Faculty for Game Production Management Major

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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Jessie Leigh Gagnon (Hough)

Biography

Jessie is a passionate writer, producer, and anthropologist who lives for games, film, and interactive media. Her creative side has melted over and fused to her project management side, and she thrives on opportunities to solve problems, hit milestones, mentor others, and make a positive impact in the lives of people and projects. With over eleven years in the game industry, Jessie has worked on AAA titles like League of Legends and volunteers time for organizations like Women in Games. She has a track record of happy, healthy, interdisciplinary teams and successful projects that shipped with clarity of vision, data-informed decision making, and an empathetic, people-driven focus. A specialist in crunch prevention and conflict resolution, she dedicates much of her spare time these days to helping developers with traditionally marginalized identities learn to thrive in game development.

Distinctions & Awards

Lambda Alpha Anthropological Honors Society, Global Citizenship Certificate,

Publications & Abstracts

“Cosplay,” World Book Encyclopedia; 2014
“Escape from the Mainstream: The Japanese Cosplay Youth Subculture,” Franklin Pierce University; 2008, Temple University Japan; 2010

Professional & Scholastic Affiliations

American Anthropological Association

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, by Jesse Schell
• Agile Game Development, Clinton Keith
• The Little Book of Hygge, Meik Wiking

Favorite Quote

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

—Margaret Mead

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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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Kyle Patterson

Biography

Kyle graduated from Champlain College in 2016 with a degree in Game Production Management and has worked at various game and tech companies such as Zynga, Warner Bros Games, Disney Interactive, Jam City, and Snapchat. He is a part time adjunct professor at Champlain focused on supporting the Game Studio.

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• Agile Game Development with Scrum by Clinton Keith
• Horus Rising -1 – The Horus Heresy by Dan Abnett
• Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry by Jason Schreier

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Andersen Pinckney

Biography

Andersen is a Game Design graduate from Champlain College’s class of 2020. He has worked as an aerospace software engineer for Saber Astronautics, a project manager for the DoD, and in production for Rockstar Games. He has been an adjunct professor for Champlain College since Fall 2021.

Favorite Quote

“Shake and bake, baby!”

–Ricky Bobby

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Dana Steinhoff

Biography

Dana Steinhoff is Program Director of Game Business and Publishing, and Game Production Management in the Game Studio at Champlain College. She holds an MFA in Emergent Media from Champlain. Her specialization is in teaching interdisciplinary teams to create interactive digital products while learning about leadership, interactive design, team dynamics, and agile project management methodology.

Steinhoff co-founded and served as the Executive Director of Rad Magpie, a Vermont-based non-profit organization that is doing its part to dismantle the patriarchy and white supremacy in video games by radically empowering underrepresented voices through video game development. Previously, she managed the Exquisite Corpse Company, an avant-garde immersive theater company in NYC. She currently consults on app and video game development projects in the Burlington area, including at Champlain’s own Emergent Media Center.

Steinhoff enjoys renovating her Winooski home and acting, most recently with Vermont Stage. You may be able to catch her performing in her cover band Dana and the Dads (limited engagements).

Distinctions & Awards

Academic Innovation Award 2023, Champlain College: For work completed on Re/Imagining Science DEIBJ Committee

Publications & Abstracts

My reflection on the evolution of Rad Magpie, the nonprofit organization I cofounded to support marginalized video game developers.

Curriculum Vitae

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Favorite Quote

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

—Anaïs Nin

Recommended Reading

Want to get a heads up on how we build games at Champlain? Read Clinton Keith’s: “Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat”

Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion” is a must-read right now to better understand the massive political divide in this country.

Office Hours

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Peter Wehr

Biography

Peter Wehr has been an Adjunct and Instructor at Champlain College since 2011 teaching Game History and Game Production. Working mostly with first and second-year students, Wehr works very closely with student game production teams teaching them to function effectively to implement their game concepts.

Wehr has worked in academia and the entertainment industry for over four decades specializing in project management and developing infrastructure for new technologies for museums, games, film, television, CR-ROM, DVD, kiosks, and the web. Wehr has been fortunate to work with a variety of industry leaders such as the Smithsonian, HBO, PBS, the Rolling Stones, Sony, CBS, Pepsi, and Dilbert. While working in NYC in the independent television and film postproduction industry, Wehr created a reputation for taking on untraditional and unusual media projects. As one coworker pointed out to him “Whenever you are in a launch meeting, I know it is going to be an interesting ride.”

In his spare time, Wehr plays and coaches soccer, hikes, kayaks, Nordic skis, and snowboards, dabbles with Arduino and Raspberry Pi, reads history, and listens to a wide variety of music.

Curriculum Vitae

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