NYU Game Center Lecture Series Presents mattie

Join us as we welcome the newest member of the Game Center faculty to the lecture series stage. The roots of games are deeply entangled with magic and religion. Before they were pastimes, games were sacred ceremonies in which we peered into the future. In this talk, mattie will explore the ways in which games' history as divination suggests possible futures for their relationship to community, culture, and the struggle to make the world a better place.

mattie creates with play as an activist designer and culture worker. Her work moves through marginalized histories and practices of design that contribute towards cultural change, providing alternative perspectives on how game design can be used for activism. She currently is a Design Strategist for Antidote, a game design studio that collaborates with organizations such as the Red Cross and United Nations.

Previously mattie was a games critic focused on issues of representation and equity in the games industry with bylines in Kotaku and Paste Magazine. She became a prominent figure of the DIY revolution in games, focused on empowering marginalized people to create games and fully engaged with issues of systemic oppression in games. mattie co-founded the Queerness in Games conference, was the associate director of the international games festival IndieCade, and has her work exhibited in galleries and shows globally.

Her current work involves crafting intentional communities through transformative justice practices, emphasizing the activist labor in domestic spaces through cooking, and establishing a visionary design practice through play and divination.

Poster art by Arlin Ortiz. Find more of his work here.

The NYU Game Center would like to thank our event sponsors: Fresh Planet, Take-Two Interactive, Empire State Development, and Parsec. Their generous support makes our events possible.

Free and open to the public. Streaming live on twitch.tv.