Four Encounters: a game design online workshop series
Join game designers Avery Alder, Jeeyon Shim, Alex Roberts, and Sharang Biswas in exploring the intersections and edges of tabletop roleplaying game design. This series of four online workshops invites you to approach game design as a multi-disciplinary playground, engaging in big conversations and leaving with new projects to tinker on. Four Encounters is a beginner-friendly, interactive, and inclusive workshop series.
Program Cost
True Program Cost - $210 for four online workshops.
Barrier-reduced Program Cost - $105 for four online workshops.
Generous Cost - $260 (True Cost plus $50 and tax receipt) for four online workshops.
These barrier-reduced program costs are made possible through grant funds and donations.
Game Design Encounters: The Self
Sunday January 30, 2022 4pm to 7pm AST
Join Alex Roberts as she delves into the depths of experience, identity, and transformation. What does play reveal about us? How can game design be a self-actualizing process, and how can games be designed to offer self-actualization to their players? This workshop explores the power of games to both reflect and shape our meaning-making processes.
Alex Roberts is a Diana Jones Award winning game designer currently working on her Master's in Counseling Psychology on WSANEC and Lkwungen territory. Her previous games include Star Crossed, For the Queen, POP!, Precious Little Animal, and Rat Trash Party. Her designs focus on mechanical elegance and relational complexity.
Game Design Encounters: The Senses
Sunday February 6, 2022 4pm to 7pm AST
Join Sharang Biswas in exploring where games activate the senses. How can the poetry of a game create a sensory experience? What about games that ask us to listen to music (or to silence), to touch each other, to eat food that we’ve prepared as part of the game? How might the very acts of touching, smelling, tasting and the rest colour our experience of play, of story, of relationships? This workshop inquires into the artistic power of games to engage the bodies of those who play and the ways in which they savour the world.
Sharang Biswas is a writer, artist, and game designer based in New York. He has won awards from Indiecade and the Indie Game Developers' Network, exhibited at the ICA-Philadelphia, the Toronto Reference Library, Pioneer Works, and The Flow Gallery, and written for publications such as Kill Screen, First Person Scholar, Eurogamer, and Dicebreaker. His fiction has been published or forthcoming in Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and Strange Horizons, among others publications. Sharang is currently Game Design Artist in Residence at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, and is on the faculty at New York University and Fordham University.
Game Design Encounters: Community
Sunday February 13, 2022 4pm to 7pm AST
Join Avery Alder in deconstructing and reconstructing the idea of community. What does the word mean? How can we model both the vibrancy and precarity of communities in our games? What potential do roleplaying games hold for building and re-imagining community in our real world? This workshop will explore how roleplaying games lend themselves to storytelling that is political, relational, and structural in nature.
Avery Alder is a queer roleplaying game designer hailing from Sinixt territory. She's the designer of Monsterhearts, The Quiet Year, Dream Askew, Ribbon Drive, and a host of smaller, scrappier projects. In her game design and play, she gravitates toward the moody, the personal, and the transformative.
Game Design Encounters: The Natural World
Sunday February 20, 2022 4pm to 7pm AST
Join Jeeyon Shim in tethering game design to the natural world. How can games help us to better appreciate and engage with our place as one part of a vibrant human and non-humanity community? What can we learn from the natural world and apply to the craft of game design? This workshop will look at games as living dreams that can connect us to broader ecosystems.
Jeeyon Shim is an award-winning game designer, multimedia artist, and outdoor educator living on unceded Chochenyo and Ramaytush Ohlone land. She is known for games rich with lyrical prose, innovative mechanics, and transformative connections with the natural world. In 2021, she received the Diana Jones Emerging Designer Award, and along with co-designer Shing Yin Khor received the IndieCade Best Live Action Game award for Field Guide to Memory. She likes dirt, animals, making things with her hands, and green growing things.