Alex Peake

Alex Peake is the founder and CEO of Primer Labs, a startup that creates endless learning games to make all knowledge playable. Their Code Hero is a game that teaches you how to make games and save the world with a code gun that shoots JavaScript. Become a code hero and shape the future!
 
Alex also founded the alternative fashion company Tactical Corsets in 2009. Alex was the editor of Agile Journal, a web & mobile applications developer at Sling, and lead animation editor at Atomic Cartoons.
 
From a young age, Alex believed that games were going to change the world and he set out to gather the pieces to make it happen. His 3rd grade Open Alternative School allowed students to learn at their own pace, so he and his peers made a competitive game out of completing grade levels as fast as they could. In 4th grade, he designed his first RPG called Realms and taught himself C and HyperCard to computerize it. In middle school he divided his time between all-laptop Computer Immersion and mentoring with Professor Dave Fracchia in the Graphics Lab at Simon Fraser University. He created an online empire simulation game called Mage Princes using play-by-email turn files to bypass First Class BBS systems’ lack of game support. Hundreds of players signed up to pay for the sequel which he planned to include more sophisticated military, economic and tradecraft RPG elements to allow players to cooperatively build nations.
 
When a BBS shutdown and a hard drive crash destroyed his 7th grade business, he dreamed bigger and decided to finish school to focus on developing the game. He entered the University Hill Transition Program to complete grades 8–12 in 2 years as he began planning a learning game called Empowerment that would revolutionize education. He began studying artificial intelligence to create a new kind of game AI that could mentor players learning real skills. He got into Berkeley with an essay about game AI as the key to a learning games revolution, but he decided to skip student loans and hire the PHDs he would need later with the profits he earned working as a programmer and investing in Apple stock.
 
As he refined Empowerment’s game design, he worked as an IT manager and an animation editor for Atomic Cartoons’ hit cartoon Atomic Betty. He developed and launched the first alpha of Empowerment, a web-based gamefication of real life in which players completed real-world missions to learn and apply real-world skills. Alex self-funded Empowerment and hired full-time developers to take things further. It became clear that Empowerment was going to have to become a real company. At LA Startup Weekend, he cofounded Socialmixr on Friday, designed its Frenemies facebook game and helped code it in Ruby to launch it by Sunday. Alex became Editor In Chief of the Agile Journal of Software Development and interviewed leading game developers to learn the secrets of agile-lean game production. To learn about business and marketing, he launched an alternative fashion line in 2009 called Tactical Corsets that became a Internet niche sensation as the twitterstorm catapulted it from BoingBoing to the pages of The New York Times. In 2010, Alex founded Primer Labs to make games that change gamers with the knowledge they need to change the world.
 
Watch Alex Peake on Strong Intelligence Amplification: Autocatalytic AI IA Symbiosis At H+, One more thing… Spacepunk!, Alex Peake at Open Science Summit 2011: Code Hero literacy as planting the seeds of STEAM, BIL 2009 Alex Peake: Apathy is obsolete. How to empower humanity!, Alex Peake at Extreme Futurist Fest, and 28c3 LT Day 2: Code Hero: Primer Zero. A game that teaches you to make games and hack the meta stack. Read From Gamification to Intelligence Amplification to The Singularity. Watch his Vimeo videos. Visit his Facebook page. Read his LinkedIn profile. Read his blog. Follow his Twitter feed.