Here is a bio and a short overview of Katherine's talk

Better Game Characters by Design: A Psychological Approach

Looking for ways to make your characters more real, interesting, and fun for players? Hoping to expand your audience with characters that appeal to a broader set of gamers? With the increasing powers of today’s graphics and AI, it’s easy to create an elaborate and expensive, but somehow ‘flat’ character. A cheaper and often more effective shortcut is to use a little psychology. The more you know about how people ‘read’ other people in real life interactions, the better your chances of making an engaging and fun game character.

This talk (based on Isbister's book by the same name, coming out in October) presents a few key ideas from social psychology that can help you make characters that seem alive and really enhance a player's gaming experience. You'll get suggestions you can apply to your own design process, relevant for artists and animators, as well as programmers.

Katherine Isbister is an Associate Professor of Communication (LL&C) at Rensselaer. She created and taught a course at Stanford University on the Design of Characters for Games, before joining Rensselaer's faculty to help develop a game design major. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford, with a focus on using ideas from social psychology to design better, more effective interactive characters. Isbister's work has been presented at GDC, DiGRA, CHI, Agents, and other conferences around the world. She has published in a wide variety of venues, and has given invited talks at research and academic venues including Sony Research labs in Japan, Banff Centre in Canada, U.C. Berkeley, the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, and others. Isbister's book - Better Game Characters by Design: A Psychological Approach - will be released by Morgan Kaufmann in October 2005.