Avery Alder

Avery Alder is a Canadian tabletop role-playing game designer. She designs games with themes of LGBTQ self-discovery, community building, and post-apocalyptic survival.[1] Alder invented the Belonging Outside Belonging system, which became a template for future designers' games. Her work is a topic of scholarship in the history of game design.

Avery Alder
OccupationGame designer
Notable workMonsterhearts, The Quiet Year
AwardsIndie RPG Awards

Game design and writing

Alder designs and writes indie role-playing games. She designed The Quiet Year,[2] a map-making game[3] about community building,[4] which won the 2013 Indie RPG Awards for "Most Innovative." She also designed Dream Askew,[5] which won the 2014 Indie RPG Awards for "Best Free Game," and Monsterhearts, which was nominated for the 2013 Origins Awards for Best Roleplaying Game.[6] Monsterhearts was one of the first published Powered by the Apocalypse games and an early example of a specifically queer themed tabletop role-playing game.[7] Critical Role played Monsterhearts on a special Valentines Day episode.[8] For Dream Askew, Alder created the Belonging Outside Belonging system,[9] which was later used for other designers' games like Wanderhome[10] and Balikbayan.[11]

Alder wrote a chapter called "Queer Storytelling and the Mechanics of Desire" in The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games by Bonnie Ruberg.[12] Alder's games have been used to teach social responsibility and decision making in secondary school classrooms.[13]

Alder designs games with the philosophy that game mechanics for fictional worlds reveal the designer's beliefs about how similar systems work in the real world.[14][15]

Reception in game scholarship

Ben Bisogno at the Kyoto City University of Art wrote an in-depth analysis of Alder's contributions to the development of role-playing games that don't use a gamemaster.[16] In Transgression in Games and Play, scholars Sihvonen and Strenos draw parallels between how the game mechanics in Monsterhearts broke the norms of roleplaying games in 2012 and Alder's transgressive subject matter of "monstrosity, adolescence, and queerness."[17] Kawitzky's Magic Circles: Tabletop role-playing games as queer utopian method explores Alder's Dream Askew's "intersections between queer theory, dys/utopian theory and the ‘Magic Circle’ in play theory."[18] In No Dice, No Masters, Eric Stein analyses Alder's Belonging Outside Belonging system through the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière.[9]

Works
Title Publisher Credits Date Ref.
Monsterhearts Buried Without Ceremony Designer 2012 [17]
The Quiet Year Buried Without Ceremony Designer 2013 [2]
Dream Askew Buried Without Ceremony Designer 2013 [5]
Monsterhearts 2 Buried Without Ceremony Designer 2017 [7]

References
  1. Duffy, Owen (8 February 2017). "Monsterhearts: 'A lot of queer youth are made to feel monstrous by people around them'". The Guardian.
  2. Jackson, Gita (14 August 2016). "How the Quiet Year Brings People Together". Kotaku.
  3. "RPG Review: The Quiet Year - Shut Up & Sit Down". Retrieved 14 March 2023.
  4. Dixon, Adam (19 February 2015). "Playing the Quiet Year, a tabletop game about building communities". Kill Screen.
  5. "Belonging Outside of Belonging: Avery Alder's Dream Askew | Unwinnable". 7 June 2018.
  6. "2013 Origins Awards". Archived from the original on December 27, 2013.
  7. "Pride Week: Dicebreaker recommends Monsterhearts 2 - an RPG about being queer and loving demons". Eurogamer.net. July 2021.
  8. "Cinderbrush: A Monsterhearts Story (A Critical Role One-Shot) | Critical Role". Retrieved 2023-03-22.
  9. Stein, Eric. "No Dice, No Masters: Procedures for Emancipation in Dream Askew / Dream Apart" (PDF). GENeration Analog: The Tabletop Games and Education Virtual Conference, with Game in Lab, Analog Game Studies, and GenCon. 2021. Retrieved 14 March 2023.
  10. "Wanderhome is a Redwall-inspired RPG that arms players with dialogue, not daggers". Polygon. 16 April 2021.
  11. Carter, Chase (9 December 2020). "Cyberpunk by Asian Creators game jam spotlights neon-and-chrome tabletop RPGS without the racism". Dicebreaker.
  12. Ruberg, Bonnie. The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games. Duke University Press, 2020.
  13. Cassie, Jonathan, "Don't Split the Party: Using Games to Enhance Social-Emotional Learning Strategies", Teaching in the Game-Based Classroom, doi:10.4324/9781003042693-12/split-party-jonathan-cassie, retrieved 2023-03-21
  14. "Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans: Ep. 27 "Game Design with Avery Alder"". mrahpodcast.libsyn.com. Retrieved 2023-03-21.
  15. "Worldbuild With Us: Episode 78: Interview With Game Designer Avery Alder on Apple Podcasts". Apple Podcasts. Retrieved 2023-03-21.
  16. Bisogno, Ben. 2022. “No Gods, No Masters: An Overview of Unfacilitated 'GMless' Design Frameworks.” Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies, 3: 70e-81e.
  17. Transgression in Games and Play. Edited by Kristine Jorgensen, Faltin Karlsen. Chapter 7: Queering Games, Play, and Culture Through Transgressive Role-Playing Games. Tanja Sihvonen and Jaakko Strenos. MIT Press, 2019.
  18. Kawitzky, Felix Rose (2020-11-16). "Magic Circles". Performance Research. 25 (8): 129–136. doi:10.1080/13528165.2020.1930786. ISSN 1352-8165.
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