Jury Members Reveal - Jessica Pardue, Wojtek Borowicz, and Nicholas O’Brien!
May 9, 2025
Hello all joiners and submitters. Thank you all so much for the overwhelming support that the NarraScope 2025 Showcase has received - 171 joiners and 149 submitters! I was hoping for 30 submissions! On behalf of NarraScope, thank you all. The jury is hard at work evaluating all of the submissions, and I’m excited to announce the ninth, tenth, and eleventh members of the showcase jury - Jessica Pardue, Wojtek Borowicz, and Nicholas O’Brien. Here are their bios, in their own words -
Jessica Pardue
Jess Pardue is a Studio Manager, Producer, and host of Stupid Little Games, a bi-weekly podcast all about gaming from the inside out! Previous companies include Avalanche Studios Group, Ghost Robot, and Stack Overflow. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner Bayard and biological cat Sir Digby Chicken Caesar. These days she runs on sweet tea and spite.
https://jesspardue.podbean.com/
Wojtek Borowicz
Wojtek is a Polish-Irish writer, narrative designer, and an award-winning dungeon master, with a background of over a decade in technical and instructional writing. He’s created several web-based games as well as a tabletop role playing system called Campfire. His essays and articles were also published across several business and literary magazines. He has a degree in Culture Studies from Jagiellonian University in Kraków and is currently based in Dublin.
https://bsky.app/profile/wojtekborowicz.bsky.social
Nicholas O'Brien
Nicholas O’Brien is a game designer, narrative designer, artist, and founder of Essay Games, a solo studio based in Brooklyn working on introspective games built on thorough research and/or personal experience.
Nicholas has exhibited at The Knockdown Center, NOW PLAY THIS!, MAGFest, PlayNYC, LuddoNarraCon, Indiepocalypse, Microscope Gallery, apexart, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. His work has been featured in Kotaku, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, BOMB Magazine, ArtReview, Critical Distance, The Guardian, Vulture, The Washington Post, and the New York Times. He is a founding mentor of the Game Design Future Lab at NYU Tandon and a visiting professor at Pratt Institute.
https://bsky.app/profile/essaygames.bsky.social
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-o-brien-essaygames/
Thanks Jessica, Wojtek, and Nicholas!
Talk soon,
vel
TLDR: Revealing jury members - Jessica Pardue, Wojtek Borowicz, and Nicholas O’Brien!