Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or ...
The Critical Research Yielding Playful Technologies (CRYPT) Lab is a critical making-and-breaking collective dedicated to the exploration of experimental game and media art for the projects of trans liberation and design justice. The CRYPT supports digital humanist scholars, artists, and aspiring ludoarsonists in developing their scholarly and creative practices.
Dr. Persephone Blue (PB) Berge is an award-winning media scholar, game designer, self-described ludoarsonist, and an Assistant Professor of Experimental Game Design in amiskwacîwâskahikan at the University of Alberta. An Assistant Professor of Experimental Game Design jointly appointed in the Media and Technology Studies program and Department of Women’s & Gender Studies at The University of Alberta, she researches trans play 🏳️⚧️🎮, tabletop roleplaying games 🌈🎲, toxic technocultures 💀📱, and the so-called “unplayable.” She is also the Co-Director of the Game Development Certificate Program.
Their research falls at the intersection of trans game studies and feminist platform studies and can be found in JCMS, New Media & Society, Game Studies, Games & Culture, and elsewhere. She is the Director of the Discord Academic Research Community as well as the CRYPT Lab.
Adeline K. Piercy is a Digital Humanities graduate student at the University of Alberta and a member of the CRYPT Lab led by Dr. PB Berge and the VITA Lab led by Dr. Sean Gouglas. She also teaches Professional Communications at MacEwan University.
Adeline’s work focuses on queer and feminist issues and explores trauma, neurodivergence, and self-exploration. Their current research challenges patterns of gendered exclusion in videogame culture, from ‘girl game’ movements to game design interventions. Adeline’s published and forthcoming work can be found in DiGRA Conference Proceedings and NiCHE. When not on campus, Adeline is likely scheming the demise of her loyal D&D players, overthinking their farm layout on Stardew Valley, buying books faster than she can read them, or trying to convince their cats that it’s not mealtime yet.
Jerzy Beaumont is an Anglo-Zulu Australian poet and researcher, currently undertaking his MA-MLIS at the University of Alberta.
Jerzy’s poetry and prose works have thus far appeared in FIRST 2017, ANALECTA DIS|CONNECTIONS 2018, Cicerone Journal Issue 1, Australian Poetry Journal 8.2, The Dirty Thirty Anthology Vol.2, BITE Magazine, The Canberra Times, Haig Park Experiments: Heritage Signage, Cordite 93: PEACH, NO NEWS, and more. His spoken word poetry has been performed domestically and internationally, including at the Sydney Opera House, Puro Slam (San Antonio, TX), the Nuyorican Poets Café (NY), Lizard Lounge Poetry Slam (Cambridge, MA), and as far north as Edmonton, Alberta. His debut verse novella Errant Night (Recent Work Press) was released in 2021, featured in Red Room Poetry's Poetry Month, and was favourably reviewed in the Australian Book Review.
Jerzy’s artistic and research interests overlap in exploring the present threats facing libraries, the sanctuary and grace found in liminal spaces and community, as well as the subtle reinforcements of privilege and power in cultural artifacts such as games and literature.
Victoria Cairns is currently a Digital Humanities Graduate student at the University of Alberta. She majored in English and minored in Creative Writing during her undergrad, completing a game development certificate alongside her degree. She combines these fields now to investigate gender and narrative in the context of video games.
She believes that video games reflect the values of people and places back onto the real world, and that the utmost care should be taken when representing anything in games. She is particularly focused on how this manifests in the portrayals of women in games, and has found a startling number of problems that sexualize and minimalize women in the context of a game’s story.
In her spare time, she can be found curled up with a good book and/or a fluffy feline, or deep in the trenches of a survival crafting game.
Abhik Hasnain is a graduate student in the Digital Humanities program at the University of Alberta. Their research looks at emerging game development markets in countries like Bangladesh and asks what frameworks of critical support are needed for their healthy growth. Bangladesh Makes Indie Games is a non-profit initiative founded by Abhik, currently undertaking its first project: an in-depth ethnography of 20+ game developers from Bangladesh and a documentary based on those interviews.
As part of CRYPT, Abhik experiments with alternative and accessible methods of physical game creation, particularly with pen plotters and 3D printers. Under the supervision of Dr. Eric Kaltman, and as part of SHFT, they study the affordances of developing robust RAG pipelines in self-contained research computing systems over large technical archives with highly heterogeneous data formats. Abhik is the primary author of the latest iteration of the Medley Interlisp Primer and an open-access textbook on ChainForge for SSH researchers.
Beyond research, Abhik is a game developer and tool maker focused on Godot. They are actively working on two games: (1) Ether 5, a split-screen co-op interactive fiction experience that recently received the IFTF 2026 Microgrant, and (2) Tong Manager, a game about running a tea stall, or tong, in urban Bangladesh.
Moving forward, Abhik is interested in mobile micro-makerspaces — how they can be sustainably run over the long term and what locally informed frameworks of effective community engagement they can benefit from.
Nick is a Masters student in the Digital Humanities program at the University of Alberta. His work currently focuses on political life and disinformation in the digital world, as well as research-creation and game design; his past research will be included at the upcoming 2026 Canadian Game Studies Association Conference. Outside of his studies Nick is an active basketball player, a student journalist, and is currently on a quest to see just how many books he can fit into a year!
Eleanor (Ellie) Young is a dual-master's student in the Digital Humanities and Library and Information Studies programs at the University of Alberta. Her work focuses on multiplayer game preservation and emulation as a preservation method, as well as computer history and video game history, and she is also a member of the Software History Futures and Technologies lab (SHFT) at U of A. Her published work has appeared in the 2025 Proceedings of the IEEE CCECE, and is forthcoming in the IEEE Canadian Review magazine. In her spare time, Ellie also enjoys being kind-of-okay at video games and pretending to be a medieval wizard.
Sam Graham is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, specializing in the pedagogical use of escape rooms to teach cultural elements. Drawing from various cultural perspectives, her work examines how monstrosity and mythology are adapted and reinterpreted within interactive media. This research culminates in a functional live-action escape room that she has created as part of her project.
Graham is currently conducting research for her dissertation, which includes a content analysis of horror game monsters from different cultural backgrounds. She employs the lens of mytholudics (Ford 60-66), to explore the varying representations and potential categories that each monster may embody. Her work investigates how these mythological and monstrous figures can enrich horror narratives and provide deeper cultural insights for players. She has showcased escape rooms and other game-related projects at university-organized events and has presented her academic work at venues such as the Canadian Game Studies Association. She looks forward to future opportunities to share her work with fellow scholars who share her interests.
SSHRC Insight Development Grant
CRYPTIDS: PB Berge • Dr. Madison Schmalzer • Adeline K. Piercy • Victoria Cairns
Playing Against the Unlivable is a community-driven, trans*disciplinary research-creation project that explores the radical game-making and game-breaking practices of gender diverse media artists and designers. Amid an international wave of legislative and political hostility targeting transgender youth and spaces of play, this project examines how speedrunners, challenge runners, play artists, and other maker-breakers create interactive media for the purposes of storytelling, political activism, and community-building.
In partnership with the Common Ground Lab, Drs. Jared Wesley, Feo Snagovsky, Gillian Harvey, and collaborators from the Department of Political Science at UAlberta.
CRYPTIDS: PB Berge • Nick Czerwonka
TownSquare is a political board game being developed by a transdisciplinary team at UAlberta with the support of the CRYPT Lab. TownSquare introduces politicians, activists, nonprofit workers, and other public-facing public workers to rhetorical pitfalls that commonly occur in political discussions with the public. Players work together to identify and respond to rhetorical pitfalls through a combination of roleplay and party game mechanics.
The CRYPT LAB is the flagship lab of THE STITCH NETWORK (Shaping Technology and Inquiry through Transdisciplinary Critical Humanities), a strategic initiative to establish a six-lab research-creation infrastructure at the University of Alberta. STITCH supports a “thinking through making” approach by integrating media fabrication, production, preservation, exhibition, and ethical reflection within a coordinated ecosystem.
STITCH includes The CRYPT Lab, SHFT Lab (Dr. Eric Kaltman), The EWOK Lab (Dr. Yelena Gluzman), the Feminist Collaboratory (Dr. Nicolette Little), the GRAD Lab (Dr. PB Berge), and the VITA Lab (Dr. Sean Gouglas).
