State of Play VI: Speakers' Bios

Profile

While currently self-employed at her own company, Philomath Games, Erin Hoffman has been designing video games for over eight years in an assortment of genres including MMOs, action-RPGs, and children's games. She is a columnist for The Escapist and a nonfiction contributor for an assortment of magazines including Strange Horizons and Gamasutra; she also maintains the industry watchdog website Gamewatch.org. In 2007 she joined Erik Bethke as co-editor of Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds and the BetterEULA project, an initiative to examine the legal, ethical, and economical issues associated with software EULAs as applied in massive online environments and online games. The BetterEULA project seeks to analyze the needs of online world creators and participants to ultimately generate a legally sound next-generation user agreement broadly applicable and customizable to a range of online products.

Hoffman is also a contributor to the Homeless Moon blog; her poetry has appeared in Not One of Us, Electric Velocipede, Antimuse, and others. She writes fantasy and science fiction, with publications in Deep Magic, Enchanted Realms I, and elsewhere.