OOO MeetUp for the Gaming Industry

What are OOO Meetups?

At Frontier RTP, we are constantly growing and making connections. We developed OOO Meetups as a way of helping connect like-minded professionals, entrepreneurs, and industry insiders during our regular, weekly Out of Office “OOO” events.

With each meetup, we work with a co-host to facilitate the networking and educational session while we pour the drinks. 

Our hope is that the meetups will spark dialogue, start relationships, and make your happy hour meaningful. Did we mention there will be free craft beer from local breweries, wine selected by RTP Uncorked, and non-alcoholic options?

About the Meetup

Work in the gaming industry or interested to know more about it? This meetup, co-hosted by International Game Developers Association NC-Triangle Chapter, is for you! We’ll discuss the ever-evolving role of games and game design principles in the tech and products we use every day.

Game Plan

4:30 – 5:00 p.m. | Check In, Drinks & Networking

5:00 – 5:30 p.m. | Educational Session in Blue Ridge 

5:30 – 6:30 p.m. | Drinks & Networking

What You’ll Learn

Topic: Scheduling Live Interactive Narratives

How do you orchestrate a live interactive experience where players, actors, props, and storylines all have to come together at exactly the right time? Live interactive experiences are part game, part theater, and part logistical nightmare. This talk explores how AI can automatically schedule actors, locations, resources, and branching narratives to make immersive experiences easier to design, operate, and adapt. I’ll also share a brief tour of my broader work in game AI, including believable social characters, procedural storytelling, mixed reality, and generative AI for game creation.

Our Session Leader

Session Leader: Dr. Sasha Azad

Dr. Sasha Azad is a Research Scientist at Jabali, where she builds AI tools that help creators make games using conversational AI, multimodal generation, and believable social characters. Her research spans game AI, social simulation, and interactive storytelling, with previous work at Disney Research and IBM Research. She loves making complex game and narrative AI approachable, and is usually found working alongside her dog, Bhoomi, who has yet to be impressed by large language models.

Vibe Coding Game Showcase

Participants of the Build Games with AI Workshop will be showcasing their games in the Atrium during Out Of Office. Come play the finished games, give feedback, and hear more about what they learned in this workshop series.

Interested in hosting your meetup during Out Of Office? Want to invite your department for some out-of-office team building? Are you holding an event in Frontier RTP the same day as Out Of Office and would like to invite your attendees to grab a beer before or after? If any of these scenarios sound like you, please reach out to our Programming Team for options and pricing to make sure we have enough beer to go around: programming@rtp.org.