The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry
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Overview:
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In this lively session, game designer Jennifer Estaris explores how games can make disagreement playful, safe, and unexpectedly joyful through a dysfunctional dinner-table game. Drawing on the 2025 Citizens' Assembly Game Jam and the continued development of VoxPop, a daily political puzzle disguised as a family debate, the talk shares practical techniques for designing structured friction, role-based empathy, and comedic realism.nnThe session culminates in a live, in-room Dinner Table Democracy encounter, where audience volunteers embody exaggerated archetypes, from the Sensible Mum to the Chaos Cousin, and attempt to solve escalating prompts before facing the ultimate final boss: Grandma. Part talk, part social experiment, part dinner-theatre chaos, this session offers designers new tools for building playful systems that hold conflict, humor, and empathy in the same space.
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