Month: October 2025

I was incredibly honoured to give the closing keynote at this year’s Games for Change Asia-Pacific Summit, held at ACMI in Melbourne. My talk explored social empathy in game design – and I spoke about how games can help us understand each other’s experiences more deeply, and how design choices can invite compassion, connection, and reflection through inciting Social Empathy.

It was such a joy to share the day with so many wonderful speakers from across the region – I learned so much from the sessions on sustainability, behaviour change, mental health, education and training, and accessibility and representation. The range of ideas and perspectives was inspiring, and it reminded me how much potential games have to create meaningful change in the world.

As part of my keynote, we hosted a live play session of Life (Re)Sounding, turning the whole cinema into a collaborative play experience! Huge thanks to the incredible tech team who made sure everything ran smoothly — and a special shout out to the XBox controller extender dongle, which somehow worked for almost the entire length of the cinema!

Thank you so much to the organisers, and especially to Daniel Teitelbaum and Ceri Hutton, for all their hard work bringing the best conference of the year to life.

I can’t wait for next year’s summit! 💖