Games & Empathy Mini-Talks

Thu 4th Mar, 13:00 – 14:00 (GMT)

Mini-Talks (Zoom Event)
Games & Empathy

Speakers:
Marina Diez (3 of Cups Games)
Alastair Low (Lowtek Games)
Natalie Schmidt
Nida Ahmad

Series of short talks from specialist game designers about cultivating empathy and improving accessibility in games design.

Marina Diez
Marina Díez is a Spanish award-winning game designer based in London, UK. She’s the CEO and Creative Director at Three of Cups Games, a games studio based in London. Besides, she is the lead game designer of Dordogne at Un Je Ne Sais Quoi Studios and game designer for Me-säätiö in Helsinki, Finland.

Marina will be talking about finding your voice as a professional with special attention to her role as an emotional game designer and how she approached her

work starting there.

Website: marinadiez.carrd.co
Twitter: @ninfa_dp

Alastair Low (Ally)
After working as an artist in the games industry for 7+ years Ally finally took the plunge to start his own indie studio Lowtek Games. His work explores making fun, retro, challenging, dyslexia friendly games.

Ally is on the board of the SGDA (Scottish Games Developers Association) helping to organise game jams and play parties and also used to help run Dundee’s local makerspace.

Lowtek Games has had a strong focus on retro games and is working on tools to help games be more accessible to dyslexic players. Ally is dyslexic himself and wants to help make change happen.

Website: lowtek.games
Twitter: @wallmasterr
Facebook: lowtekgames
Artstation: lowtek

Natalie Schmidt
Natalie is a writer and game designer based in Los Angeles, CA. Having studied both dramaturgy and game design at Carnegie Mellon University, Natalie specializes in narrative design and script development for multi-media storytelling. She’s designed small-scale TTRPGs, and her previous narrative work for Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute explored human-AI decision-making via branching interactive stories.

She is particularly passionate about meaningful representation of BIPOC within the TTRPG space, as well as accessibility of design within interactive entertainment. Natalie is currently working freelance, as well as on several personal projects.

Websites:
natalie-schmidt.wixsite.com/portfolio
medium.com/@s.natalie25

Nida Ahmad

Nida is a UX Designer with a focus on creating playful user experiences with accessibility and psychology in mind. She has worked on Warhammer Combat Cards and currently an upcoming social MMO. She is an advocate for integrating UX processes into game development, having spoken at industry conferences and was nominated for the Game Dev Heroes Awards as a result. She is also a mentor for students studying games, was a reader for the BAFTA Young Game Designer Awards and is on the founding team of POC in Play, who strive to increase the inclusion of POC in the industry.

Twitter: @NidaAhmad_

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