Erin Drake Kajioka is a game designer, author, and speaker currently working as Head of Applied Game Design for Google Research. From 2017-2020 she led Google Stadia's research and development lab. Prior to Google she was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, following a 17 year career as a game systems designer for companies including Konami, DreamWorks, Zynga, GlassLab, and Simutronics. She co-founded the social good game company Sense of Wonder and is the published author of three novels, many short stories, game industry nonfiction, and one infamous blog essay.
Her specialties are: innovation; games and machine learning/AI; vision-setting, pitching & communication; systems thinking; designing for emotion; building and facilitating teams to do great innovation work (and form forever bonds in the process); designing complex systems (and elegantly simple ones).