Virtual Cultures

Contributing Editor, Ron Meiners

Ron Meiners is currently Developer Relations Manager at Multiverse.net, the platform for independent and academic MMOG and virtual world creation.  Ron has worked in a wide range of online community applications, from casual games to virtual worlds, from HearMe.com and Uru Live to a volunteer position as the Online Community Advocate for the Burning Man organization. He is passionate about the potential for online communities to foster relationships between participants and to open the range of experiences to collaborative creativity, transformative experiences, and the evolution of social organization. He is committed to the exploration of new forms of interaction and collaboration online, and in understanding these experiences in light of wider human experience and aspiration.

Celia Pearce, Contributing Editor

Celia Pearce is a professor in the School of Literature, Communication at Georgia Tech, where she teaches game design and new media arts, and heads up the Emergent Game Group (http://egg.lcc.gatech.edu). She has been designing multiplayer games, high tech theme park attractions, exhibitions and real and virtual public spaces since 1983.  She received her doctoral degree in 2006 from the SMARTLab Center, fomerly at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Desgin in London. Her thesis project was an ethnographic study of intergame immigration among refugees of the original Beta Test of Uru Live; she also helped Gametap to reconvene the Uru community for the re-release of the game. Her recent work has focused on designing for emergence in massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds. She is also co-founder of Ludica (www.ludica.org.uk), a women's game art and design collective. www.cpandfriends.com