Evaluation Juries

Anouk is the creative mind behind Noukii, a production company that pushes the boundaries of technology to add a human dimension to tomorrow's cultural experiences. Noukii redefines innovation with its experiences that blend immersion, artificial intelligence and digital technology while placing the human outlook at the heart of each of it projects.

Passionate about technology, creativity and user experience, Anouk worked in the cultural and creative industries for over 15 years before joining Noukii. She began her career as a game designer in big studios before moving on to educational games and, more recently, immersive and museum experiences.

Dr. Emma Westecott is a feminist game studies scholar. Emma is Associate Professor in Game Design, and Co-Director of the game:play Lab (with Cindy Poremba). She has worked in the game industry for over 25 years - in development, research and the academy. She originally achieved international recognition for working closely with Douglas Adams as producer for the best-selling CD-ROM Adventure Game, Starship Titanic (1998, Simon & Schuster). Since then, Emma has built up a worldwide reputation for developing original as well as popular game initiatives, including running an applied game research lab in Sweden and a regional student game event in Toronto called Level Up Showcase. Emma’s funded research connects the aesthetic, expressive, and political potential of digital game form to a longer tradition of critically informed research creation practice. She has been invited to present internationally and has been published in edited collections and journals such as DiGRA, Loading and Eludamos. Emma co-chaired the Game Design Track at DiGRA 2020 and sits on PhD committees for students at both The Norwegian Film School and the University of Toronto

Yat-Chi Lau is a Canadian video game producer, designer and artist. From 2007 to 2019, Lau worked at Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Shanghai – on brands such as Prince of Persia, Rainbow 6 and Far Cry – where he acquired and developed the aptitudes for running large scale, multi-studio productions. In 2019 at Unity Technologies, Lau created and headed the Microgames product line – “ready to modify” game projects that introduced new users to core functionalities of the Unity game editor. In 2022, Lau became an independent games consultant, and his present focus is on Blockchain gaming and digital art.