Faculty for Game Design

Kel Bachus

Biography

Kel is an author and veteran of the video game industry; they’ve worked on everything from titles like Elder Scrolls Online, to mobile games to the last game ever made for the Atari Jaguar. Working in game development as both a designer and writer while publishing in genre fiction led to teaching with a very story-forward focus. In 2022, Kel created Champlain’s Interactive Narrative major to meet the increasing need for narrative specialists in the current market.

Champlain provided the perfect opportunity to create not only cutting edge curriculum for story creators, but to work on issues of equity and justice in this sometimes problematic field. Kel’s interest is in radically inclusive spaces and decolonized processes; they work with students on a range of projects in their own studios, often with a justice focus.

Kel founded Rad Magpie, a Vermont nonprofit supporting underrepresented developers, and runs a summer studio for students working on independent projects and starting their own companies.

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John Boyd

Biography

Boyd started teaching at Champlain College in the fall of 2012. He teaches multiple topics within the Game Design curriculum including game design, system design, and level design.

As a game designer, he helped develop eight titles on a variety of development platforms including PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. Notable titles include: Rage (Xbox 360, PS3, PC), Ghostbusters: The Video Game (Xbox 360, PS3), Kinect Star Wars (Xbox 360), Medal of Honor: Airborne (Xbox 360), Luxor3 (PC), and Sin Episodes: Emergence (PC).

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Amanda Crispel

Biography

Amanda is the Acting Dean of the Division of Communication and Creative Media, the Chair of the Game Studio (a seven-program cohort of faculty and students), and a Professor of Game Design. She has been a faculty member of Champlain College since 2005, and has an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art focused on games as a persuasive communication medium.

Amanda Crispel is a veteran of the game industry. She has worked for companies such as Brøderbund Software, Mattel, Lego, Leapfrog, The Learning Company and Nickelodeon, and she specializes in games and interactive media for children and families and games with persuasive or educational purposes.

She has also worked on several research grants in the serious game space targeting the prevention of sexual violence against women.

What are your hobbies?

Dragonboat Paddling, Woodworking, Skiing

Favorite local eateries and things to do in Vermont:

Being on Lake Champlain, or enjoying a beautiful evening at a lake shore eatery.

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Christopher DeGuise

Biography

Christopher DeGuise is a professor at Champlain College and the founder and game developer at Instance Entertainment. DeGuise is an entrepreneur and a technologist with more than 20 years of experience working as an IT professional. DeGuise has an equal interest in the technology and business sides of his field, and believes technology has the ability to automate and simplify our lives.

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Jonathan Ferguson

Biography

Jonathan Ferguson, Assistant Professor, Game Design and Game Production, Division of Communications and Creative Media at Champlain College is a Game Designer and software freedom advocate. Prof. Ferguson has over 27 years of technology development experience, spanning careers in Cybersecurity, Software Development, Game Development, and Teaching. Prof. Ferguson maintains particular interests in free and open source software, game technology, game history and game preservation and access. Prof. Ferguson holds a Masters of Science in Managing Innovation in Information Technology from Champlain College.

Prof. Ferguson is the creator of the Game History Collection at Champlain College. The mission of the Game History Collection is to preserve and provide access to historical games for study and play. This requires ongoing preservation and maintenance of game software, hardware and online platforms needed to replicate the experiences of historical games. Providing access to past experiences drives the preservation efforts of the Game History Collection in The Game Studio at Champlain College. The GHC offers access to thousands of games for students to study and play, providing direct access to original hardware, emulated games, and hardware-reimplementation.

Since 2009, Prof. Ferguson has served as the Faculty Advisor for the 3 hours weekly project-based Free and Open Source Technology Club (FOTC) at Champlain College, offering weekly opportunities to explore and discuss software and hardware freedom. Over the 2022-2023 academic year, students built a small-scale (Beowulf) compute cluster, and learned about Amateur Radio and Electronics.

Prof. Ferguson also supervises the Games Testing Lab in The Game Studio at Champlain College. Games Testing Lab typically runs five sessions of Games Testing per week, supporting testing options for Personal Computer, Mobile, Virtual Reality and physical prototypes.

Prof. Ferguson is also the Faculty advisor for the Juggling Club and the Destiny 2 Club.

Distinctions & Awards

2021 John Lavallee Innovation Award

Professional & Scholastic Affiliations

• ACM
• IEEE
• AAAS
• IGDA

Curriculum Vitae

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Timothy Hamel

Biography

Mr. Hamel is a 15-year veteran game developer who still actively works in the field. He has also been teaching game development for over seven years.

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals
• The Ultimate History of Video Games
• The Hobbit

Favorite Quote

“Do or do not. There is no try.”

—Yoda

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Rachel Hooper

Biography

As a Creative Media Faculty member at Champlain College, Rachel Hooper teaches a range of courses including Human-Centered Design, Creative Media, and Video Game Production. Additionally, she serves as the Project Manager at the Emergent Media Center, where she empowers students to seek patterns, connect dots, and imagine new futures by using data and empathy to uncover and define problems worth solving.

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Ken Howell

Biography

Ken Howell is an Associate Professor in the Division of Communication & Creative Media, where he teaches in multiple programs. He started teaching at Champlain as an adjunct in 2006, having previously taught at the New York University Steinhardt School and New Jersey City University.

Ken has been working with Champlain’s Emergent Media Center (EMC) since 2008. He has worked on an array of projects, including the UNFPA Game to Prevent Violence Against Women and IBM Virtual Worlds project. Along with support from the EMC, Ken recently served as Faculty Advisor for the Sandbox team, a group of students exploring new and novel forms of human-computer interaction. Work from that team has been exhibited at the Chicago Design Museum, the Game Developers conference, and many other venues internationally. He also works with a group of artists called the Illumination Collective, exploring digitally controlled lighting as a means of art making.

In addition to teaching, Ken has been an independent Interaction Designer and Developer for over twenty years, and has worked on such broad-ranging brands as Urban Outfitters, Rossignol, Pantene, and Skittles. He is also active in the Maker Movement, and is a founding board member of Generator Makerspace

When he is not working or teaching, Ken enjoys drawing, painting, tinkering in his laboratory, taking care of his Bonsai trees, and all things outdoors.

Curriculum Vitae

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Dean Lawson

Biography

Dean Lawson has worked in the Games Industry for nearly 30 years, primarily as a Programmer but also as a Designer, Project Lead, and Director of Programming.

He has worked on 14+ shipped titles, including SimCity Societies, Caesar IV, Majesty, Risk: Global Domination, a number of online board game conversions for Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, and World of Zoo and Club Penguin: EPF: Herbert’s Revenge on the Nintendo DS for THQ and Disney Interactive, respectively. Throughout his career, Dean has focused on game AI and how it helps shape the player experience.

Dean’s other main passion in games is Game Architecture; how to engineer flexible technical frameworks for games. Dean advises at the EMC at Champlain College, as well as working as a contract programmer for a number of game and educational companies. Dean has been teaching at Champlain College since 2010: he previously taught Game Programming and Design at Savannah College of Art and Design.

Dean Lawson earned a BS in Computer Science from Union College in Schenectady, NY and an M.Ed in Secondary School Mathematics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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Shannon Mitchell

Biography

Shannon is an Adjunct for the division of Communication and Creative Media, with a specialization in Game Production. Recognized by Bustle in “Women Redefining What It Means To Work In STEM” Shannon is co-owner, Vice President, and COO of GameTheory Co, a Vermont-based game studio whose passion is using gaming technology to inspire social change. Shannon’s work at GameTheory begin in 2016 with this mission, and to expand the creative application of games, technology, and design towards meaningful impacts. Through her time in the game industry she has served as project manager on dozens of successful projects across entertainment, mobile, edu-tech, and health spaces utilizing wearables, AR/VR and biometric feedback. Before working in her current positions, Shannon held several roles in entertainment-focused independent studios, where she collaborated on widely recognized and award-winning app titles.

At this point in her career, Shannon is focused on expanding the benefits of leading edge gaming technologies to provide accessible and sustainable benefits outside of traditional gaming spaces. The core of this expertise lies in her use of agile project management workflows to streamline development across a portfolio of acclaimed projects of ranging scale and scope. This background provides her with years of experience effectively managing technically advanced project teams through research projects requiring significant considerations for human protections, close collaboration with subject matter experts, and secure data management processes. In addition to her experience in Game Production and Entrepreneurship, she specializes as a UX designer and consulting working from a lens of respect-based design – a methodology that bridges elements of accessibility, user-first, and empathetic design principles into a centralized theory for product development. As a professional, Shannon has served as a local event organizer, IGDA mentor, and industry coach to support individuals starting out in her career to foster positive growth, creativity, and intersectional diversity within the games industry.

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