Mattie Brice

Mattie Brice is an independent video game designer, critic, educator, and industry activist. Her games and writing focus on diversity initiatives in the games industry, discussing the perspective of marginalized minority voices to publications like Paste, Kotaku, and The Border House. Her games are freeware and do not require programming to create.

Mattie Brice
Occupation	Video game critic and director
Language	English
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Florida Atlantic University, New York University
Notable works	Mainichi (2012)
Notable awards	Writers Guild of America Video Game Writing Award nomination Official Selection Award for Mainichi in 2013

Career

She graduated from Florida Atlantic University, with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, Creative Writing, Gender and Sexuality Studies and from New York University with a Masters of Arts. Her background is in media, teaching, and social justice advocacy.

Her game, Mainichi, role plays the day-to-day life of a transgender person.^[1][2][3] It was exhibited at XYZ: Alternative Voices in Game Design in Museum of Design Atlanta, the first-ever exhibition that highlights the work of women as game designers and artists.^[4] It was also exhibited at Indiecade 2013.^[5] Her game helps create a notable presence for LGBT+ individuals in video games.^[6] Mattie also consults and speaks at gaming-related conferences like the Game Developers Conference, IndieCade, and the Queerness and Games Conference at the Berkeley Center for New Media. She was a consultant for Spirit AI software.^[7]

In 2013, she was on a panel about diversity in games at IGDA Summit^[8] and GDC.^[9] In 2014, she was appointed as one of a hundred judges at the Independent Games Festival.^[10] In 2017, she was associate director of IndieCade.^[11]

She has taught gaming-related courses at different universities such as New York University^[12] and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.^[13] Brice is currently a principal faculty member at the University of California, Santa Cruz school of Art & Design: Games and Playable Media.^[14]

Works

Games

Title	Year released
Mainichi	2012
DESTROY ALL MEN	2013
Blink	2013
EAT	2013
Mission	2013
empathy machine	2016

Publications and contributions

She is the author of the chapter "Play and Be Real About It: What Games Could Learn From Kink" in the book Queer Game Studies.^[15]

She was an interviewee for the chapter "Radical Play Through Vulnerability" in the book Queer Games Avant-Garde,^[16] and she was an interviewee for a chapter in Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Volume Two.^[17]

Further reading

• Anthropy, Anna (2012). Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. p. 208. ISBN 978-1609803728.
• Brandes Hepler, Jennifer (2017). Women in Game Development - Breaking the Glass Level -Cap. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group. p. 223. ISBN 978-1138947924.
• Ruberg, Bonnie, and Adrienne Shaw (2017). Queer Game Studies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. p. 330. ISBN 978-1517900373.