Scot Osterweil

Scot Osterweil is Creative Director of the Education Arcade at MIT. Game designs include Zoombinis (math and logic), Vanished: The MIT/Smithsonian Game (environmental science), Labyrinth (math), Caduceus (medicine), and iCue (history). He is Creative Director of Learning Games Network where he led the design of the Gates Foundation funded Xenos (ESL), and Quandary, named 2013 Game of the Year (Games for Change festival). He co-authored the book Resonant Games and served as the play consultant on the Emmy Award winning Amazon TV series Tumbleleaf.

The world reborn: reimagining player identity.

FROG 2020 – Short Talk

All games offer opportunities for players to enhance their identities as effective and competent actors in their lives’ narratives. But whether acknowledged or not by their creators, games sold in the marketplace are part of a cultural conversation that is mediated by the demands of capital and hierarchies, a conversation that often distorts player self-identity in harmful ways. This talk is a challenge to game designers/writers/producers to think more deeply about player identity in the games they create, and offer suggestions for how to rethink player identity.


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