Auckland Makes Games

Back to back Level Ups! This month we are excited to host Laetitia (Tish) Laubscher who will talk about designing games for people in prison. We won't have formal playtesting this month as we work out a better format for it going forward, but feel free to bring along devices if you want to show your work in progress after the event.

Designing a Game for Prisons
What happens when you set out to design a game not for gamers, but for people living in one of the hardest-to-reach environments of all — prison? This talk explores the unexpected journey of creating a stress management training game for prisons — one where the controller isn’t a joystick, but your heart rate.

Along the way, Laetitia shares hard-won lessons in empathy, discovery, and co-creation. Expect an honest account of how a game went from idea to product, complete with insights and surprising trivia.

About Laetitia (Tish) Laubscher
Laetitia (Tish) Laubscher is the CEO of Manana Interactive, a company building gamified training tools for resilience. Her varied, international career has spanned television, digital media and the gaming sector for the likes of the United Nations, Patrick Gower, VICE and a local AI game studio. She's obsessed with and has an insatiably curiosity about humans and how to use media to create transformative experiences for the good of humanity. The one game she will repeatedly insist everyone should play is This War of Mine.

Schedule

• 6:00PM; Doors open
• 6:30PM; Designing a Game for Prisons
• 7:30PM; Talk finishes
• 8:30PM; Event finishes

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