Jonaya Kemper

Jonaya Kemper is an American game design academic and game writer/designer. Kemper's work includes LARP, tabletop role-playing games, and computer games. Kemper coined the term and developed the theory of "emancipatory bleed."^[1]

Jonaya Kemper
Occupations	Game designer/writer and academic
Employer(s)	University of California, Santa Cruz, Carnegie Mellon University
Known for	LARP theory of emancipatory bleed
Notable work	Thirsty Sword Lesbians co-writer
Awards	Nebula Award, ENNIE Awards

Academic work in games

Kemper developed the theory of emancipatory bleed in live-action games^[2][3][4] as a way of analyzing how players with marginalized identities can achieve political liberation through embodying imaginary characters.^[5][6] Emancipatory bleed includes Kemper's concept of "navigational play." Kim Eggleston for Vox Media summarized navigational play as, "using games to imagine yourself differently, in a way that might feel safer than in your real life."^[7] Kemper also developed guidelines to design games for players with intersectional identities^[8] and an auto-ethnographic process for LARP research and documentation.^[9][10]

In 2025, Kemper became Assistant Professor of Performance, Play & Design and Creative Technologies at UC Santa Cruz.^[11] As Game Design Lead in Carnegie Mellon's computer science department's Human-Computer Interaction Institute,^[12][13] Kemper conducted professional research on human-robot interactions in educational games^[14] and racial and gender biases in the design of children's games.^[15]

Game writing and design

Kemper co-wrote Thirsty Sword Lesbians (Evil Hat Productions), winning a Nebula Award for Best Game Writing^[16][17] and ENNIE Awards for "Best Game" and "Product of the Year."^[18] Kemper wrote a game based on Bram Stoker's Dracula novel called Feeding Lucy in the LARP anthology Honey & Hot Wax (Pelgrane Press).^[19] Kemper wrote Tales from the Corner Coven, a short tabletop role-playing game about bodega cats in Brooklyn, for Simon & Schuster's The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book.^[20] Kelly Knox for Nerdist called Tales from the Corner Coven "bewitching" and said, "We want to play right meow."^[21]

Kemper also wrote the adventure "The Little Mx. Scare-All Pageant" for Visigoths vs. Mall Goths by Lucian Kahn and contributed writing to 7th Sea.^[22]