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. 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 An indie role-playing game is a role-playing game published outside traditional, "mainstream" means. Varying definitions require that commercial, design, or conceptual elements of the game stay under the control of the creator, or that the gam ...

. She designed ''

The Quiet Year ''The Quiet Year'' is a map-drawing tabletop role-playing game for 2-4 players about community building, by Avery Alder. The illustrations are by Ariel Norris, and Jackson Tegu is credited with additional design insights. It was independently p ...

'', a map-making game about community building, which won the 2013

Indie RPG Awards The Indie RPG Awards are annual, creator-based awards for Indie role-playing games and supplements. They were established in 2002 by Andy Kitkowski, and are the most sought-after awards in the ''Indie RPG'' community. For the purposes of the Award ...

for "Most Innovative." She also designed ''Dream Askew'', which won the 2014

for "Best Free Game," and ''

Monsterhearts ''Monsterhearts'' is a role-playing game about "the messy lives of teenage monsters", developed from '' Apocalypse World''. It is known for its handling of sexuality and LGBT content.

'', which was nominated for the 2013 Origins Awards for Best Roleplaying Game. ''Monsterhearts'' was one of the first published Powered by the Apocalypse games and an early example of a specifically

queer ''Queer'' is an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or cisgender. Originally meaning or , ''queer'' came to be used pejoratively against those with same-sex desires or relationships in the late 19th century. Beginning in the lat ...

themed tabletop role-playing game. Critical Role played Monsterhearts on a special Valentines Day episode. For Dream Askew, Alder created the Belonging Outside Belonging system, which was later used for other designers' games like '' Wanderhome'' and Balikbayan. 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 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 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."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." In ''No Dice, No Masters'', Eric Stein analyses Alder's ''Belonging Outside Belonging'' system through the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière.

Works

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Alder, Avery Canadian game designers Indie role-playing game designers Living people Role-playing game designers Year of birth missing (living people)