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Reports & Talks

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Polaris Design Retreat is an exclusive, invite-only think tank where the industry’s top senior and lead designers come together to tackle the most challenging problems in games. Over 48 hours, attendees collaborate intensively on pressing topics, then compile reports on their insights to share with the broader industry.

This paper explores how permanent loss in games, when designed intentionally, can create deeper meotional engagement by turning player pain into meaningful experiences. It outlines strategies for preparing, personalizing, and reflecting on loss.
This paper highlights how to support players who enjoy nurturing by creating systems that foster meaningful care, deepen emotional bonds, and reflect the subject's interior life rather than using shallow or transactional interactions.
This paper presents a model for how player experiences become memorable and shareable stories. It shares a set of techniques that help seed player narratives with conditions that make tellable, meaningful, and enduring experiences within communities.
This was a series of mini talks about what mid stage development careers are like for marginalized devs. My talk focused on practicing self-advocacy for those who have impostor syndrome.
This was a full day workshop on design documentation. This included documentation best practices, examples of vision decks/feature spec/one pager, visualizations, exercises, and rubrics.
This talk was inspired by the Polaris Paper about strategies that can be used to create a deeper form of nurturing. The talk aimed to expand on specific examples.
This talk was about habits and learnings you can take from Game Jams and apply to work.
This roundtable was about discussing the ethics of Free to Play games and monetization strategies.