Avery Alder | |
---|---|
Occupation | Game designer |
Notable work | Monsterhearts, The Quiet Year |
Awards | Indie RPG Awards |
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.
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]
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]
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] |