GDC 2025 Session Viewer
Educators Summit: Cup of Tea: Cozy Design in a Game, Course and Community
Melissa Kagen (Assistant Professor, Worcester Polytechnic Institute)
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Summits Pass - Get your pass now!
Track: Educators
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: All
This session uses examples from three levels of cozy interactive experience design—a game, a course, and a community initiative—to illustrate the alignment between design, process, and community and to develop useful principles for academic game departments looking to infuse their programs with more safety, abundance, and softness. Using the metaphor of a cup of tea, the session explores the following principles: carve a sturdy cup (create a solid container in which spontaneous paidia-style playfulness can occur), someone needs to make the tea (pay attention to who is laboring to make the coziness happen and support them), and drink it together (use collections of tangible objects and rituals of physical presence to reflect and energize the group).
Takeaway
By threading the principles of cozy interactive experience design throughout their educational structure—from game design to course design to community design—attendees can better support creative work, academic experimentation, fun, and collective empowerment.
Intended Audience
This session is for game educators interested in alternative pedagogy, pro-social community-building post-covid, third-order design (designing the experiences in which indirect experiences will be designed), and how to make our games and game programs cozier.