In organizing this large-scale event, Alliance numérique benefits from the support and expertise of a number of game industry professionals, who determine the content of the events and activities offered.
Advisory Board
Éric Plante - Content Coordinator
Development Director
Electronic Arts
Éric did an MSc in computer science and then started his career in 3D and special effects for the film industry, first at Taarna Studios and then at discreet. He joined EA Montreal in its early days and has worked on 8 of the titles it has released, first as a graphics programmer and then as a Development Director, switching his interests from consoles and graphics to managing teams and projects, while completing an MBA part-time at HEC Montreal.
David Anfossi
Producer
Eidos Montreal
David began his career as project leader for a research centre in the European car industry, where he signed three European patents and one world patent in six years. Upon his arrival in Quebec, he became project leader at Mega Brands (previously Megabloks) before joining Ubisoft Montreal, first as project coordinator, then as closer, associate producer and producer. After four years, David decided to take on new challenges and joined Stéphane D’Astous to set up EIDOS-MONTREAL.
With 12 years’ experience in management and more than 70 projects to his credit, David is the producer of the very first game to be developed by EIDOS-MONTREAL. His responsibilities involve managing the budgets and the planning, recruiting production experts, and directing and supporting a team made up of 80 talented people.
Éric Asselin
Lead Game Designer
Sarbakan
Éric Asselin holds University degrees in both Arts and Arts education. He has been working at Sarbakan for seven years. At first an animator, his creativity soon landed him the job of Game Designer. He has designed hundred of games for clients as varied and prestigious as Nickelodeon, Disney, Warner Bros, NFB/ONF, Cartoon Network, etc. He is currently Lead Game Designer at Sarbakan and manages the creativity of a team of ten very talented Game Designers. In his free time, he teaches Game Design at college level and is an award winning cartoonist. He is also the father of two tornado boy.
Jonathan Jacques-Belletête
Art Director
Eidos Montreal
Jonathan is known by his peers as being particularly passionate and dedicated to the video game medium. Trained in commercial arts, he started in the animation industry and was a freelance illustrator for several years. He jumped on his first opportunity to work in the games industry in 1999 as a concept artist at a small start-up that eventually became JamDat; he then joined A2M as a Lead Artist and Assistant Art Director, working there for over five years on many different projects including Scaler and the game that would ultimately become Wet. He was then hired by Ubisoft as an Art Director, where he worked on the Farcry series and many new IP concepts, including one that landed them the James Cameron’s Avatar license. Jonathan is now working at Eidos Montréal, where he is creating the visual direction of Deus Ex 3.
Rima Brek
Programming Development Director
Ubisoft
After completing her studies in Electrical Engineering at McGill University and spending a year at Nortel, she joined the game industry in 1998 to work at Ubisoft as a game programmer. She worked on a series of games for children before joining the technology team to work on the development of a new game engine. As an AI programmer, she worked on titles such as Rainbow Six Raven Shield and Rainbow Six 3 – Xbox and later worked as lead programmer on Rainbow Six Black Arrow and Open Season. Now after over 10 years at UBISOFT, she works with the production teams to evolve the craft within the studio as Programming Development Director.
Jason Della Rocca
Executive Director
International Game Developers Association
Jason is the executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), a professional organization committed to advancing the careers and enhancing the lives of game developers. Jason and the IGDA focus on connecting developers with their peers, promoting professional development, and advocating on issues that affect the developer community - such as quality of life, creative freedoms, workforce diversity and credit standards. As the spokesperson for the IGDA, Jason has appeared in countless news outlets and has spoken at conferences around the world.
Éric Holt-Leclerc
Programer R&D
Humagade
After receiving a BEng in Software Engineering, Eric joined Humagade where he has been working for the past 3 years. Eric began his career in the game industry as a game programmer; working mainly on mobile games, he contributed to bestsellers such as Family Guy and Torino 2006. Very implicated in restructuring the production pipeline, he has been the reference and main developer of the mobile engine for the past year and a half.
Lesley Phord-Toy
Game Director
A2M
After spending 4 years in R&D as a software engineer for companies such as Electronic Arts, Softimage, and Sony, Lesley moved onto the production floor in 2003 as a game programmer. In 2006, she changed career paths to her current role as Game Director. She has since produced various projects collaborating with partners such as Activision, Pandemic, and EA. In her four years at A2M, she has shipped both original and licensed IP titles for console and PC.
Olivier Proulx
Producer
Electronic Arts Mobile
Olivier Proulx, producer at EA Mobile, has five years of experience in the video game industry as a tester, programmer, associate producer and producer. He has contributed to the development and deployment of a dozen titles and the implementation of production processes at the Montréal studio. For over two years now, he has been supervising production on numerous titles including Yahtzee, JAMDAT Bowling 3D (J2ME version), Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland, The Sims Bowling and Royal Solitaire for iPod.
Frédéric Saint-Laurent
Senior Game Designer
Sarbakan
Frédéric is a highly imaginative game designer who has been working in the interactive field since 2000. With studies in Communications and Graphic Arts & Design, his professional path has led him to freelancing and teaching before joining the Sarbakan team in 2004. Proficient in multiple video game genres, Frédéric has worked on the production of over fifty Web games for clients such as Breakthrough Films, Disney, Mattel, and Nickelodeon. He is particularly interested in improving production tools and processes as well as developing in-house intellectual properties.
Mathieu Tremblay
Producer
Beenox
Mathieu Tremblay, who holds a degree in computer engineering from Université de Sherbrooke, entered the video game industry in 2002 as a programmer and then as director of operations. A producer for Beenox since 2005, he has produced and delivered eight highly prestigious titles for various platforms, including Spider-Man 3, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Cars (Disney) and the recent Kung Fu Panda.
Mathieu is currently focusing on the production of the Wii and PC versions of the next James Bond, the first game in the franchise to be developed entirely by Activision.
Serious Games Advisory Board
Jim Parker
Professor of Digital Media
University of Calgary
Jim Parker is currently Full Professor of computer science at the University of Calgary working in the Faculty of Fine Arts. He now works on the use of multimedia and artificial intelligence in very practical ways to remove artificial interaction methods from the user’s view and replace them with natural interfaces. This is to be done especially in games and game-style software, which has the property of containing aspects of almost all modern software technologies. Gamelike software is also very easily understood by the typical user - a lot of care has gone into building game systems that almost anyone can play. He received his B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics and M.Sc. in Computer Science in Calgary, and his Ph.D. (Doctor in de Wetenschappen) in Informatics (Informatica) from the State University of Gent (Universiteit Gent) with greatest distinction (met de grootste onderscheiding) or, in Latin, Magna Cum Laude.
He works with Kinesiology, connected with the Sport Technology Laboratory, on kinetic games, which are games that use the physical activity of the player as control input to a game. He is the director of the Digital Media Laboratory at the University of Calgary. The lab is doing work on visual and auditory perception for interface development, animations and computer mediated games for teaching and training, and research in computer mediated theatre, music, and art.
Samuelle Ducrocq-Henry
Professor
Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue
Samuelle Ducrocq-Henry is a professor at the Université du Quebec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT); she manages a campus in Longueuil offering programs in 3D creation. She presently writes a thesis at the Joint PhD Program in Communication (UQAM, Univers ity of Montreal and Concordia), on the questions of lan parties. She is specialized on the question of serious video games (interactivity and interactive storytelling), network, games and society, that she observes as communicational agents announcing the birth of a new entertainement mass media, just between sports and spectacles.
Mark Baldwin
Psychology Professor
University of McGill
Mark Baldwin is also President of MindHabits, a company developing science-based videogames designed to help players reduce stress and build self-confidence. He studied Psychology at the University of Toronto (BA.) and the University of Waterloo (MA and PhD, 1984). He then held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Michigan and the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto.
For several years he wrote and performed in children’s television, co-creating the award-winning series Camp Cariboo. Then he taught at the University of Winnipeg for 8 years before beginning his current position at McGill University in 1998, where he and his students have been studying the use of video games to help people develop psychologically beneficial habits of thought. Mindhabits recently won $1.3 M of development funding in Telefilm Canada’s Great Canadian Videogame Competition, and has released Mindhabits Trainer as an online casual/serious game.
Bernard Perron
Associate Professor, Art History and Film Studies Department
Université de Montréal
Bernard Perron has co-edited two anthologies for Routledge, The Video Game Theory Reader (2003) and The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (forthcoming in 2008). He is the editor of Silent Hill: Il motore del terrore (Costa & Nolan, Milan, 2006), an analysis of the acclaimed series of horror video games. He is currently at work on an anthology entitled Gaming After Dark. Essays on Horror Video Games (McFarland, forthcoming in 2009). His research interests include the introduction of montage, cognition, narration and the ludic dimension of narrative cinema, and interactive cinema and video games.
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