Disrupting Monkey, Laughing Raven

Disrupting Monkey, Laughing Raven

Here is a talk about trickster archetypes and games and play that I did in October 2021 for Upsala University’s Transformative Play Initiative. It builds off of ideas I initiated in my 2019 Playful By Design talk at UIUC.

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Indigenous Digital Development Day Presentation

What follows is the copy from my artist keynote for the Indigenous Digital Development Day 2021, on October 20th. I’ll also post a link to the video recording when it becomes available. The main page of it all can be found here. Thank you to the folks at imagineNATIVE who …

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Magic of the Tricksters’ Dance

This began as an answer to a post from my friend online and game design peer, the awesome Kate Bullock. The question was “What is your magic?” I answered the post but decided to expand on my answer and talk a bit more about my interaction with the world with …

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The Tomorrow That We Dream

What follows are my notes, which make for a rough transcript, of my talk to the University of Kansas’ Digital Storytelling Colloquium from November 4th, 2020. The video can be found here. Opening I’d like to first acknowledge, during the crazy times of this particular election, that we are still …

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On Resilience

I have been told by quite a number of people that I have a certain emotional resilience and a tenacity for working at a problem. I sometimes say that I attribute the development of that particular part of me to years of play tabletop roleplaying games, video games, board games, …

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Rambling Thoughts on Utopias, Speculative Fiction, the Matter of Black Lives

I’m sitting here, in this Covid world, experiencing its emotional ups and downs while I watch all the things that are shaken loose as the slowing down caused by the pandemic, beats the bushes. My mind wanders to my own design process and the things I think are important. The …

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Breathe

There are special breaths that come to us over the course of our lives. There is the “Breath of Arrival”. We come into this world from our mothers and are shocked into wakefulness. The sudden awareness of the world overwhelms us and fills our lungs with this great breath that …

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Winters, Continued

Last time, I talked about this process that I call the “Winter Counts” which arose out of the character creation process found in Ehdrigohr: The role-playing game. I figured it was worth it to break down how this process actually works for me so that groups could try to do …

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