• Source: 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. In collaboration with Benjamin Rosenbaum, 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.


      Game design and writing


      Alder designs and writes indie role-playing games. She designed The Quiet Year, a map-making game about community building. Her game 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. For Dream Askew, Dream Apart, Alder and Rosenbaum created the Belonging Outside Belonging system.
      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. Alder's games have been used to teach social responsibility and decision making in secondary school classrooms.
      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.


      Reception




      = 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. 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." 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." In No Dice, No Masters, Eric Stein analyses Alder's Belonging Outside Belonging system through the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière.


      = Awards and nominations

      =
      The Quiet Year won the 2013 Indie RPG Awards for "Most Innovative." The prototype for Dream Askew won the 2014 Indie RPG Awards for "Best Free Game."
      Monsterhearts was nominated for the 2013 Origins Awards for Best Roleplaying Game. Dream Askew, Dream Apart was nominated for three 2019 ENNIE Awards: "Best Game," "Best Setting," and "Product of the Year."


      = Offshoots

      =
      The Belonging Outside Belonging system was later used for other designers' games like Wanderhome and Balikbayan. As of July 2024, Itch.io lists 211 products with the tag "Belonging Outside Belonging."
      Critical Role played Monsterhearts on a special Valentines Day episode.


      Works




      References

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