Kara Stone is an artist and scholar making work about psychosocial disability, sexuality, and the environment. She works in different media but often in interactive art and experimental videogames. Her artwork has been featured in The Atlantic, Wired, and VICE, and exhibited at Athens Digital Art Festival in Greece, Vector Game Art Festival in Toronto, Canada and a solo exhibition at Babycastles in New York City, USA. She is a member of the Different Games Collective, a horizontal organization dedicated to expanding the culture and industry of games.
She holds a BFA in Film Production and Master’s degree in Communication and Culture from York University, and a Ph.D in Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Feminist Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is currently working on Solar Server, a solar-powered website hosting videogames about the climate crisis. Visit www.solarserver.games for more information.
Professional Activity
Selected Publications and Recorded Talks
Selected Publications
Stone, Kara. “Reparative Game Creation: Disability in Design,” Design Issues. Winter 2023 (39:1). Editors Elizabeth LaPensée and Jim Malazita
“Self Care as a Game: Psychosocial Disability and Apps that Heal.” Diseases in Digital Games: Theories, Topics, Analyses. Edited by Arno Görgen and Stefan H. Simond. Transcipt + Medical Humanities. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5328-1/krankheit-in-digitalen-spielen/?number=978-3-8394-5328-5
Marcotte, Jess and Kara Stone. “Questions on Queer Game Design.” Widerscreen. Vol. 1 No. 2, 2019. http://widerscreen.fi/numerot/2019-1-2/
Stone, Kara. “What Can Play: The Potential of Non-Human Players”. Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Study and Thought. Vol 7 No 1 (2019): Muddied Waters: Decomposing the Anthropocene. https://pivot.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/pivot/article/view/40291
“Time and Reparative Game Design.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research. Vol 18, 3. December 2018. http://gamestudies.org/1803/articles/stone
Selected Recorded Invited Talks:
A MAZE. International Games and Playful Media Festival. “Healing Journeys + The Environment in UnearthU.” 2022 https://youtu.be/E8VYqYzv1N8
Video Game Art Gallery. “Fireside with Kara Stone.” 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHBtiR0W76o
Game Developers Conference. “Mental Illness and Videogames.” 2019 https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025698/Indie
Centre[3] Function Keys. “Affective Play.” 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HedFz5UHlQ