Emilia Lazer-Walker
Emilia is a Toronto-based artist and engineer. She currently works at Microsoft, supporting indie game dev communities through open-source tools, educational materials, and fostering inclusive spaces. As a game designer, most of her work focuses on using non-traditional interfaces to reframe everyday objects and spaces as playful experiences, and to inspire people to become self-motivated learners. She’s built projects as far-flung as a site-specific generative poetry walk, a game played on 19th century telegraph hardware, and a commercial Alexa-enabled board game. As an event organizer, she runs playful professional events such as the Roguelike Celebration conference, the alt.ctrl.PARTY experimental hardware party, and various iterations of the QueerJS meetup worldwide. She has also spent time in academic game design research environments such as the MIT Media Lab’s Playful Systems group.
