Every game is a set of decisions — about who holds power, whose story gets told, and what values get built into the rules. These decisions are never neutral, and increasingly, they matter.

In this keynote, professor, researcher, and designer Dr. Jeffrey T.K.V. Koh traces how power operates across three dimensions of game design: mechanics, narrative, and culture, drawing on examples from tabletop and video games to argue that the rules of a game are always a political act, and that the cultural contexts designers bring to their work are not incidental but intentional.

This is a rallying call for a new generation of designers to treat game design not merely as entertainment, but as an act of authorship: a way to practice, through play, the world they want to inhabit.