Uploaded December 2023 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
Meghna Jayanth designs narratives and worlds which explore fantasies and pleasures counter to capitalism-colonialism. Her work includes 80 Days and the upcoming Thirsty Suitors, as well as contributions to Sable, Sunless Sea, Horizon: Zero Dawn, This War of Mine and others. She won an IGF award for Narrative in 2015, a Writer’s Guild award – in the UK and in the US – and has been nominated for several BAFTAs, amongst other awards and accolades. Her writing and speaking work critiques contemporary technopolitics and excavates video games’ potential as sites of radical and liberatory re-imagination, alongside advocating for better labor conditions for industry workers. Her talk will question the political, artistic and cultural role of the video game and designer in this era of deepening polycrisis. In our work and throughout our careers, we will be invited to collude with dominant culture by the structural tendencies of the industry. But some of these invitations can be refused and subverted, by asking candidly “what do we do when we game design?”
This talk was streamed live on Thursday, October 26th, 2023 at twitch.tv/nyugamecenter
Poster art by Molly Mendoza. Find more of their work here: mollymendoza.com
Meghna Jayanth designs narratives and worlds which explore fantasies and pleasures counter to capitalism-colonialism. Her work includes 80 Days and the upcoming Thirsty Suitors, as well as contributions to Sable, Sunless Sea, Horizon: Zero Dawn, This War of Mine and others. She won an IGF award for Narrative in 2015, a Writer’s Guild award – in the UK and in the US – and has been nominated for several BAFTAs, amongst other awards and accolades. Her writing and speaking work critiques contemporary technopolitics and excavates video games’ potential as sites of radical and liberatory re-imagination, alongside advocating for better labor conditions for industry workers. Her talk will question the political, artistic and cultural role of the video game and designer in this era of deepening polycrisis. In our work and throughout our careers, we will be invited to collude with dominant culture by the structural tendencies of the industry. But some of these invitations can be refused and subverted, by asking candidly “what do we do when we game design?”
This talk was streamed live on Thursday, October 26th, 2023 at twitch.tv/nyugamecenter
Poster art by Molly Mendoza. Find more of their work here: mollymendoza.com
