FDG’2026 KEYNOTES AND MASTER CLASSES
KEYNOTES
Valentina Nisi: Who’s Playing? Making kin through Game Design
What if games enabled us to play and make kin with other species?
This keynote challenges the foundational assumption of human player-centered design by asking: what happens when we treat nonhuman species, ecosystems, oceans, and emergent systems – not as backdrop, but as co-players, co-authors, family, kin?
This talk proposes a posthuman turn in game design: one that distributes agency, cultivates interspecies attunement, and reframes play as a method of entangled becoming. The talk builds on examples from a recently funded Horizon Europe project, Locative Games for Cultural Heritage and the Bauhaus of the Seas Sail.
From Biotopia, a transmedia journey where non-humans become protagonists – where species are characters and ecosystems are plot, the story does not belong to the player alone; to Echo of the Abyss, a Virtual Reality experience that uses animal guides and immersive environments to cultivate a sense of kinship towards marine life; these approaches offers design strategies aimed at fostering human and more-than-human relations, through caring and mindflul relational aesthetics.
Together, these projects reveal an emerging design space at the intersection of posthumanism and game design. Drawing on concepts of “making kin” and “companion species,” the talk synthesizes three generative design principles: distributing agency across nonhuman actants; designing for attunement rather than mastery; and building games where winning means becoming entangled, not dominant.
This is not the funeral for the end of the human player. It is an optimistic manifesto for what games can make us feel, know, and become – when we design a world that is already playing back.
Valentina Nisi is Professor of Design Thinking at Tecnico, Lisbon University, Portugal, affiliated with the Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (USA). Valentina is a founding member and Vice President of the Interactive Technologies Institute. From Fine Arts to Screenwriting, Interactive Digital Storytelling and Design thinking, Valentina’s interdisciplinary approaches combine Research-through-Design with feminist post-humanistic concerns. She reimagines human-centric knowledge by challenging traditional boundaries between human, animal, nature, and technology, through Storytelling and Gaming. Her funded research focuses on the participation of marginalised groups and unheard voices in the celebration and preservation of various tangible and intangible heritage forms. Her recent work forwarding relational natureculture heritage, was supported through the coordination of the EU funded Locative Games for Cultural Heritage project.
Tim Garbos: What the Studio? How to run a Studio and Generate a 1000 new Ideas
Abstract follows
Tim Garbos: I build video games, creative teams, and IPs… but mostly, I (try to) build things that make people laugh. As Creative Director & Co-Founder at Triband, I’ve spent the past decade designing and directing comedy-driven games – most notably the WHAT THE series – while also handling everything else that comes with being a co-founder a game studio (including waaay too many meetings). Triband started as a small, weird ambitious idea. Just like our games. Today, it’s a comedy games studio with multiple teams working on both new games and live games, all with the same goal: making people laugh through gameplay. Along the way, we’ve built a recognizable game series and IP, grown the studio, and shaped a structure that supports both creative freedom and sustainable development. I love subverting expectations, experimenting with game design, and figuring out new ways to make gameplay that lasts. My focus is mostly on creative leadership and strategic decisions – helping teams explore and refine ideas into something worth playing (and replaying).
Miguel Sicart: Playing in their world – play design in an agentic world
We are living in an agentic world. Perhaps the most impactful development in generative AI has been the creation of agentic systems that autonomously relate to each other and run operations without much human intervention. The capacities of generative AI systems are making true some of the dreams and nightmares of science fiction: a world in which autonomous artificial agents take decisions about people without people. Play and games provide a unique perspective to engage with this reality. In this talk I will reflect on how making playable media with and for AI agents can be a critical instrument to reflect and engage with this brave new world.
Miguel Sicart is a Professor of Digital Play at the IT University of Copenhagen, where he is the head of the Center for Digital Play. He has written about play, games, philosophy and design. Among his books are Play Matters (2014), Playing Software (2023), and Jugar en el fin de un mundo (2026).
MASTER CLASSES
Designerand Creative mostly interested in new applications of science and psychology in the field of interactive experiences. Focused on issues of creativity and design processes, but also, by leveraging a background as an actor and journalist, developed skills as a trainer and a communicator, mostly about Game Design but also about games and digital interaction as a medium and human activity.
Alexis Jolis Desautels: The Rational Concept Process
Game Design is often mistakenly seen as the “realm of ideas,” where having the right idea is treated as the Grail, and sometimes even a guarantee of a great game. In practice, design is something else entirely. Whether you are designing a game or a toothbrush, the work is about finding the right solution within a complex set of constraints. Game Design has also long occupied an uncertain place within development: the youngest discipline, with fewer formalized methods than its peers, often leaving designers to rely primarily on instinct…valuable, but difficult to communicate, repeat, or scale!
The Rational Conception Process (R.C.P.) is both a mindset and a toolset. Drawing on key findings from multiple disciplines, it equips designers with conceptual frameworks and concrete deliverables that sharpen intuition into a more rigorous design practice, one that remains creative and inspired while becoming more technical, communicable, and grounded.
This full-day masterclass offers an overview of the broader R.C.P. framework, with a particular focus on Rational Game Design: a subset of tools that explores the atomic structure of gameplay itself. Participants will gain actionable ways to understand player behavior, map design decisions to player experience, and work with greater precision and intentionality.
Graham McAllister is an organisational psychologist specialising in game vision and team alignment. His work explores the mental models of game creators – how teams think about, communicate, and maintain shared vision throughout game development. He is the creator of Vision4D and author of the upcoming book The Psychology of Game Vision.
Graham McAllister: Vision4D: The Psychology of Game Vision
Game vision is one of the most important, yet least understood, parts of game development. Teams often claim they “have a vision,” but that does not mean that the vision is accurate or that it is interpreted the same across all team members. This lack of a shared vision leads to feature creep, conflicting priorities, and unclear player experience goals. So why is maintaining a coherent vision so difficult in practice?
Based on the upcoming book The Psychology of Game Vision, this workshop combines rigorous research with practical tools that can be applied directly to your own projects. Participants will explore the psychology of game vision – the mental models developers use to think about games, and how these models lead to communication breakdowns, misalignment, and flawed design decisions across teams.
The workshop introduces Vision4D, a new lens for defining and communicating game vision. Vision4D proposes that game vision must be understood across four distinct dimensions in order to create a complete, accurate, and shared vision across different disciplines. The goal is not simply to ‘have’ a vision, but to ensure that the vision is both accurate – capturing the intended experience without ambiguity, and shared – it is interpreted consistently across the team.
Through discussion and practical exercises, this workshop aims to change how participants think about and communicate game vision. Attendees will leave with practical tools for creating game visions that are both accurate and shared across development teams.
Erwin Kho (Rotterdam, NL, 1980) studied visual communication at ArtEZ Enschede and has worked as a graphic designer and freelance illustrator for two decades. In 2017 he joined Danish indie studio Geometric Interactive as the art lead and art director for their debut title, COCOON, which was released in 2023 to critical acclaim. The game’s minimalist biomechanical sci-fi designs earned widespread praise and won Best Visuals at the 2024 Spilprisen Awards.
Erwin Kho: From Artist to Art Director – Thematic Development for Indie Game Visuals
Join Erwin Kho, Art Director of COCOON (Geometric Interactive), for a hands-on masterclass designed to help videogame artists level up their art direction skills by sharpening their conceptual thinking and developing novel, out-of-the-box ideas. Through case studies, deconstructing and expanding themes, and inspired by art and design disciplines outside of videogames, participants will push their ideas beyond genre conventions and into meaningful visual experiences.
This one-day, hands-on workshop is designed for videogame artists working in small indie studios or as solo creators who want to strengthen their conceptual and thematic thinking to take on art direction roles. If you want to refine and challenge your ideas, and push your designs to go beyond genre conventions, this one is for you.
What You’ll Do
You will learn to challenge, break, and rebuild your ideas through:
- Learning from the greats: Study disciplines beyond game design, for example: fashion, photography, tv-show set design, architecture. What can we take from other brilliant minds?
- Deconstructing & expanding themes: Learn how to dig deeper into your concepts. Case study: How COCOON’s “worlds-within-worlds” concept shaped the art into a coherent and novel visual language. Push your ideas further with unexpected combinations.
- From Theme to Visual Seed: Sketch your own visual seeds in a rapid, iterative sprint.