Recent Episodes
Playable Theatre with IndieCade 2022 Nominee Long Story: a deep time LARP from Laura op de Beke
Celia Pearce
– PLAYABLE THEATRE –
Celia Pearce is an award-winning game designer, artist, curator, author, teacher, and serial instigator. She is the co-founder IndieCade and the Playable Theatre Project, and currently holds a position as Associate Professor of Game Design at Northeastern University, where she has created games with student teams under the mantle of Paidia Studios and Pins&Needles. Her games have been featured at Come Out & Play, Different Games, Incubate, Smithsonian Indie Arcade, and BostonFIG Fest, where her game eBee (designed with Gillian Smith, Jeanie Choi and Isabella Carlsson) received the 2016 award for most Innovative Tabletop Game.
Her books include Communities of Play (The MIT Press 2009) and IndieCade: A History — The Interdependence of Independence (ETC/CMU Press 2020), and she has authored/co-authored/edited numerous papers and book chapters as well as two other books. Her current research and creative practice builds on her pre-academia career as an experience designer for theme parks and is focused on the intersection between game design, live action roleplaying and theatre. Her performative and live action works have appeared at Living Games A Week in Boston, and The Night Cafe, a collection of live pieces around the heme of insomnia co-created by Kellian Pletcher-Adams and Lizzie Stark. She is a Higher Education Video Game Association (HEVGA) Fellow and was included in Game Advocacy’s “50 Over 50 Most Influential people in the Game Industry” in 2018.
Peih-Gee Law
– ESCAPE ROOMS –
Peih-Gee is most well known for being a fan favorite contestant on the reality show Survivor, where she played first in Survivor China in 2007, and again in a returning All-Star season Survivor Second Chance. She calls Survivor “the greatest immersive game in the world.” She is the co-host of REPOD, a podcast exploring escape rooms and immersive gaming. She also hosts the live Q&A sessions at RECON. Loves: narrative-driven games with lots of player interactions & clever wordplay. Hates: Math puzzles and poor functionality that distracts from immersion.
David Spira
– ESCAPE ROOMS –
David is the co-founder of Room Escape Artist, a resource for escape room creators and enthusiasts alike. From the start, he applied his professional skills as a digital experience designer to the burgeoning industry of escape rooms. David is full of ideas: from in-depth research pieces to new content types… like cute animals solving puzzles. He is always pushing REA to try new things, take risks, and be something more. He is also the co-founder of RECON, a convention for the escape & immersive game industry, as well as the co-host of REPOD, a podcast exploring escape rooms and immersive gaming.
Tatiana Vilela dos Santos
– ALTERNATIVE CONTROLLERS –
Tatiana Vilela dos Santos is a multi-award winning independent game designer and artist based in Paris, France. She makes experimental games based on new technologies and hand-made interfaces through her multimedia project, MechBird. Her goal is to explore the uncharted territories of playfulness.
Alistair Aitcheson
– ALTERNATIVE CONTROLLERS –
Alistair Aitcheson is a British indie developer who specialises in playful installations, custom-made game hardware, and interactive performances. He sees his games as a springboard for real-world social interaction, and loves to encourage players to bend rules and make the technology their own.
Alistair is the creator and host of The Incredible Playable Show, an interactive stage show which has been performed across the UK, Europe and the USA. His work has been nominated for awards at A MAZE and Alt.Ctrl.GDC, and won awards at the IndieCade Festival in 2015 and 2017.
Evan Torner
– PLAYABLE THEATRE –
Evan Torner is a game designer, community organizer, and faculty member in games. He is Associate Professor of German and Film & Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where he directs the UC Game Lab. He co-founded the Golden Cobra Challenge and Analog Game Studies, and is a coordinating editor at the International Journal of Role-Playing. He has been an IndieCade judge since the mid-2010s. Much of his games work is in indie tabletop and live-action role-playing games, and is an award-winning designer at Fastaval in Denmark.
His current game-related projects include a short monograph on Apocalypse World for University of Michigan Press, Generation Analog print proceedings, and the forthcoming storytelling game Diamond 20.
Aaron Trammell
– TABLETOP –
Aaron Trammell is an Assistant Professor of Informatics and Core Faculty in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. He write about how Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, and board games inform the lived experiences of their players. Specifically, he is interested in how these games further values of white privilege and exclusion in geek culture. He has two books slated for release in 2022: Repairing Play (MIT Press) is a theory of play that centers BIPOC people and The Privilege of Play (NYU Press) is a history of games and race in the 20th Century.
