We have an amazing line up for MAC 2026:
In an era defined by systemic complexity rather than individual heroes, how must our narratives evolve to remain relevant?
Renowned Franchise Architect Jeff Gomez, who has shaped worlds for Avatar, Halo, and Pirates of the Caribbean, explores why traditional storytelling is no longer sufficient for our complex, AI driven, interconnected era.
Ken Levine is a video game designer and creative director, best known for leading the creation of BioShock and BioShock Infinite. Previously, he was a designer at Looking Glass Studios, where he worked on Thief, and a co-founder of Irrational Games, where he worked on SWAT 4, Freedom Force and System Shock 2, among others. He is currently President and Creative Director of Ghost Story Games, where he is working on the upcoming launch of Judas.
Grand Theft Hamlet started as an idea in lockdown - then turned into a full production staged inside GTA Online, with an in-game audience, a livestream audience, and all the messy unpredictability that comes with performing in a hostile multiplayer world.
Thomas Keane is a game designer focused on turning speech and language into a core gameplay mechanic. In this session, he challenges the idea that AI is the "death of the author," arguing instead that the human hand is now more important than ever before. Tom will reveal the inner workings of Meaning Machine’s debut, Dead Meat, where players can ask suspects anything and - crucially - see the subtext of their internal thoughts .
CEO and co-founder of Piing, a Manchester-based company building mass-participation games for sports and live events. Their format is simple to describe and hard to pull off: thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of people scan in, use their phones as controllers, and collectively drive what happens on the big screen - creating moments of laughter, tension, cheering, and rivalry on cue.
Rachel Hamilton is a writer and academic whose work sits at the intersection of AI, literature, and human emotion. In her MAC session, she explores the fundamental gap at the heart of human-AI interaction: the space between the genuine feeling an AI produces in us and the total absence of feeling on the other side. Drawing on the "ELIZA effect" and original research into collaborative play, Rachel investigates why we respond to language models as if someone is actually there.
This film is a funny, slippery, and unexpectedly direct masterpiece that avoids simple answers to find something much sharper instead. The Why’s and Wherefores of Yoko Taro is a brilliant epistolary work built from a month-long email correspondence that captures a portrait of a creator in real time.
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