Open World Map: Digital Sovereignty for Game Creators
Join us for an inspiring day of discussion, demos, and workshops about open source tools and open protocols. **Session timing will be announced closer to the date and registrants will be emailed.**
Enshittified platforms and proprietary tools are not only making the world worse, but they make it harder for game creators to connect with an audience. But as tech-savvy systems thinkers, game creators are uniquely positioned to push back in a number of ways.
Tired of feeling powerless when your game dev tools change their terms of service or increase their monthly fees? Matt Hammill (Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime) was, so he took the plunge into open source alternatives: Godot, Krita, Blender, and more. He'll give a tour of his workspace and share the pain points and keyboard shortcuts he learned along the way.
Have you bounced off the indie social media alternative, or never even tried it? Rob Gehl, author of Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media (Oxford Press), will give us an insider tour and teach us hands-on tips and tricks to make the non-algorithmic and non-extractive option work for you and your game creation practice.
What if your D&D character could login to a video game? What if they could login to many games, and carry your escapades through many worlds? Join the notorious Cousin Vagabond on a quest that transforms your Bluesky account into a passport for adventure! Along the way you'll learn how the AT Protocol is expanding our capacities as game designers, liberating our data as players, and unlocking new ways to craft collaborative worlds beyond the social web.
Christine Lemmer-Webber and David Thompson have a long history of developing open source technology and decentralized (social) networking protocols such as ActivityPub. But how to explain such tech, how to make sure it actually works, and how to keep it all fun? Spritely's team talks about their use of game jam demo-driven-development to build an internet for social good!
Disgusted by Google's complicity with Trump, TGW co-organizer Jim Munroe kicked his 15 year habit in a month. He will be sharing the self-hosted alternatives for collaborative docs, safer email and calendar hosting options, and even an open source Android OS for his phone! Learn about community-run technocritical projects like Yunohost that makes DIY self-hosting much easier for the moderately technically able, and the power of asking for help in welcoming forums.
Part of https://torontogamesweek.com 2026!