Three projects, one thread: taking players seriously, whether that means grounding a puzzle mechanic in clinical evidence or treating community complaint as a text worth reading closely.
Undergraduate dissertation · Oct 2025 – Jun 2026
Framing Fairness
Player Discourse and Microtransaction Models in Live Service PC Games
How do player communities decide that a monetisation model is fair or exploitative? Rather than relying on survey self-report, I read the communities themselves: a Critical Discourse Analysis of Steam reviews, Reddit threads and forum discussion across three structurally distinct live-service economies (Diablo IV, Destiny 2, and Counter-Strike), coded against a purpose-built codebook. The study found that fairness is a discursive construct rather than a property of the monetisation system, that how a decision is communicated is judged as much as the decision itself, and that community memory imposes a longitudinal accountability the discrete-purchase era never faced. Defended in viva, June 2026.
Winner · Best BA Dissertation in Games Design
Final-year design project · Unity 3D · Oct 2025 – May 2026
Deus Ex Machina
A tactical word-puzzle adventure, designed as a serious game for cognitive health
In an Aetherpunk world where language itself is failing, a retired professor of classical languages is recruited to crack the cipher, and discovers his experience matters because of his age, not despite it. The design premise: words function as movement rather than scoring. Word length determines how far you travel across a tactical grid, so vocabulary retrieval, pattern recognition and route planning are exercised in a single decision. The niche is narrative: existing serious games for older adults are transactional drills with no story, and Deus Ex Machina instead gives its players an overarching plot to invest in, the kind of narrative pull games for younger audiences take for granted. Designed for adults over sixty at risk of mild cognitive impairment, with every mechanic traced to published evidence, and accessibility treated as a founding constraint rather than a retrofit. Delivered as a research-grounded design document, a storyboard, and a playable Unity prototype.
3
Phases in the daily loop
BFA degree project · Linnaeus University · 2022 – 2023
The COPCube
A campaign to make COP climate conferences virtual
My degree project for the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Design at Linnaeus University, Sweden: a design intervention lobbying policymakers to make COP conferences virtual through holographic conferencing, arguing that the world's climate summit should practise what it negotiates. Published in DiVA, the Swedish national research archive. It was my first sustained study of how design shapes participation in large systems, and the beginning of the interest in systems and their audiences that now runs through my games work.