First, we’d like to thank every single person who took the time to apply to the writing group — especially those who applied for the second time. There were a large number of talented applicants, and we hope everyone who can’t take part will find other ways to share their stories!
Now, without further ado… we present this year’s Pixelles Writing Group participants!
In six months, these group members will have produced five pieces of game writing and spent many hours critiquing each other’s work. The act of writing well is a marathon, not a sprint, and we are excited by their level of dedication to the craft.
 Camerin Cobb Camerin is an artist, community organizer, and techie. An alum of McGill and Emily Carr Universities, their career traces a winding path through documentary and narrative film making, integrated media, and web development. Currently, Camerin teaches Queen lyrics to chat bots at Autodesk. In their spare time they make art, pet other people’s dogs, and dream of revolution.
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 Shoma Patnaik Shoma has been writing and drawing all her life and now works in a video game cooperative following an eclectic career path involving, among other things, an English lit minor, a M.Sc in business and four years in diplomacy. She believes in the untapped potential of a Jane Austen/Mortal Kombat mashup, the theory of narrative causality and Havelock Vetinari.
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 Kyungseo Min Kyungseo Min is a Korean-Canadian playwright. After completing a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre at the University of Southern California, she strives to create a distinctive style of writing blending Western and Eastern philosophies. She aims to tell stories that break linear structure and find drama not only in action and dialogue, but also in stasis.
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 Shadi RJ The question of where I’m from needs more space to answer than I have here, so ask me in person over a very large cup of coffee! Professional life? Let’s say I’ve done years of school, engineering, medicine… I won’t bore you with that either. My passion has always been writing, mostly short stories.
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 Fatima.V.Ndiogou World creator, character designer and avid gamer, Fatima picked up her first video game by the time she also picked up writing so merging the two became inevitable. Her mind is bursting with imagination and with ideas to shape the gaming world for future generations. Even her dreams are narratively structured so it’s no surprise she would be driven to follow that path in life.
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 Sabrina Gannon A programmer originally from Edmonton, Alberta, returning to a childhood love of writing with fresh game designer eyes so that I can tell stories in more than code. Powered by tea, whatever is on netflix and always working my way through several projects at once, I’m excited to finally be bouncing writing ideas off of someone other than my dog!
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 Alex Borgeot From a French teeny tiny town called Touquin, Alex is a graduate student at ISART Digital in Game Design. Passionate about storytelling, she also studied movies and has been writing since childhood. Alex is a melting pot of many weird things, a creepypasta addict, a gif collector and a doggo lover.
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 Cassiel Moroney Programmer and writer, ready to take digital narratives to the next level. Undergrad at McGill studying computer science and world religions. Excited to see as many shades of blue as possible in one lifetime.
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Program Coordinators
Linda Nguyen
Linda is a Scriptwriter at Ubisoft on Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege. She also wrote for Far Cry 5. Before that, she was the Legal Coordinator for the Narrative Team on Watch Dogs 2. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and a BA in Psychology. She uses both backgrounds to create complex fictional characters. She’s also a longtime Pokémon trainer but far from being a master.
She participated in the first edition of the Pixelles Game Writing Group in 2015. The program gave her a supportive community for which she’s super grateful. With the help of fellow co-coordinators, guest critics, mentors, and many fantastic individuals, she’s picking up the torch to keep the program going.
Betty Robertson
Hailing from BC, Betty Robertson considers herself a ‘Jane of All Trades’ when it comes to creative arts. She has a background in film, theatre, drawing, animation, writing, and painting. Has two trade certificates. Casually obsessed with Scooby-Doo. Wants to be a contestant on Jeopardy. Always complaining about the romance options in Bioware games. Mostly harmless.
Ella Siemeni
Ella grew up in the wilderness of the French countryside and caught early on the writing bug through the games and books she threw herself in. She went away on her own adventure to Quebec where she completed a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Montreal, after which she tried her hands at freelance and blogging while discovering and falling in love with the industry.
Having participated in the 2017 edition of the Writing Group, Ella is now a scriptwriter at Ubisoft where she gives a voice to its chatbot. A storyteller at heart, she spends her time creating and seeking fantastical worlds and horror stories.
Special Guest Academic
Lea Ehret
Lea is a Ph.D student in Education at McGill University, researching the change-in-the-making of female-led game writing and female-led game culture. The Pixelles’ community is the activating force of this research, through its living practice of making more room for female life to invent new ways of writing-making-living-loving video games. It is an honour to know the incredible women of Pixelles, and to feel these potentials unfolding.
♥ Our Supporters
We’d like to extend a big thank you to Red Barrels Games, Gameplay Space, No More Robots, and StoryBundle for supporting the Pixelles Writing Group. Without their help, this program wouldn’t be nearly as amazing!
