral position at HEAD Geneva, teaching spatial and virtual design degree and master subjects. Simultaneously, she is part of the project The Future of Humanitarian Design, on which she is researching how to use tools for the production of virtual space in humanitarian crises across the world, from an architectural perspective.

J. Martin teaches game design at the Mediadesign University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf and, intermittently, as a guest lecturer at the CGL in Cologne, with a teaching focus on design methodologies and applied social and ethical aspects and a research focus on the interplay of motivation, emotion, and memory in games and game-based learning. His academic background includes American studies/literature, medieval literature, and language history and language change. His professional background includes co-founding and co-leading an indie developer studio in Hong Kong up until 2010. Titles he worked on from that era include the 2004 isometric TPP BloodTrail for the European and the social-mobile-casual MMO Coobico for the Asian market; more recently, he worked on games for the STARKid resilience project in cooperation with HHUD Uniklinik Düsseldorf, Cologne University, and FZ Jülich. 

Stephen Mallory is an Assistant Professor of Game Design at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan, USA. His research operates at the nexus of game studies, critical media (cultural) studies, and critical design and making, looking at digital games through the lens of digimodernism, investigating the use of AI in cultural production, and the impact of digimodernist texts on digital fascism. A former game designer who has contributed as level and game designer, his work can be experienced in over a dozen games including Bloodrayne 2 (2004), Aeon Flux (2005), Ghostbusters: The Video Game (2009), Section 8 (2009). His research has been published in Visual Arts Education, The Well Played Journal, and has works appearing in an upcoming collection titled Education and Roleplaying Games: Theory and Pedagogy, and The Journal of Popular Culture He has joined the advisory board for the upcoming book series by DeGuyter titled “Pop Culture in Context” where he continues to explore digimodernism in media and cultural production.