Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee — Irish Game Designer & Narrative Systems Designer

I met Emma-Jane in Bali outside a little bar where everyone was supposed to be talking about music, but she had somehow turned the whole table into a game design argument. There were scooters going past, someone was trying to order another round, and she was explaining how a night market could work like a dialogue tree if the prices changed according to rumour. Not money. Rumour. That was very her.

She has this thing where she looks like she is just out, laughing, half-listening, being social, and then suddenly you realise she has been collecting mechanics the whole time. A woman arguing with a fruit seller becomes a bargaining system. A drunk tourist losing his sandals becomes a quest condition. A shrine with the wrong offering becomes an entire level. She does not separate life and games very much. The street is research. The party is research. The weird conversation at two in the morning is absolutely research.

What I remember most is how intense she gets when she talks about games, but not in a boring industry way. She is not trying to sound clever. She talks about games like they are alive and misbehaving. She cares about rules, but mostly the rules people pretend not to have: family rules, village rules, girl rules, ghost rules, the rules of who gets believed and who has to apologise first.

I have seen her leave a perfectly good night out because she suddenly needed to write down a mechanic. I have also seen her come back an hour later with a whole prototype structure in her notes app and absolutely no explanation for where she had been. That is Emma-Jane. Very fun, very chaotic, very serious when it matters.