James Wallis

James Wallis is an author, award-winning games designer, lecturer and consultant who has been active in the UK games community for over thirty years. He runs the games consultancy Spaaace, which has worked on tabletop games for clients including Shell, Greenpeace, Carlsberg, Experian and Dyson.

He's written seventeen books, from Sonic the Hedgehog novels and gamebooks (for a few months in the early 1990s he'd written more fiction about Sonic the Hedgehog than anyone else in the world) to epic Warhammer novels, non-fiction about the history of games with industry legend Ian Livingstone, and ground-breaking storytelling games like Once Upon a Time, Alas Vegas and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. (Once Upon a Time is actually a card-game about telling stories, so maybe that's eighteen.)

James lectures in game design and interactive storytelling at London South Bank University. He's a former TV presenter and Sunday Times journalist, his work has been published by MIT Press, and he is a columnist for Tabletop Gaming magazine. He chairs the GameCamp series of events and has run his board-game design masterclass all over Europe. In the 1990s he was director of Hogshead Publishing, the largest publisher of RPGs in the UK, and in the 1980s he held the Guinness World Record for playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons non-stop (84 hours).

You can find his website at www.jameswallis.com and on Twitter he's @jameswallis but in the real world he lives in South London with his wife and 1d4 -1 children.