Helen Young, PhD
Dr. Helen Young completed her PhD at the University of Sydney (2007) and is currently a Senior Research Fellow leading the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship titled “The Politics of Medievalism: Persuasive Narratives” in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. Helen has published widely on popular culture, including genre fiction and videogames and gaming cultures, with particular interests in race, racism and medievalism and cultures of far-Right extremism.
A former President (2021-2024) of the Australia and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Helen is a member of the Executive Committee of the Addressing Violent Extremism and Radicalisation to Terrorism research network and Deputy Director of the Deakin Centre for Contemporary History. Helen’s publications have appeared in Textual Practice, Continuum, from Cambridge University Press, Springer, and transcript Verlag, and for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology.
Emily Grace Buck
Emily Grace Buck is the Studio Narrative Director at EA DICE, leading a 20+ person strong narrative team for the upcoming Battlefield project and the live service of Battlefield: 2042. Previously, she served as Narrative Design Lead at Ubisoft Reflections and was the Narrative Director for The Waylanders at Gato Studio. Her experience includes interactive television with Eko and pre-production narrative leadership on Destruction AllStars at Lucid Games.
Renowned for her work at Telltale Games, Emily was a story and design lead on The Walking Dead: The Final Season, Batman: The Telltale Series, Batman: The Enemy Within, and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. Earlier in her career, she designed training simulations at Kognito and published a children's tabletop RPG. Emily's diverse background includes writing gaming news, teaching acting, social-emotional learning, and yoga, and performing as an actor and dancer. Emily is currently studying for her Executive MBA at Valar Institute.
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Emma Vossen, PhD
Dr. Emma Vossen is a writer and researcher with a PhD from the University of Waterloo. She is the co-author and co-editor of the book Feminism in Play (Palgrave, 2018) and Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be (Punctum, 2025). Much of her writing looks at the intersections of politics and games. Her most recent article, “Tom Nook, Capitalist or Comrade?” discusses the Animal Crossing games in the context of the contemporary housing crisis.
Vossen has been interviewed about her work by Wired, Macleans Magazine, the Washington Post, and Electronic Gaming Monthly. In 2016, CBC Ideas made a 40-minute radio documentary about her research that was broadcast nationally. After completing two postdoctoral research fellowships at York University and the University of British Columbia, Vossen returned to Waterloo where she is the Knowledge Mobilization and Research Impact Officer at the University of Waterloo's Games Institute.
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Melissa Rogerson, PhD
Dr. Melissa Rogerson is an international expert in modern boardgames and hybrid digital boardgames, with a strong history of industry engagement, examining future design directions for people’s leisure participation. She work at the intersection of Game Studies, Board Game Studies, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), as a Senior Lecturer in HCI in the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne.
Her current research centers on the use of digital and electronic tools for hybrid tabletop game play. This is supported through two Australian Research Council funded projects: Hybrid Technologies for Tabletop Play and Co-designing Innovations In Digital Storytelling with Older Adults.
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