Jess Haskins is a game designer, writer, and artist living in Brooklyn. She is studying game design in the MFA Design & Technology program at Parsons the New School for Design, with an emphasis on games and narrative.
Recently, she was a gameplay and level designer for Creavures, a casual Unity platformer by Muse Games released in February 2011, and has been the lead designer on numerous personal and academic game projects, including The Last Book, an action/strategy game for iPhone created for the 2010 Global Game Jam, and Wisps, a casual bug-hunting game for iPhone that was featured in the book ICan iPhone 4 Programming by DongYoon Park, published in 2011 in Korea. In 2010 she co-created, co-wrote, and co-directed Interesting Choice, a live-action interactive narrative webseries that allowed audiences to vote on plotlines and narrative elements. Her graduate thesis project is Lethe, an experimental narrative Flash game inspired by research about the effects of Tetris on symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
As an undergraduate, she studied languages and literature, including French, Old French, Latin, and Middle English. She spent a semester at the Sorbonne, Paris IV, and received a BA in French from Bard College in New York.
Her hobbies include gaming, adventure travel, yoga, and drinking large quantities of tea. An occasional recreational time traveler, she enjoys Jazz Age nightlife, Prohibition speakeasies, Victorian picnics, and other anachronistic pastimes.