Jeb Havens

From Jeb's IGDA profile:

My name is Jeb Havens and I work as a Lead Designer for 1st Playable Productions near Albany, NY. I was Lead Designer on Marvel Trading Card Game for the DS, and am now Lead Designer on an unannounced title for the DS. Before that, I was a designer on Playboy: The Mansion and was Lead Designer on the Private Party expansion pack, then lead the design of some end-user tools for a training simulation game.

I got into the industry as a designer after graduating from Brown University where I studied Complex Systems like brains and ants. I'm still a student at heart, drawn to books about big nerdy ideas (Gaia, entanglement, Chaos Theory, emergence, consiousness, etc.). In my spare time, I do a lot of board/card/party game design, and my first professionally published board game ("Mother Sheep") will hit the shelves in early 2007.

I've been trying to get back into playwriting, having had one successful play produced Off-Broadway. I try to get some attention paid to diversity in the Video Game Industry, especially LGBT gamers and developers. I've spoken and lead workshops at a number of conferences, including the Future Play Conference, the Game Developers Conference, the Women In Games Conference, and the Sex in Games Conference, talking about game design and diversity. This March, I'll be leading a LGBT Developers Roundtable at GDC for the second year in a row.