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BAFTA Games Panel: Who rules games?

Tuesday, 13 December 2016 - 7:00pm
Princess Anne Theatre, BAFTA, 195 Piccadilly
A panel of experts including representatives from Jagex, Twitch and Gfinity explores the positive and negative impacts of fan communities on the game industry.

Ellie Gibson (Host)

Ellie Gibson is an award-winning video games journalist who has worked in the industry for 15 years. She was previously deputy editor of Eurogamer and has written for The Guardian and Vice. She is also one-half of the comedy double act Scummy Mummies, and appears as the games expert on hit TV show Dara O Briain's Go 8 Bit. 

Mike Bithell

Mike Bithell is the chap behind two reasonably liked British games, Thomas Was Alone and Volume. He is currently playing around with VR, having released a PSVR expansion for Volume, and EarthShape with Google. He'll probably tell you about them on twitter (@mikebithell) or on his site, www.bithellgames.com

Phil Mansell

As studio head at Jagex, Phil oversees the RuneScape game franchise, covering multiple development teams, live publishing operations and partnerships. He specialises in ‘games as a service’ and has given conference talks on player driven development and working closely with a game’s community of players when making and running games. Phil's career in games spans 18 years, including tenures at Bullfrog, EA, Sony and Climax, before evolving into head of product at Jagex.

Shannon Plante

Shannon Plante is the Community Manager of Education at Twitch, responsible for smooth and enjoyable user experiences for all users. Shannon joined Twitch in 2015 after serving as a site admin and running the Twitch Subreddit, bringing to the company a purely community-first perspective. Prior to this, Shannon was manager of one of the largest Twitch partners and worked as a game producer at Improbable, where she led early alpha development of an MMO game. Shannon holds a BA in English Literature from Simon Fraser University and is a Twitch Partner in her own right.

George Kelion

George Kelion is the Senior Communications Lead for VR Games at CCP Games. Fondly remembering playing the Virtuality games of the early ‘90s in London’s Trocadero, George could not resist the lure of virtual reality games development and can now be found at CCP’s London office, where he evangelises the amazing merits and astonishing possibilities of VR given even a fraction of a chance.

Sam Van Tilburgh

As a digital marketeer and film maker, Sam was a trail blazer if it comes to videogame communities. Having joined Lionhead Studios in the early 2000's he was responsible for the original Fable, The Movies and Black&White communities. He now looks after marketing (including communities) at eSports company Gfinity.

Booking opens Wednesday 16 November, 09.30

Tickets will be available for collection from Reception before this event

Student ticketholders will be asked to provide ID on entry