Play Make Learn 2025
August 21, 2025, was a full circle moment attending the 2025 Play Make Learn conference in Madison, WI. I realized that evening that the 2012 Games+Learning+Society conference, at the same UW-Madison Memorial Union location as 2025 PML, was the first time I presented my own game design work at an academic games conference.
13 years ago (plus a few weeks), I was a newly minted MFA in Design and Technology graduate from Parsons presenting a poster on my thesis project, Make a Move / Toma el Paso.
The poster (above) even won “Most Shocking Findings” award too – I think the concept of a board game designed for unaccompanied immigrant minors was shocking in and of itself!
Now in 2025, Toma el Paso is getting recognized as a 2025 GEE! Learning Games Award finalist, and I had the chance to talk about the situated meaning of the game as well as its longevity during the PML livestream with Dr. Krista-Lee Malone. Not only has Toma been used in juvenile immigration detention centers, it has been used in college classrooms to talk about the fact that a game like this even exists: because this process and system exist are very real to unaccompanied immigrant minors.
I also presented with RJ Ramey “Beyond Dichotomies: Making a game-based history lesson both playful and serious, cinematic and accessible” on our design and development process for our client partner Full Spectrum Education to design a web-based game, using Twine, that meets their high high bar for accessibility standards. We made our presentation ‘choose your own adventure’ style (very meta, IYKYK), and I am really pleased with how well it went! The audience chose to hear about accessibility first; then transformational game design process; and finally the game concept itself. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that was the intended order of the presentation and/or we are good at improvising based on the selected path.
It was a long but fulfilling day, starting at 4:45am when I woke up and then drove from Chicago to Madison to catch the Mattering Collective (like minds, like lab names) keynote from BIPOC faculty and students sharing stories of microaggressions and misconceptions and racism pursuing education in Wisconsin. Then I attended a highly interactive session on civics and games from the Bill of Rights Institute: I have even more ideas for my 2026 lived civics and games course! Then back-to-back lunch, livestream chat, and our presentation. (Then another session, game demo/poster/awards event before great conversations – and elevated pub food – at I/O arcade and Great Dane Pub.) It was a long and full and very fulfilling first day at PML.
Day 2 included comments from Dr. Jim Gee himself on the future of learning games and closing out the conference on Monona Terrace at the Union with new and old learning game friends!