HarkMorper
Hello! My name is Jeremy and I’m queer, multiracial, Black, and nonbinary. I also have ADHD.
I'm new to game design, but I love it and want to keep doing it. Inspired by some designers I really look up to, my goal is to just make games for the time being. Maybe they'll resonate with people. Maybe they won't. But challenging myself to share my games with the world really helps me find the motivation to focus and to finish things.
Who am I?
Throughout my life I’ve been passionately involved in education, community organizing, prison abolition, and anti-violence work. To pay the bills, I work at a university, where I teach educators and administrators how to create more inclusive learning and working environments, and I teach students about the relationships between gender, race, and society.
But my other love is games. I love playing them, reading them, thinking about them, talking about them, and pulling them apart to see how they work. I’ve even taught courses on using games for social change! I’ve been hacking board games and TTRPGs for as long as I can remember, and within the past year I started trying my hand at more robust game design. I also co-host They’re A Super Geek--an actual play livestream dedicated to highlighting marginalized creators in the TTRPG scene.
How Do I Approach Game Design? What inspires and motivates me?
As a designer, I'm most inspired to create games about the complexities of building community and forming relationships in a society that is designed to isolate those of us with marginalized identities. I hope to explore themes of connection and disconnection, marginalization and resistance, community accountability, restorative justice, and identity formation. Mechanically, I’m inspired by focused game design--games that do one or two things but do them very well. Narratively, I’m a lover of speculative fiction--especially works by marginalized creators and those that ask readers to imagine new ways of being in community--and that definitely shows up in my work. At the same time, I’m a sucker for the tropes in silly 90s video games, emotional teen dramas, superhero stories, and supernatural fiction--and I love drawing on those tropes in my creative works.
Free Community Copies
Important note: fuck capitalism and the many ways our society deprives *some* people from living their fullest lives. All of my games have free community copies available. If you want one but aren’t sure if you can afford to spend the money right now, grab one. If you want one and are a member of any marginalized community, grab one. I know what it’s like to feel too broke to be able to fully participate in my communities, and I never want to contribute to anyone else feeling that way.
