Welcome to Beles Games! This is a personal website designed as part of my graduate coursework at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Currently, I am a PhD Candidate in the department of Journalism and Media Studies at the School of Communication and Information, and I was previously the Head of Fact Checking at TED Conferences. I previously published work under the name Joseph Isaac, but now publish professionally as Joseph A. Teweldemedhin.

While this website’s games are partially inspired by a commitment to translate specialized research into novel play experiences, they are also committed to the adoption of games as a critical research methodology, from which the records of our archives, oral history transcripts, and material objects can be reimagined according to the contexts of what they leave out. Asking what else there might be, and who we may have overlooked, these games are meant to offer speculative visions committed to the figures of their respective accounts, re/discovering those avenues of life, hope, and justice un/mentioned in the records of our knowledge production systems.

If you’d like to learn more, or just reach out and say hi, my email address is: joseph [period] isaac [at] rutgers [period] edu

Why Games?

Games offer unique sites through which we can explore the different ways that reality operates around us (or rather, how we think such reality comes to operate). As the very structure of a game involves a set of rules that rewrite our norms and expectations, its format provides us with a space through which we may critically engage with the relations and consequences of power at-work. But games can also support our deep introspection, offering as much a commentary on ourselves as the power relations we might seek to confront. In such cases, they force us to compare reality as we understand it with the possibilities (future or otherwise) of its creative re-design, ultimately allowing us to appreciate and un/make those rules, games, and systems which already exist around us.

However, this website’s preferred choice of tabletop games rather than digital or video is far more personal. While most focus on games research bends towards the computational, my research remains firmly committed to the analog precisely because of its grounding in material practice. On the one hand, this material focus allows my games to be inclusive of communities with less-than-constant digital access and resources. But it is also supportive of those novel mechanics which allow its featured systems to be critically critiqued, demanding less of that specialized knowledge needed to code its rules and so far more supportive of those changes suggested by each game’s respective playtesters.