Avery Alder

Avery Alder is a tabletop role-playing game designer. She designs games with themes of LGBTQ self-discovery, community building, and post-apocalyptic survival.https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/episode-78-interview-with-game-designer-avery-alder/id1478367367?i=1000506932813 0:44-2:11
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.https://mrahpodcast.libsyn.com/ep-27-game-design-with-avery-alder 30:27-30:42 Her work is a topic of scholarship in the history of game design.
==Work==
Alder designed The Quiet Year, a map-making game about community building,, Dream Askew and Monsterhearts, which was nominated for the 2013 Origins Awards for Best Roleplaying Game. Monsterhearts was one of the first published Powered by the Apocalypse gameshttps://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thirdfloorwars/episodes/Avery-Alder-Monster-Hearts--The-Quiet-Year-Interview-ep--153-e1c99bh 0:55-1:02 and an early example of a specifically queer themed tabletop role-playing game. Alder created the Belonging Outside Belonging system, which was later used for other designers' games like Wanderhome and Balikbayan. Alder's games have been used to teach social responsibility and decision making in secondary school classrooms.Teaching in the Game-Based Classroom: Practical Strategies for Grades 6-12. Edited by David Seelow. CRC Press, 2021. Don’t Split the Party:
Using Games to Enhance Social-Emotional Learning Strategies. Jonathan Cassie. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003042693-12/split-party-jonathan-cassie
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.Ruberg, Bonnie. The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games. Duke University Press, 2020. Alder has presented at NYU Game Center.
==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 GM-less games.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. 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."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. 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."Kawitzky, Felix Rose. Magic Circles: Tabletop role-playing games as queer utopian method. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts. Volume 25, 2020 - Issue 8: Training Utopias. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13528165.2020.1930786 In No Dice, No Masters, Eric Stein analyses Alder's Belonging Outside Belonging system through the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière.
Category:Living people
Category:American people