Greg Costikyan

You can find the long and boring bio here, but briefly: I've designed more than 30 commercially published board, roleplaying, computer, online, and mobile games, including 5 Origins Award winners. I've written scads of articles on games and the industry, as well as four novels and a bunch of short stories. In 2000, I co-founded Unplugged Games, one of the first North American mobile game start ups, which went out of business a few months after 9/11. After consulting for a time, I joined Nokia as a full-time games researcher, but left them in late 2005 to found (with Johnny Wilson) Manifesto Games, which works to build a vibrant, innovative, and viable independent games industry. I also coordinate the New York city chapter of the International Game Developers Association.

More at the Blog

Some of the More Interesting Things Here

• Death To the Games Industry (Long Live Games), which will give you a pretty good idea what I'm trying to accomplish with Manifesto Games (part two of the piece is here).
• My GDC Rant on the iniquities of the game industry, which seems to have established me as the industry's voice of cynicism and despair :).
• Violence: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed, originally published by Hogshead Publishers Ltd., but now released under a Creative Commons license.
• My 1999 analyst's report on online games, originally published by Creative Good at $500, now a free download (and a little out of date, but still useful, I think).
• "I Have No words & I Must Design", an essay about game design that despite publication in the obscure journal Interactive Fantasy, has become one of the things that game scholars reference most frequently, and is used in game studies courses worldwide.
• Presentations I've given at conferences over the years.
• The SPI Compendium, an archive of information about all products published by Simulations Publications, Inc. during its lifetime.
• My ludography.

And lots more content available by browsing the menu-bar links.