Rilla Khaled

Concordia University

Dr. Rilla Khaled is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, where she teaches interaction design, serious game design, and programming, and more. She is former director and steering member of the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Research Centre, Canada’s most well-established games research lab, in the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology. Dr. Khaled’s research is focused on the use of interactive technologies to improve the human condition, a career-long passion that has led to diverse outcomes, including designing award-winning serious games, creating speculative prototypes of near-future technologies, developing a framework for game design specifically aimed at reflective outcomes, establishing approaches for capturing and reasoning about game design knowledge, and working with Indigenous communities to use contemporary technologies to imagine new, inclusive futures.

Selected publications:

Khaled, R., Sych, Steven, Bourgault, Samuelle, and Barr, Pippin. NEO//QAB: Creating a World Through Speculative Play. Proceedings of ISEA 2020.
Khaled, R., Lessard, J., and Barr, P. Documenting Trajectories in Design Space: a Methodology for Applied Game Design Research. In the Proceedings of FDG 2018.
Khaled, R. Questions over Answers: Reflective Game Design. Playful Disruption of Digital Media, Springer, 2018.
Khaled, R. Culture and Gamification. In The Gameful World, MIT Press, 2014.

All Sessions by Rilla Khaled

  • 1. Nov. 17, 2021: 11th Clash Of Realities (Part III)

    Summits: Immersive Gaming x Cultural Heritage & Media Education

  • 18:00  - 18:45
    How and what we play says a lot about who we are. Where we play says a lot about who we think we can be. The Skins game-making workshops have been running for the last decade in Canada and Hawai'i. They have a twofold objective: (a) to foster a supportive environment for Indigenous folks who seek to learn game making (b) to firmly claim presence of Indigenous voices and perspectives in game spaces, that provide rich, materialised visions of Indigenous Futures. At the end of these workshops, participants produce a game. But beyond this, what is the work being achieved during – and after – these workshops? And how do we navigate participation when we are not from the communities whom we are seeking to support? I will do a deep dive into two iterations of Skins held during 2017 and 2018 in O'ahu, Hawai'i, resulting in the games He Ao Hou and Wao Kanaka. I will bring you behind the scenes into our workshop, I will unravel some of the knots that turn up in culture to game transmediation, and I will show you the long tail of the workshops that continues extending into today.

  • 3. Nov. 19, 2021: 12th Clash of Realities

    Main Day

  • 16:00  - 17:00
    Within LARP circles, the concept known as "bleed" is about carryover of experience between play and normal life. It is often considered a problem: play that resonates with us too much. Simultaneously, serious and learning game designers run into a related but different problem: limited carryover between play and normal life. This is play that resonates with us too little. In this talk, I will argue for why game and playful designers should embrace bleed as a design tool, and leverage it consciously and conscientiously. Play that resonates appropriately. I will bring it all to life via two large ongoing projects: Speculative Play, which is about the middle space between speculative/critical design and interactive playful media, and the Skins workshops, which take place in the context of the Initiative for Indigenous Futures project. What both these projects have in common is that they require playful, playable translations of speculative futures, and invite the resonation of their design experiences. The last part of this talk will merge into a design activity, where audience members will partake in a short exercise for designing for bleed in light of their lived experiences and realities.




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Rilla Khaled