BALANCED CEO Robert Atkins organized a PAX Panel of industry experts who spoke on the subject of empowering gaming and online communities to save the planet.
The panel was conducted on September 2nd in Seattle during PAX West, the world’s largest consumer focused video game show. Over 80,000 attend this weekend long conference.
Saving the World One Game at a Time
Gaming can, and should, be more than just entertainment. The leaders in this panel will talk about how innovative technologies, games-related foundations, and gaming experiences are going to help empower communities of game players to use entertainment hours for real purpose.
The full video of the panel discussion
Panelist Bios
[Gaming Communities Advocate]
Kate Edwards – Top 10 females in the industry and a leader and voice for how gaming is doing more than just entertaining.
Description
Kate Edwards was the executive director of the International Game Developers Association from December 2012 to June 2017. She is a geographer, culturalization pioneer, writer, event speaker, Board Member at TakeThisOrg, Chief Advocate at Game Advocacy, and former Executive Director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Edwards
[Science and Research Communities]
Dr. Corey Clark – Deputy Director of Guildhall Research and Lead on Adult Literacy XPRIZE finalist team (they created a game to teach people to read English and Spanish)
https://adultliteracy.xprize.org/teams/people-forwords
http://keranews.org/post/north-texas-team-develops-smartphone-game-help-adults-learn-read-and-write
https://www.smu.edu/Guildhall/People/Faculty/Corey-Clark-PhD
[Game Development Communities]
Robert M. Atkins – CEO of BALANCED – Building a game which you go into the body, and you heal the body from the inside. It’s entertainment first, but grounded in the science… while you play the choices help teach AI and create Machine Learning tool for medical researchers in treatment discovery. We are working with world leaders in Education and Medical research who are writing research papers around the effect of this type of gaming as a treatment.
https://www.balancedmediatechnology.com/project/the-8-cell/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertmatkins/
https://www.balancedmediatechnology.com/jimmys-wish/
https://www.balancedmediatechnology.com/make-a-wish-presentation/
[Charitable Gaming Communities]
Travis Eriksen – Executive Director of Child’s Play Charity – Leaders in bringing games to hospitals for children to improve their well-being.
Executive Director with a demonstrated history of working in the primary/secondary education field. Skilled in Classroom Management, Lesson Planning, Educational Technology, Differentiated Instruction, and Curriculum Development. Strong visionary with a Master’s Degree focused in Education from Oregon State University.
Child’s Play seeks to improve the lives of children in pediatric hospitals and other child welfare facilities through the kindness and generosity of the video game community and the power of play.
[Streaming Communities]
Katie Stone Perez – Director of Mixer Interactive & Developer Success at Microsoft
Katie Stone Perez is the Director of Mixer Interactive & Developer Success. She oversees Mixer’s Development relations and the developer platform. She previously lead operations for the ID@Xbox team and also worked as an executive producer for the Xbox Incubation team. Katie is a passionate advocate for creating broad appeal and casual content and was also founding member of the Xbox Live Arcade team. Katie was a key contributor in establishing the game development pipeline for arcade and has shipped over 70 titles across the Xbox and Xbox 360 Arcade services. Katie joined Microsoft 13+ years ago as part of the Microsoft Games Studios (MGS) team, where she worked as a software test engineer for MGS on several hit titles including “Fuzion Frenzy,” “Kung Fu Chaos” and “Zoo Tycoon Gold.”
Specialties: Game Development, Partner Management, Product Development, International development and Localization.
[Gaming Developer and Social Causes Communities]
Paul Bettner – Founder, CEO at Playful Corp. & Director for the Drake Bettner Foundation that funds projects that have a positive global social impact.
Founder, CEO and Creative Director at Newtoy, Inc. (sold to Zynga)
- Created Words With Friends
Game Developer at Ensemble Studios, Microsoft
- Shipped over 22 million units spread across four major titles and a half dozen expansion/bundle packs in the Age of Empires and Halo Wars series. Worked on a number of large-scale prototype projects.