Spencer Everhart

Spencer Everhart is a game designer and academic based in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. He holds a BFA in Game Design from the Cleveland Institute of Art and is currently working toward an MFA in Visual Communication Design at Kent State University. A jack of all trades, his interests lie in understanding the relationship between games and their players and how to create deeply meaningful experiences that players bring with them after the game ends. He specializes in user experience, accessibility, and rapid game prototyping.

https://sceverhart.wixsite.com/portfolio

GDEX 2025 Session: Performing Play: Player-Centered Design | When working on a game, problems inevitably arise. Sometimes, these are technical issues, glitches resulting from code that doesn't behave how we'd hoped. But what about when there are no issues and the game still isn't...quite right? Wouldn't it be nice if we could ask the game what needed to be done, why it didn't feel right? In this talk, we argue that you can: the player isn't merely consuming the game, they are a *part* of it. Drawing from performance studies, we explore how we co-create our games with our players, and how a change in perspective might unlock new and better ways of designing.