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Play This Thing Staff

Editor in Chief

Greg Costikyan (costik)

Greg Costikyan has designed more than 30 commercially published games -- tabletop, PC, online, mobile, and social network -- been a game industry entrepreneur, and written extensively about games, game design, and game industry business issues for publications as diverse as the New York Times, Salon, The Escapist, and Verbatim: The Language Quarterly. He has consulted on game industry business issues to clients including Motorola, Nokia, Intel, IBM, British Telecom, France Telecom and Sarnoff Corporation. He designed one of the earliest online games, one of the earliest web games, and one of the earliest mobile games. Some of his writings are extensively used in game studies courses across the globe. He's received the Maverick Award (for "tireless promotion of independent games"), the Gamer's Choice Award, five Origins Awards, and is an inductee into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame. At present, he is working as a freelance game designer and game industry business consultant.

Managing Editor

Patrick Dugan (the99th)

Patrick Dugan is a game designer and writer who focuses on the power of games to educate, challenge worldviews, and change the world. He's currently involved in a global conspiracy to summon Azathoth through a huge MMO ritual. He's willing to hear offers from Yog Sothoth.

Contributing Editors

Emily Short (EmilyShort)
Her Wikipedia entry.

Dustin Smith (TheDustin)
Dustin Smith is your friendly neighborhood Eskimo -- a ne'er-do-well punk who fashions himself as a Neo-Luddite/Anarcho Primitivist. While he hasn't released a game (yet), he has much love for the medium and is naive and hopeful about its future. He likes listening to drone-doom metal, 8-bit chiptunes, and acoustic-punk while long distance running across the tundra.

Sebastian Sohn (sebastian sohn)
Sebastian is a "well played" game player, critic, and game design instructor. With an insatiable appetite to learn, explore and catalog different games in the wild, he spends his time researching tabletop games and videogames. He is especially fascinated by the use of games as an experiential teaching aid and constantly on the lookout for boardgames, videogames, and roleplaying games that teach life skills, particularly investment and business skills. He is currently on a few side quests to level up to a full-time game design instructor.

Paul Eres (RinkuHero) is a game designer with Radical Poesis Games & Creations, originally founded to improve people through the games they play. Some of their games are Immortal Defense, Fedora Spade, Alphasix, Missing, Sword of Jade.

He also keeps a LiveJournal.

Robert Rossney (rbr)
Robert Rossney is a software developer (often), journalist (rarely), and owner of far too many board games (always). Subjects he can be a bore on include: how the Assize of Clarendon prefigures The Dukes of Hazzard, how he knows he was the first person ever to get an email address printed in the San Francisco Chronicle, why you should give Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun another try, Bob Pfeifer's federal obstruction-of-justice charge, why collectible card games aren't fun, the genius of Karl-Heinz Schmiel, slavery (he's against it), single-payer health insurance (he's for it), and XSLT (he's in recovery). His plangent bleatings can very occasionally be found at www.koaxkoaxkoax.com.