Advisory Board
Paul Fletcher MB BS; PhD, FRCPsych, FMedSci
Bernard Wolfe Professor of Health Neuroscience, University of Cambridge
Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist, Cambridge University Hospitals Trust and
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust
Wellcome Trust Investigator
Fellow and Director of Studies for Medicine, Clare College Cambridge
Paul trained in Medicine and then Psychiatry, practising full-time psychiatry in London before becoming involved in neuroimaging research exploring the brain basis of memory in health and disease. He took a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and spent a year studying neuroanatomy in Dusseldorf before moving to Cambridge where he is currently based.
He currently divides his time between research, teaching and clinical work in psychiatry. He was appointed to the Bernard Wolfe Professorship of Health Neuroscience at Cambridge University in 2008 and he is an honorary consultant psychiatrist with Cambridge University Hospitals Trust and the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust. Paul’s research is supported by the Bernard Wolfe Health Neuroscience Fund and by a Wellcome Trust Investigator’s Award.
He uses combinations of pharmacology, neuroimaging and large scale behavioural studies in healthy and clinical populations, with the aim of understanding the basis of perception, learning and decision-making in the human brain, as well as how this may be altered under conditions of illness or drug disturbance. His research draws on the principle that the mind/brain is a model of its world. It constructs reality in order to predict that world as a means of interacting with it efficiently, fruitfully and safely. In doing so, it is prone to changing or even losing contact with the reality of the world.
Through understanding this, and the many ways in which we are all prone to losing touch with reality, the aim is to understand mental illness and mental distress more deeply.
Given the principles of his research, he is fascinated by the potential for video games in representing and researching mental distress. They provide unique contexts for understanding how people actively model and engage with new realities and thus offer powerful opportunities for studying the fundamental processes of the mind. His involvement with Ninja Theory in representing psychosis in the game, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, has shown him the huge potential for games in this respect and he now actively collaborates with them in thinking about new ways of representing mental distress and, in the future, ways of using game settings for therapeutic purposes.
Eve Crevoshay
Executive Director of Take This since 2018, is a 15-year veteran of the nonprofit sector, with a focus on fundraising and executing strategy. Her background spans education, social services, and the arts. Eve is a member GDC advisory board in the advocacy track. She’s also a certified yoga teacher, avid gardener and cook, backpacker, and gamer. She lives in the Seattle area with her husband, daughter, and two dogs.
Kate Edwards
Kate Edwards is the Executive Director of the Global Game Jam, as well as the CEO and principal consultant of Geogrify, a consultancy which pioneered content culturalization. She is also a Board Member of Take This and is the former Executive Director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) from 2012 to 2017. In addition to being an award-winning advocate who serves in several advisory roles, she is a geographer, writer, and corporate strategist. Following 13 years at Microsoft, she has consulted on many game and non-game projects for BioWare, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and many other companies.Fortune magazine named her as one of the “10 most powerful women” in the game industry in 2013 and in 2014 was named by GamesIndustry.biz as one of their six People of the Year. In 2018, she was honored with Reboot Develop’s annual Hero Award and also presented with IndieCade’s annual Game Changer Award. She is also profiled in the December 2018 publication Women in Gaming: 100 Professionals of Play.
Mike Wilson
Since 1995, Mike Wilson has been an executive at the forefront of new media development, publishing, film and videogame production, and Internet marketing. Widely regarded as a pioneer and leading expert in development and marketing to the $30 billion computer and video game audience, Wilson has been featured in such high-profile publications as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Daily News, Wired, and Texas Monthly.
Mike’s reputation for innovative marketing and distribution strategies was cemented during his tenure as Vice President of Marketing and Distribution for id Software, one of the most successful independent game developers in the world. From 1995 to December of 1996, he managed the company’s business and marketing affairs, overseeing its publishing relationships with GT Interactive (GTIS) and Activision (ATVI), while establishing distribution for id’s self-publishing efforts. He also directly managed the launch of the mega hit Quake series, as well as many products in the best-selling DOOM series.
Wilson entered the game industry in 1995, spending six months as Vice President of Development at IVS/DWANGO, the first nationwide online gaming service. During this time, he managed the company’s growth from a single-server, 4-man operation in Houston, TX, to a nationwide franchise operating in 22 markets in less than 6 months, establishing a foothold for the pioneering service that still exists today.
Mike studied PR and Journalism at Louisiana State University, and has been a featured speaker at major industry events and conferences including E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo), GDC, (Game Developer’s Conference), SPA (Software Publishers Association) and others.
Atheeshaan Arumuham
Dr Atheeshaan Arumuham is a clinical research associate and a PhD student at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, and a specialty doctor in Psychiatry at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Aty is a committee member of Gaming the Mind; a charity comprising a group of mental health professionals with an interest in promoting wellbeing in the gaming community and looking at the interactions between mental health and gaming. He is an avid fan of esports including Overwatch, League of Legends, Dota 2, and Teamfight Tactics. He has produced wellbeing advice for the British Esports Association, with a focus on aspiring and professional esports players.
Leo Zullo
Leo co-founded Safe In Our World with Neil Broadhead and Gareth Williams. Leo is a video games industry veteran, having worked on hundreds of titles and is the Managing Director of an award-winning independent video games publisher. As a leader in the industry, Leo recognised the access the industry has to some of the most vulnerable audiences – both in players and in teams, and in 2017 set about to find ways to help support, develop, nurture, teach and improve the lives of these communities. This grew into what Safe In Our World is today, and it’s his hope that through the ethos’s we work and live by, the communities we develop, and the support and guidance that we provide, we can not only lead by example, but also truly help remove the stigma around mental health.
Chris Charla
As the director of the ID@Xbox program, Chris Charla helps independent developers self-publish their games on Microsoft’s Xbox One console. Previously, he was portfolio director for Xbox Live Arcade at Microsoft Studios. Before Microsoft, he spent ten years at an independent developer doing everything from level design to original IP and transmedia development, helping the studio grow from twenty-five to more than five hundred people, and finishing as VP of Business Development. Way back in the ancient past, he edited video game magazines and served as the launch editor of IGN.com. In his spare time he creates text adventures and a print fanzine, “Incredibly Strange Games,” which has a website at incrediblystrangegames.com.
Dean Takahashi
Dean Takahashi is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist for more than 33 years, and he has covered games for 24 years. been at VentureBeat since 2008. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, “Opening the Xbox” and “The Xbox 360 Uncloaked.” He organizes the annual GamesBeat and GamesBeat Summit conferences. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Jason Docton
Jason Docton is the CEO of Rise Above The Disorder charity. As a result of Jason’s dedication and efforts to help fellow gamers, Anxiety Gaming was founded as a 501(c)(3) Mental Health Non-Profit, committed to educating and treating mental health issues within the gaming community. To date, Anxiety Gaming has helped 30,000 individuals improve their lives through the therapy they receive. In 2018, Jason re-branded the organization to Rise Above the Disorder to expand his mission of providing free mental health care with compassion and integrity to people of all backgrounds.
Tammy McDonald
Tammy McDonald is the CEO of Axis Game Factory and Strategic Advisor at Griffin Gaming Partners. Over the past 24 years, Axis Game Factory has developed interactive video games on all next-gen platform systems and first-party social gaming platforms for over 150 licensed properties. They have produced, directed, and animated over 20 hours of 3D Animation for in-game cinematics as well as broadcast TV and feature film. Their clients have included, SCEA, SCEE, SOE, Microsoft, Activision, Blizzard, EA, Eidos, Google, Nickelodeon, Midway, Take-Two, and many others. Tammy is directly responsible for the growth, operations, and business development of the company.
John Smedley
John Smedley is studio head at Amazon Game Studios San Diego. He is an experienced chief executive officer with a demonstrated 30 year history of working in the gaming industry, also as a former president of Daybreak Game Company, which changed its name from Sony Online Entertainment in 2015. John is skilled in online gaming, game design, monetization, venture capital, and digital distribution.
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Paul Fletcher MB BS; PhD, FRCPsych, FMedSci
Bernard Wolfe Professor of Health Neuroscience, University of Cambridge
Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist, Cambridge University Hospitals Trust and
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust
Wellcome Trust Investigator
Fellow and Director of Studies for Medicine, Clare College Cambridge
Paul trained in Medicine and then Psychiatry, practising full-time psychiatry in London before becoming involved in neuroimaging research exploring the brain basis of memory in health and disease. He took a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and spent a year studying neuroanatomy in Dusseldorf before moving to Cambridge where he is currently based.
He currently divides his time between research, teaching and clinical work in psychiatry. He was appointed to the Bernard Wolfe Professorship of Health Neuroscience at Cambridge
University in 2008 and he is an honorary consultant psychiatrist with Cambridge University Hospitals Trust and the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust. Paul’s research is supported by the Bernard Wolfe Health Neuroscience Fund and by a Wellcome Trust Investigator’s Award.
He uses combinations of pharmacology, neuroimaging and large scale behavioural studies in healthy and clinical populations, with the aim of understanding the basis of perception, learning and decision-making in the human brain, as well as how this may be altered under conditions of illness or drug disturbance. His research draws on the principle that the mind/brain is a model of its world. It constructs reality in order to predict that world as a means of interacting with it efficiently, fruitfully and safely. In doing so, it is prone to changing or even losing contact with the reality of the world.
Through understanding this, and the many ways in which we are all prone to losing touch with reality, the aim is to understand mental illness and mental distress more deeply.
Given the principles of his research, he is fascinated by the potential for video games in representing and researching mental distress. They provide unique contexts for understanding how people actively model and engage with new realities and thus offer powerful
opportunities for studying the fundamental processes of the mind. His involvement with Ninja Theory in representing psychosis in the game, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, has shown him the huge potential for games in this respect and he now actively collaborates with them in thinking about new ways of representing mental distress and, in the future, ways of using
game settings for therapeutic purposes.
View Profile
Eve Crevoshay,
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Kate Edwards is the Executive Director of the Global Game Jam, as well as the CEO and principal consultant of Geogrify, a consultancy which pioneered content culturalization. She is also a Board Member of Take This and is the former Executive Director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) from 2012 to 2017. In addition to being an award-winning advocate who serves in several advisory roles, she is a geographer, writer, and corporate strategist. Following 13 years at Microsoft, she has consulted on many game and non-game projects for BioWare, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and many other companies.Fortune magazine named her as one of the “10 most powerful women” in the game industry in 2013 and in 2014 was named by GamesIndustry.biz as one of their six People of the Year. In 2018, she was honored with Reboot Develop’s annual Hero Award and also presented with IndieCade’s annual Game Changer Award. She is also profiled in the December 2018 publication Women in Gaming: 100 Professionals of Play.
View Profile
Since 1995, Mike Wilson has been an executive at the forefront of new media development, publishing, film and videogame production, and Internet marketing. Widely regarded as a pioneer and leading expert in development and marketing to the $30 billion computer and
video game audience, Wilson has been featured in such high-profile publications as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Daily News, Wired, and Texas Monthly.
Mike’s reputation for innovative marketing and distribution strategies was cemented during his tenure as Vice President of Marketing and Distribution for id Software, one of the most successful independent game developers in the world. From 1995 to December of 1996, he managed the company’s business and marketing affairs, overseeing its publishing relationships with GT Interactive (GTIS) and Activision (ATVI), while establishing distribution for id’s self-publishing efforts. He also directly managed the launch of the mega hit Quake series, as well as many products in the best-selling DOOM series.
Wilson entered the game industry in 1995, spending six months as Vice President of
Development at IVS/DWANGO, the first nationwide online gaming service. During this time, he managed the company’s growth from a single-server, 4-man operation in Houston, TX, to a nationwide franchise operating in 22 markets in less than 6 months, establishing a foothold for the pioneering service that still exists today.
Mike studied PR and Journalism at Louisiana State University, and has been a featured speaker at major industry events and conferences including E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo), GDC, (Game Developer’s Conference), SPA (Software Publishers Association) and
others.
View Profile
Dr Atheeshaan Arumuham is a clinical research associate and a PhD student at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, and a specialty doctor in Psychiatry at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Aty is a committee member of Gaming the Mind; a charity comprising a group of mental health professionals with an interest in promoting wellbeing in the gaming community and looking at the interactions between mental health and gaming. He is an avid fan of esports including Overwatch, League of Legends, Dota 2, and Teamfight Tactics. He has produced wellbeing advice for the British Esports Association, with a focus on aspiring and professional esports players.
View Profile
Leo co-founded Safe In Our World with Neil Broadhead and Gareth Williams. Leo is a video games industry veteran, having worked on hundreds of titles and is the Managing Director of an award-winning independent video games publisher. As a leader in the industry, Leo recognised the access the industry has to some of the most vulnerable audiences – both in players and in teams, and in 2017 set about to find ways to help support, develop, nurture, teach and improve the lives of these communities. This grew into what Safe In Our World is today, and it’s his hope that through the ethos’s we work and live by, the communities we develop, and the support and guidance that we provide, we can not only lead by example, but also truly help remove the stigma around mental health.
View Profile
As the director of the ID@Xbox program, Chris Charla helps independent developers self-publish their games on Microsoft’s Xbox One console. Previously, he was portfolio director for Xbox Live Arcade at Microsoft Studios. Before Microsoft, he spent ten years at an independent developer doing everything from level design to original IP and transmedia development, helping the studio grow from twenty-five to more than five hundred people, and finishing as VP of Business Development. Way back in the ancient past, he edited video game magazines and served as the launch editor of IGN.com. In his spare time he creates text adventures and a print fanzine, “Incredibly Strange Games,” which has a website at incrediblystrangegames.com.
View Profile
Christopher Metzen is an American game designer, artist, voice actor, and author known for his work creating the fictional universes and scripts for Blizzard Entertainment’s three major award-winning media franchises: Warcraft, Diablo and StarCraft. Metzen was hired by Blizzard Entertainment as an animator and an artist; his first work for the company was with the video game Justice League Task Force. Metzen was the Senior Vice President of Story and Franchise Development at Blizzard Entertainment and assisted the company’s projects by providing voice talent for a number of characters, most notably the orc character Thrall, as well as contributing to artistic character design. Metzen retired in September 2016 to spend more time with his family. In his most recent work, Metzen co-authored graphic novels, Transformers: Autocracy and Transformers Monstrosity with author Flint Dille and artist Livio Ramondelli.
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Dean Takahashi,
Dean Takahashi is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist for more than 33 years, and he has covered games for 24 years. been at VentureBeat since 2008. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, “Opening the Xbox” and “The Xbox 360 Uncloaked.” He organizes the annual GamesBeat and GamesBeat Summit conferences. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
View Profile
Jason Docton,
Jason Docton is the CEO of Rise Above The Disorder charity. As a result of Jason’s dedication and efforts to help fellow gamers, Anxiety Gaming was founded as a 501(c)(3) Mental Health Non-Profit, committed to educating and treating mental health issues within the gaming community. To date, Anxiety Gaming has helped 30,000 individuals improve their lives through the therapy they receive. In 2018, Jason re-branded the organization to Rise Above the Disorder to expand his mission of providing free mental health care with compassion and integrity to people of all backgrounds.
View Profile
Tammy McDonald,
Tammy McDonald is the CEO of Axis Game Factory and Strategic Advisor at Griffin Gaming Partners. Over the past 24 years, Axis Game Factory has developed interactive video games on all next-gen platform systems and first-party social gaming platforms for over 150 licensed properties. They have produced, directed, and animated over 20 hours of 3D Animation for in-game cinematics as well as broadcast TV and feature film. Their clients have included, SCEA, SCEE, SOE, Microsoft, Activision, Blizzard, EA, Eidos, Google, Nickelodeon, Midway, Take-Two, and many others. Tammy is directly responsible for the growth, operations, and business development of the company.
View Profile
John Smedley,
John Smedley is studio head at Amazon Game Studios San Diego. He is an experienced chief executive officer with a demonstrated 30 year history of working in the gaming industry, also as a former president of Daybreak Game Company, which changed its name from Sony Online Entertainment in 2015. John is skilled in online gaming, game design, monetization, venture capital, and digital distribution.