Let’s just get straight to it! Here’s our Mega-Blog, including all our Speakers, Game Jam Participants, Games, Comics x Games Festival Schedule and more! Support all these incredible people!

Game Jammers!

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Jasmine Noseworthy Persaud

Miss You, Love

Jasmine Noseworthy Persaud is a chronically ill, nonbinary digital media artist of Guyanese and English descent living in Toronto. They create work around embodiment – part of an intentional practice to honour the body. They are particularly interested in drawing connections between micro and macro levels of intimacy, interdependence, and care. Chosen media include: illustration, poetry, and film.

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Camille McIntyre & Ludipe

Bell Bookmark Subscribe

I am a Brooklyn-born artist with a passion for storytelling. Being a curious kid at heart and a scientist in training, I love exploring different ways to make art and to have people interact with that art. I dream to become an expert in drastic measures, bizarre characters, and mind-tingling worlds.

Freelance game designer and occasional event organizer. I release free experimental games pretty often.

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Erica Lee & Kaelan Doyle Myerscough

The Faceless City

A concept artist and illustrator that absolutely loves buying plushies and dreams of becoming a knight. Also, enjoys creating stories and playing games!

Kaelan Doyle Myerscough is a trans/nonbinary critical creator, game designer and academic interested in the theory and praxis of worldbuilding. They make games and organize game jams about speculation, complex collaboration and rethinking the relationship between play and locality. 

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Kelly K & Droqen

Untitled

Kelly K is an illustrator and cartoonist who spends half their time in Toronto and the other half on the net. If they’re not at home browsing the internet (for research), reading comics (for research), or playing RPGs (also for research), they’re most likely drawing OCs or journaling.

Droqen makes beautiful playable gardens! I make frustrating nightmare mountains! I make games and videogames and all sorts of other things.

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Elijah Forbes & Bryan Depuy

B-Sides

Elijah Forbes is a Two Spirit transgender creative who creates content that focuses on life beyond a gender binary, and the lifeways of Indigenous people. He works on the community level to create access to arts education regardless of economic status.

Bryan Depuy (he/him or they/them) is a queer white settler artist, punk, and DIYer. he develops tiny video games, writes speculative fiction, and records very loud music. on & offline, he aspires to balance creative practice with accountability to the people and communities who inspire and challenge him.

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MAY 8TH – 12TH, 2021

ONLINE via Twitch!

Schedule!

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Speakers!

Lina Wu

Website | Twitter

New Ways to Love You

New Ways to Love You explores the legacy of zines as responses to video games, centering pre-existing fanzines and how fan culture influences the creative process. Questions include: How is fan work perceived or misconceived in the arts? What compels us to respond to games with our own narratives and ephemera, and what are we building and expressing together? Do these works function as responses, or do they actually change the way we play and love video games?

Alex Rushdy

Website | Twitter

Bringing Comic Book Monsters to Life

I discuss how to blend 2D and 3D assets, complex shaders, and unique animation workflows to create a unique comic book aesthetic through our upcoming game, Dawn of the Monsters. Our process doesn’t require fancy tech, just fancy technique! I also compare and contrast various approaches to bringing comic books and manga to life on the video game screen and where our approach aligns and differs.

Jedidjah Julia Noomen

Website | Twitter

Words without audio, or how comics taught me to write for voiceless game characters.

When I started out in game writing, I had many years of experience in film, tv and theatre. But the first games I wrote for, had no voice overs… I had to write for (limited) animated characters with text balloons, and suddenly, half of my jokes and nuanced one-liners fell flat, because there wasn’t an actor to give them the right tone of voice. In a bid to learn how to write non-voiced game dialogues, I turned to one of my other favorite story-telling art forms: comics. This is what I learnt.

Geoffrey Golden

Website | Twitter

Now You’re Playing with Panels: The Art of Gamebook Comics

You’re not just a reader with gamebook comics. You’re the hero! Imagine a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, only with panels instead of text blocks, and monsters to battle with dice rolls. We’ll take a look at the legacy of solo comic gamebooks, from the obscure British comic Diceman (1986) to Marvel’s You Are Deadpool (2018). How are these games designed? What elements do they draw from video games, tabletop RPGs, and interactive fiction? Are they fun? Turn the page and find out.

LeeAnne Ireland

Website

Indigenous Storytelling in Comics

In this talk, we will explore how Indigenous teachings, learning and storytelling is a great mechanism to building the foundation of comics, graphic novels and games. The talk will also explore how to incorporate Indigenous processes, parallel ways of knowing and ceremony into the process to ensure it is as meaningful as the end product. Lastly, people will have an opportunity to explore some of the behind the scenes ways that we created our popular graphic novels into virtual reality game experiences.

Sharang Biswas

Website | Twitter

Understand Comics / Understanding Games: Examining Games Through the Scott McCloud Lens

What can comics teach game designers? How are the visual and interactive arts related? In an increasingly interdisciplinary world, studying an art form through the lens of an another, seemingly unrelated field can yield insights and breakthroughs that defy current expectations of art. In this talk, we’ll be examining games and game-design through Scott McCloud’s classic text UNDERSTANDING COMICS.

Bahiyya Khan

Twitter

Environmental storytelling in the absence of context

This talk will focus on how screenshots from vignette video games that rely on environmental storytelling as a narrative device can exist as a comic when placed out of context as well as how the environmental storytelling present in a comic can be transmuted into a vignette video game. The talk also explores the different mediums approach to environmental storytelling with video games looking at player agency and interpretation and comics relying more on traditional exposition.

Sara Alfageeh & Meg McCurdy

Sara’s Twitter | Meg’s Twitter

Sequential Storytelling: A Look At Table-Top Roleplaying games

Sitting with Sara Alfageeh and Meg McCurdy, creative director and lead artist of ONE MORE MULIVERSE.Talking about visual storytelling by game devs with one foot in comics and the other in table top roleplaying games. Looking at how artists bring over storytelling concepts from one to the other. Understanding how visuals allow us to “move at the speed of story”, and what that means.

Games!

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Boy Problems

Boy Problems Productions

It is many years into the future. A wealthy and powerful person (or persons) has claimed a rare and much sought after prize: the “vault” of 200 unreleased (this is real!) songs from renowned Canadian pop artist, CARLY RAE JEPSEN. Hired by an anonymous sponsor, your team of highly trained individuals will raid a well-defended location to retrieve said item. From planning to set-up to execution, you will see this heist through to its completion, whether that be a success or failure. There will many twists and turns along the way, and don’t always trust the specialists by your side.

Time Bandit

Joel Jordon

Time Bandit is a dark life sim where everything you do takes time. Place down a robot to push a box for you, and it will take an actual half an hour to finish. By saving the game and coming back periodically to make progress, you are invited to explore your habits, rituals, and experience of time in general, particularly as it relates to work and exploitation.

Keyword

City From Naught Inc.

Keyword is a near-future cyberpunk 3D detective-thriller game about a private investigator searching for his missing daughter. Players will take on the role of a private investigator and father to an 18-year-old girl, use their observation and deduction skills, coupled with their tech-savviness, hacking around social media accounts and websites in order to unravel the threads surrounding the mystery of the missing daughter.

Questlike: Pocket

Spritewrench Studios

Questlike: Pocket is a mobile, monster-hunting RPG where you battle monsters and craft awesome gear. Get swept up in the Rhythm of the Hunt- Time your attacks to best your fearsome foes and secure your place as the world’s top-ranked Hunter!

Midnight Identity Crisis

Yuen Hoang

“There will always be comfort in knowing that you are comprised of other’s parts- because then, you can never be truly alone.” Midnight Identity Crisis is a multimedia surreal walking simulator, focused on how media, other people, and art influence our identities.

Nell & the Festival of Spooks

Becky Wu

A slice-of-life visual novel about a seemingly ordinary girl named Nell, who has a love for horror. An eclipse transports her to a spooky town where she gets enrolled into a fancy academy!

Saving You From Yourself

Taylor McCue

Play as a therapist and fuck up a perfectly good girl by helping her.

The Hex Perplex

Daniel Narvaez

Welcome to the Hex Perplex! Can you defeat the unstoppable power that lurks among these walls? Master the power of the spell books and vanquish the curse that holds the castle! Use them to fight enemies and alter your terrain! It will surely be a difficult journey!

Bombing!!: A Graffiti Sandbox

Devon Wiersma

Bombing!!: A Graffiti Sandbox is a creative lo-fi sandbox game where every inch of the environment can be painted. Armed with your trusty backpack, a bag full of gear and a selection of tools, take to the streets and fill them with your creations!

GUNPIG: Firepower For Hire

LaPointe Joints

Hop into your teeny tank and blast the Chrysophods…fast, fun, arcade style action! Join alien pest control specialist (and possibly shortest mercenary in the galaxy) Bax Torpini, as he fights to rid Stalwart Academy, a school space station, of a rogue horde of out-of-control robot space monsters!

Pixel Puzzle Makeout League

Rude Ghost

Solve pixel puzzles, date superheroes, and save the day! Dating sim meets puzzle game in this romantic comedy adventure.

START AGAIN: a prologue

insertdisc5

START AGAIN START AGAIN START AGAIN: A PROLOGUE (or: START AGAIN: a prologue) is a short rpg where you, Siffrin, are stuck in a time loop for no reason you can find.
You’re fine though! Hiding your knowledge from your friends is easy! Fighting the same enemies is easy! Dying to the same final boss over and over again is easy!
You have to make sure your friends don’t find out about the super fun times you’re having though.
They can’t know.
They can’t.

START AGAIN: a prologue is a story-driven 3-5 hour long RPG made in RPGmaker, and is available on itch.io. It can be played with a keyboard or a gamepad.

Emergent Fates

megaphemeral

Emergent Fates is a Japanese inspired Role Playing Game about finding identity and purpose in a world where your fate has already been decided.

Duskwitch: Heroic Soul

VIVIDBLUE LTD

Duskwitch: Heroic Soul is a fast-paced character action shooter where you play as Rutie, a witch tasked with saving the rest of the world after nearly ending it herself! Using her Broom, she uses soul energy to eliminate Azazoth’s Remnants which are shadows of an ancient evil being that consume human souls. Fight your way through the horde of Remnants and take them out in style!

Garden Story

Picogram

Unify a broken community as the newly-appointed Guardian of The Grove. Traverse a vibrant island to combat invasive Rot, inspire its inhabitants, and rebuild your home. You won’t have to do this alone: fruity friends await, ready to lend a hand!

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In Cold Dark

done \ undone

Three years scouting the distant reaches of the galaxy. You’ve been all on your own, but now it’s time to head back, to SAGI 499: a divided colonial society on the edge of the Sagittarius spiral, and your home. Old friends calling, new faces to meet, political turmoil … and hints of something far stranger. What will you choose?

Shot in the Dark

Possum House Games

Shot in the Dark offers a unique challenge, combining nail biting pixel perfect platforming with precise point and click shooting. But many of the cruel creatures of the night remain hidden in shadow. The bandit will have to be on the lookout for glowing red eyes, shadows moving through the trees, and figures lurking in the night. Because sometimes the only sign of a demon on your trail is the slight movement of the tall grass. And sometimes all you can do is take a shot in the dark.

Facts About the Robot Uprising

Geoffrey Golden, Jordan Robins

Facts About the Robot Uprising is the first new game to be developed for the Tiger 2-XL in more than 25 years. In this trivia challenge, 3-XL (2-XL’s sinister successor) quizzes the audience on why and how robots will enslave humanity. Players who answer 3-XL’s questions correctly get a funny song! Those who don’t will become the first victims of the robot uprising…

flaming/million

Nilson Carroll

A NEW GAME FOUND IN THIS FLAMING DUMPSTER: follow L.C. through a warped glitch campus during the FRATPARADE. destroy the three (3) police surveillance monuments and rid the campus of masculine oppression. use the queer power of glitches and begin to heal this terrible curse put on us all.

The Big Con

Mighty Yell

Flex your inner teenager in The Big Con, an adventure game where you hustle across the country as a teen trying to save your family video store. In classic 90s con movie style, you’ll get to persuade and pilfer your way to greatness using a whack of potential grifts.

Project Snapshot

Dinky Dinos

A casual simulation game where players channel their inner photographer to capture the natural beauty of a remote island for peculiar clients!

Dawn of the Monsters

13AM Games

Dawn of the Monsters is a co-operative kaiju beat-em-up coming in 2021. Players take control of powerful monsters in order to take on the evil “Nephilim”- a horde of creatures that are hellbent on destroying the planet. Liberate four major metropolitan areas- from Toronto to Tokyo in this epic action game.

Shwip

Jamhammer Games

Dominate global leaderboards as you face off against an onslaught of geometric foes. Shwip combines straight up twin-stick arcade action with tight controls, insane pixel destruction and devastating weapons and abilities. Evade, outlast and play with style in four game modes over single and local multiplayer.

Some Like It Hot!

AugEx

Some Like It Hot! is a combination of job simulation and visual novel, where you’ll be crafting complex caffeinated concoctions during the rush hours, and getting to know the regulars during your down time.

Gladiotron

Gavin Ball / Full Circle CS Inc.

Gladiotron is a modern take on Metroidvanias, while not hiding it’s retro inspirations. It is also an online interactive story that follows the adventures of 2 Detroit area high school students as they get wrapped up in a cosmic adventure that will test their faith and resilience as they try to save the galaxy from the intergalactic space demons.

Triversal

Phantom Compass

Triversal is a simply satisfying spatial puzzle game that helps you find your chill. Relaxing and rewarding; Suspend a light orb over the goal by tethering to nearby supports and complete puzzle after puzzle.

Told By Starlight

Ryan Khan

Told by Starlight is a no prep, GM-less tabletop game for 2-6 players. It is about drawing constellations and telling the tales behind them. Using a standard deck of playing cards to generate themes and prompts, you will create an entire mythology, and all the characters within.

Hop Together

Toasty Bread Team

Help bunnies bring carrots up to their friends in this charming little puzzle game.

A Night at Manster Mansion

Onino Zvezdin

Woken in the night by your boss, you must go uncover the murder at the mysterious Manster Mansion belonging to the most ruthless mafia clan in the world. Will you be able to get out unscathed or will you perish like the typical victim of their cruelty?

DepowerBall

Mega Power Games

DepowerBall is a competitive game where the fate of every matchup is influenced by fast-paced gameplay and tactical decision-making. Every match, each player starts with the same set of powers to try and accomplish their task of pleasing the Dragon Queen by feeding her delicious treats! When a player wins a round, he or she will earn the Queen’s favour, but will earn the wrath of the other players as they vote to take away one of the winner’s powers! Adapt to your changing conditions, or get left behind as the other players take advantage of your weakened state!

Recalculating

Blank Slate Games

Think small talk is tough? Imagine if your life depended on it. Recalculating is a soft-thriller visual-novel intended to simulate an uncomfortable position familiar to many women: being in a rideshare vehicle. Navigate your thoughts and choices by launching a ball to select dialogue options that bounce around the screen. In a game with multiple endings and plot twists, can you speak your mind when it really matters? After all, when anxieties heighten, things becomes harder to say… literally.

Bapy

Snotwurm

Adopt and care for an infant demon of your own!

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Our Partners

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Promoter Tier Supporters

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Patron Tier Supporter

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Volunteers

Coordinators: Enna Kim & Sam Cuddy

Erica Coutts, Porter Crease, Kevin Ly, Sonya Tsui, Mobeedah Akhter, Amer Ali Mohammed, Ian Fyfe, Chih-Chieh Chang, Chi Ma, Leif Conti-Groome, Gresa Ago Ago, Jack Chang, Annabelle Wu, Siena Smith, Cass Alvarado, Phoenix Simms, Katelyn Campbell, and Adil Sulaiman.

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It’s back and bigger than ever! The Hand Eye Society has partnered once again with the Toronto Comics Arts Festival (TCAF) and Canzine to announce the return of the Comics x Games festival! This year, due to COVID-19 Comics x Games will be making a return, but with a virtual twist! We can’t wait to be able to showcase the works of more local and international artists at this year’s festival! Here are this year’s festival speakers! Please support them!

MAY 8TH – 12TH, 2021

ONLINE via Twitch!

SCHEDULE TBD SOON!

Lina Wu

Website | Twitter

New Ways to Love You

New Ways to Love You explores the legacy of zines as responses to video games, centering pre-existing fanzines and how fan culture influences the creative process. Questions include: How is fan work perceived or misconceived in the arts? What compels us to respond to games with our own narratives and ephemera, and what are we building and expressing together? Do these works function as responses, or do they actually change the way we play and love video games?

Alex Rushdy

Website | Twitter

Bringing Comic Book Monsters to Life

I discuss how to blend 2D and 3D assets, complex shaders, and unique animation workflows to create a unique comic book aesthetic through our upcoming game, Dawn of the Monsters. Our process doesn’t require fancy tech, just fancy technique! I also compare and contrast various approaches to bringing comic books and manga to life on the video game screen and where our approach aligns and differs.

Jedidjah Julia Noomen

Website | Twitter

Words without audio, or how comics taught me to write for voiceless game characters.

When I started out in game writing, I had many years of experience in film, tv and theatre. But the first games I wrote for, had no voice overs… I had to write for (limited) animated characters with text balloons, and suddenly, half of my jokes and nuanced one-liners fell flat, because there wasn’t an actor to give them the right tone of voice. In a bid to learn how to write non-voiced game dialogues, I turned to one of my other favorite story-telling art forms: comics. This is what I learnt.

Geoffrey Golden

Website | Twitter

Now You’re Playing with Panels: The Art of Gamebook Comics

You’re not just a reader with gamebook comics. You’re the hero! Imagine a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, only with panels instead of text blocks, and monsters to battle with dice rolls. We’ll take a look at the legacy of solo comic gamebooks, from the obscure British comic Diceman (1986) to Marvel’s You Are Deadpool (2018). How are these games designed? What elements do they draw from video games, tabletop RPGs, and interactive fiction? Are they fun? Turn the page and find out.

LeeAnne Ireland

Website

Indigenous Storytelling in Comics

In this talk, we will explore how Indigenous teachings, learning and storytelling is a great mechanism to building the foundation of comics, graphic novels and games. The talk will also explore how to incorporate Indigenous processes, parallel ways of knowing and ceremony into the process to ensure it is as meaningful as the end product. Lastly, people will have an opportunity to explore some of the behind the scenes ways that we created our popular graphic novels into virtual reality game experiences.

Sharang Biswas

Website | Twitter

Understand Comics / Understanding Games: Examining Games Through the Scott McCloud Lens

What can comics teach game designers? How are the visual and interactive arts related? In an increasingly interdisciplinary world, studying an art form through the lens of an another, seemingly unrelated field can yield insights and breakthroughs that defy current expectations of art. In this talk, we’ll be examining games and game-design through Scott McCloud’s classic text UNDERSTANDING COMICS.

Bahiyya Khan

Twitter

Environmental storytelling in the absence of context

This talk will focus on how screenshots from vignette video games that rely on environmental storytelling as a narrative device can exist as a comic when placed out of context as well as how the environmental storytelling present in a comic can be transmuted into a vignette video game. The talk also explores the different mediums approach to environmental storytelling with video games looking at player agency and interpretation and comics relying more on traditional exposition.

Sara Alfageeh & Meg McCurdy

Sara’s Twitter | Meg’s Twitter

Sequential Storytelling: A Look At Table-Top Roleplaying games

Sitting with Sara Alfageeh and Meg McCurdy, creative director and lead artist of ONE MORE MULIVERSE.Talking about visual storytelling by game devs with one foot in comics and the other in table top roleplaying games. Looking at how artists bring over storytelling concepts from one to the other. Understanding how visuals allow us to “move at the speed of story”, and what that means.

OUR PARTNERS

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Patron Tier Supporter

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Promoter Tier Supporters

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The 7th annual WordPlay Festival takes place Saturday, November 9th & 10th 2019!

Sat. November 9th, Sunday November 10th

Saturday 11:00am – 4:30pm and Sunday 1:30pm – 4:30pm

Toronto Reference Library
789 Yonge St. (Bloor-Yonge subway)
Free!

Did you hear the good news? WordPlay 7 is happening THIS WEEKEND!

We’re so excited and proud to be able to bring you games from all over the world by the amazing creators and hand-picked speakers which some, by the way, are flying into the city just to talk to us! We also have tons of workshops–we know you like those! It’s going to be a fun time especially that WordPlay is now TWO (2) days of narrative fun instead of one, so get plenty of rest, don’t want to miss any of this!

Just as a reminder, let’s be sure to make WordPlay a safer space together. Here is our Safer Spaces Policy that we will abide by including all speakers, participants, volunteers, and staff members. We will have Safety Check Personnel on site which is comprised of both staff and volunteers. They will be wearing prominent red ribbons and will be present throughout the weekend. If you have any questions or concerns during WordPlay, we can help to address them. If you would like to contact us after the event, you can email us at safe@handeyesociety.com or you can fill out this anonymous online form.

But allow me to break down the event for ya, like cookies in milk!

Look at this cool WordPlay poster! Oh my god! Credz to Elizabeth Zhang.

Where to go

Saturday

Micro-Talks

Sunday

What to Play

Our Partners

Event Details

Sat. November 9th, 11 am – 4:30 pm
Sun. November 10th, 1:30 pm – 4:30 pm
Toronto Reference Library
789 Yonge St. (Bloor-Yonge subway)
FREE!

Hey everyone! This month, everything’s coming up WordPlay! You’ve known it in the past as is our free one-day festival celebrating the most interesting uses of writing and words in contemporary games. But this year we’re blowing it up into two days of wordtasticness. And to do that, we’ve enlisted the help of a stunning array of guest stars who will be presenting a series of fascinating talks, informative workshops, and inspiring performances.

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It’s my distinct pleasure to present to you our official schedule for WordPlay 2019!

Schedules

Saturday

Micro-Talks

Sunday

Now that you’ve seen our schedule come meet the people who are making it all happen – allow me to introduce our WordPlay 2019 speakers!

Alexander King

Alexander King is a game designer and professor based in Brooklyn, New York. His work centers on data-driven design and simulation, and he was the systems and economy designer on the recently released Apple Arcade launch title Dear Reader. Alexander is also an adjunct professor at the NYU Game Center and Parsons School of Design, where he has taught classes on game design, and math and economics for games. Before working in games, Alexander was an analytics consultant working in finance and eCommerce, but now the economies he models are largely fictional ones.

Talk: Artisanal Procedurality: Designing Procedural Word Puzzles using Classic Literature

Join us for a close-up view of the systems behind Dear Reader, a mobile game that uses the text of public domain literature as the raw material for procedural wordplay. The design of Dear Reader balances algorithmic elements and manually-defined components. Designer Alexander King will walk through the game’s development in finding this balance, and share some best practices and lessons learned from turning classic books into procedural puzzles.

Alfe Clemencio

Alfe Clemencio is an indie game developer behind the company Sakura River Interactive. He gave a talk at University of Waterloo, was a guest at Fan Expo, and exhibited at Tokyo Game Show. His passion for gameplay-impactful story choices in games has led him to study various techniques in games new and old. As old as DOS at least.

Micro-talk: Making Choices Matter and More! (explained in under 6 mins)

If you ever scratched your head about how to make choices matter this talk is for you. Learn about “meta” characters, foreshadowing for “fairness”, compound choices and more!

Benoit Esmein

Benoit: I fell into game localization at a very early age. When I was around 7, my dad started localizing games aimed at children, such as Putt-Putt, Pyjama Sam, Spy Fox, Marine Malice, and my sister, my brother and myself became early localization testers, and contributors. I have always been interested in languages, studying Russian as a first foreign language in school, and became completely fluent in English by spending summers in the US, staying with host families. Taking advantage of my Law background and of my fluency in English, I started translating professionally in 2015, in order to finance a double Bachelors in Scandinavian Languages and Russian, and to support myself while moving and trying to settle in Sweden. Life happened and led me to move to Canada to be closer to my partner. I have so far worked on 16 games and game-related projects, ranging from Indie (Russian Subway Dogs, Quench) to AAA (Battlefield 1, For Honor, CoD Black Ops 4).

Micro-talk: The importance of showers in Indie Game Localization

In a world that is increasingly rushed, and where localization can often be an afterthought for developers, leading to compressed deadlines, I make the case for leaving ample time for translators to do multiple passes on their work. I will go over the necessity, especially for Indie developers, to take into account the effects that a bad localization can have on the success of their game abroad, whether it breaks immersion or simply isn’t funny. I will touch on Deep Work (concept popularized by Cal Newport), background brain processing and what the French call “esprit d’escalier”, and the importance of taking breaks to produce work that one can be proud of.

Betty Robertson & Evangelia Fahantidou

Betty Robertson is a Narrative Designer and Writer at Ubisoft Montreal. She’s worked on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and on the Odyssey Story Packs. She was one half of the coordinators for the Pixelles Game Writing Incubator from 2018-2019. A graduate of Camosun College, and BCIT, Betty is well versed in Creative Writing, Game Design, and Education. She considers herself a snappy dresser, and funnier than she actually is.

Evangelia Fahantidou is a Level Designer at Ubisoft Montreal. She was a Quest Designer for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and the Odyssey Story Packs. She has previously been a Computer Science lab assistant for the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth in Greece and a Game Design Intern for Minority Media. She graduated from Champlain College of Vermont in 2017 with a Bachelor’s degree in Game Design. She denies that she has a coffee addiction and that she understands French.

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Talk: Mission Design & Game Writing: A Marriage

Game Writer Betty Robertson and Mission Designer Evangelia Fahantidou break down the symbiosis of Writing and Mission Design. Common practices, misconceptions about roles, and the best way to compromise.

Dave Evans

Dave Evans is the owner and studio director of Falling Squirrel, a Niagara based indie game dev specializing in the advancement of narrative design and audio game mechanics for visually impared accessibility.

Dave began his career in film and TV as a writer/director before transitioning into AAA games as a Cinema Director (Too Human and X-men Destiny). Indie games eventually provided Dave the opportunity to write, design and direct projects (Phantom Compass’s Pinball/RPG mashup Rollers of the Realm) as well as pursue his own narrative driven projects through his company Falling Squirrel.

The studio’s current project, The Vale, is an audio based action/adventure title slated for launch on PC early next year.

Talk: A Soundscape is Worth a Thousand Words.

Creative Director, Dave Evans walks us through the The Vale; a narrative driven action adventure game that has no visual gameplay. This talk tracks the game’s development from cost-effective narrative experiment, to robust blind accessible game. Dave reflects on the unique freedoms that come with writing for an audio based game, the intimate experiences that 3D soundscapes can create, and how the development of The Vale was an education in how to make mainstream games more accessible.

Em Lazer-Walker

Em (she/they) is a Toronto-based an artist/engineer who makes interactive art, experimental games, and open-source software tools to empower creativity. Most of her work focuses on using nontraditional interfaces to reframe everyday objects and spaces as playful experiences and to inspire people to become self-motivated learners. She currently works as a cloud advocate at Microsoft.

Workshop: Analytics? In MY interactive fiction?!

Capturing analytics data about how players experience your game often feels a bit gross, or like something you’d only want to do if you’re making a AAA or free-to-play game. But it can be a valuable form of getting player feedback, even if you’re making personal and noncommercial narrative games. This workshop will discuss how analytics can be useful as a design tool, but also when getting too caught up in numbers can be a bad thing. We’ll also get hands-on with tools to integrate free analytics into your Twine game, without any coding required — bring your laptops and an existing Twine project if you’d like!

Jim Munroe

Jim Munroe is a “pop culture provocateur” according to the Austin Chronicle. His graphic novels and prose novels have been praised by Pulitzer-winner Junot Diaz and comics legend Neil Gaiman, and his lo-fi sci-fi feature films by Wired and the Guardian. His political videogames have appeared at Sundance and Cannes, and he co-founded the world’s first videogame arts organization. He was an Art Gallery of Ontario Artist-in-Residence in 2014 and he lives in the Junction neighbourhood in Toronto.

Workshop: Creating Interactive Fiction With Texture Writer

Narrative designer and indie game maker Jim Munroe will be running a workshop using a tool he created with Juhana Leinonen, Texture Writer. The session will begin by showcasing standard patterns in choice based fiction, go into paper prototyping, and then the participants will learn to implement their small games.

Jordan Jones-Brewster & Carol Mertz

Jordan Jones-Brewster: Jordan Jones-Brewster is a Brooklyn-based narrative designer, game designer, and writer who’s work focuses on dissecting interpersonal relationships. He has an MFA in Game Design from New York University. You can find them on Twitter @Versiphied.

Carol Mertz: Carol Mertz is an independent game designer, Executive Director of indie game conference PixelPop Festival, and MFA graduate of the NYU Game Center. Having worked for over a decade in interactive arts and media, her portfolio of work centers around creating and supporting multidisciplinary projects that expand our perspective, help us learn about ourselves and each other, and challenge the typical boundaries of play.

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Talk: The Design of ‘We Should Talk’: Putting a New Spin On Narrative Choice

How does it feel to explore a relationship playground? In We Should Talk, players are encouraged to think carefully about the words they choose as they interact with various people in a bar, while also texting their partner at home. Using the sentence spinner mechanic developed for this game, players craft sentences in response to the in-game characters, allowing them to explore the nuances of conversation with interactions of various intimacy levels.

Developers Jordan Jones-Brewster and Carol Mertz describe the development process of that mechanic, and how it allows for a different way to engage with meaningful choices.

Kate Gray

Kate Gray is a British writer living in Canada. She is the Narrative Director at KO_OP, an indie studio in Montreal, and writes about sex and relationships on a regular basis, most notably for Kotaku. She was a full-time journalist before moving to Canada, working for Official Nintendo Magazine, Xbox UK, and GameSpot, among many other sites and publications. She can’t tell you about the project she’s working on right now but she’s pretty sure you’d love it.

Talk: How Romance In Games Can Change The World

Romance, relationships, and sex in games are no longer just sidequests and minigames — they’re ways that developers, artists and storytellers can express themselves and their world within a game. We won’t solve world hunger by playing Dream Daddy, but we can all learn to be kinder, more empathetic beings through romance in games.

Robert Kori Golding

Robert Kori Golding is the co-founder and lead game designer at Albedo Informatics, a Toronto-based development studio with a focus on location-based Augmented Reality (AR) experiences. Albedo is currently developing SIGIL, a location-based AR game that brings myths, folklore and local legends to life. Kori has been crafting geo-locative narrative experiences for the past 14 years.

Talk: Pushing Storytelling in Location-Based Games

With the arrival and widespread success of geo-locative augmented reality (AR) games such as Pokemon Go!, Jurassic World Alive and Harry Potter Wizards Unite, a new medium for storytelling is emerging. With these new types of games, the world itself becomes a giant sandbox for players to explore. As game designers, how can we embrace the unique opportunities presented by this medium to tell stories that truly embrace and integrate the world around the player? In this talk, we will provide an overview of the history of location-based games and narratives. We will also discuss how game designers can meaningfully incorporate local landmarks, terrain types, weather, time of day, local lore, and the experiences of the players themselves in order to forge powerful experiences that capitalize on this nascent medium. We will also provide a brief overview of the current tools available for potential creators.

Squinky

Mx. Dietrich “Squinky” Squinkifer (they/them pronouns) is a new media artist living in Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal). They create playable experiences in the form of videogames, interactive installations, and performances, touching on subjects of gender identity, social awkwardness, and miscellaneous silliness. Recently, Squinky’s work has been shown at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria, as well as in the Rainbow Arcade exhibition on queer videogames at the Schwules Museum in Berlin. Squinky has also been known to show up to various events making noise with some kind of large brass instrument.

Performance: How Making Videogames Turned Me Into a Depressed Gay Communist

“How Making Videogames Turned Me Into a Depressed Gay Communist” is a solo performance about my experience growing up as an undiagnosed autistic, proto-transgender nerd with immigrant parents, with all the loneliness such an experience entails, and my long time love-hate obsession with videogames that led me to a rocky career making them for money, burning out spectacularly in the process. This performance is illustrated in the self-demonstrating style of a choose-your-own-adventure story, wherein audience participation is mediated by a hacked together web app running on my aging laptop and a knockoff Google Glass-esque augmented reality device attached to my face and feeding me my lines. The defamiliarizing experience created by this intentionally awkward juxtaposition of theatre and technology mirrors the ambivalent feelings I experience living in today’s cyberpunk dystopian capitalist hellscape. Yet, the performance is also punctuated by moments of joyful movement and singing, as I celebrate my body as it changes from hormone replacement therapy, and learn to better connect with others by accepting myself.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.

Xalavier Nelson Jr. is an IGF-nominated narrative designer, game developer, writer, ex-PC Gamer columnist, IntroComp organizer, and MCV Rising Star. You might know him from his work on Hypnospace Outlaw, Can Androids Pray, SkateBird, We Are The Caretakers, or a dozen other things. He is very tired as a result, and appreciates your understanding.

Performance: Disco Never Died (But It Is Trying To Kill You): A #DISCOGAME

Building on the foundation of last year’s successful LARP “DESPITE YOUR RAGE YOU ARE STILL A RAT IN A CAGE — NICOLAS CAGE, WHO IS SUSPENDING YOU OVER A PIT OF LAVA WITH HIS FORMER SERVANT IGOR,” Xalavier Nelson Jr. again brings an absurd massively collaborative storytelling game to Wordplay Toronto. Explore a HAUNTED DISCOTHEQUE. Talk to chill DISCGHOSTS. Battle the DISCEMPEROR. Save your DISCSOUL.

This is #DISCOGAME.

Micro-talk: We Don’t Talk About The Toilets: Worldbuilding with Purpose

Award-nominated narrative designer Xalavier Nelson Jr. shows you how you can spend less time exhaustively explaining a plumbing system your audience will never see, and more time doing the worldbuilding your project actually needs.

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