Dean Michael O'Donnell

Dean O’Donnell is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and game writer. He has been interested in video games since winning his first Atari 2600 in the Kellogg’s “Stick Up for Breakfast!” contest in 1976. While writing plays he earned extra cash writing strategy guides and dialogue for long-forgotten games like One Must Fall 2097, and Highway Hunter. He is a published playwright, and his 2002 short film, Legwork 2002 Tom Luce Christian Stolte, can be found on YouTube. His work can also be found in Titan Quest: Immortal Throne the 2004 expansion pack to the hit game Titan Quest. He even provided voice acting for Grail to the Thief in 2014.

Dean was one of the architects of the IMGD program at WPI. He is the organizer of the Master Class program that brings industry veterans to WPI each term to work with IMGD students. He is currently the social media organizer for the program (follow the program @WPI_IMGD and him @deanodon) because he occasionally tweets interesting and witty remarks.

Dean is an avid player and sometimes designer of alternate reality games (ARGs). He enjoys blurring the lines between reality and fiction and using new, and sometimes old, media to do it. He has never met a puzzle he didn’t like, although he prefers them after he’s solved them. He enjoys this so much that he makes his students create ARGs annually, and sometimes gets scolded for the hijinks they perpetrate.

He also enjoys tabletop role-playing games, and overly complicated board games. He uses improv techniques to improve his role-playing storytelling and has been writing pen and paper adventures since he was fourteen. He tries to incorporate stories and storytelling in his teaching whenever he can.

You can follow his gaming ups and down on his Twitch channel, where he regularly streams whatever he’s playing, at http://twitch.tv/deanodon.