Jonaya Kemper is an American game design academic and game writer/designer. Kemper's work includes LARP, tabletop role-playing games, and computer games. Kemper coined the term and developed the theory of "emancipatory bleed."Kemper, Jonaya (2018). “Playing to Create Ourselves: Exploring Larp and Visual Autoethnographic Practice as a Tool of Self Liberation for Marginalized Identities.” Master’s Thesis. New York University.
Academic work in games
Kemper developed the theory of emancipatory bleed in live-action gamesKemper, Jonaya. (2017): "The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity Documentation." NordicLarp.org June 21, 2017. Accessed April 9, 2021.Kemper, Jonaya. (2020): Wyrding the Self. In Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, & Mia Makkonen (eds.). What Do We Do When We Play? Helsinki; Solmukohta 2020. Accessed April 9, 2021. as a way of analyzing how players with marginalized identities can achieve political liberation through embodying imaginary characters. Emancipatory bleed includes Kemper's concept of "navigational play." Kim Eggleston for Vox Media summarized navigational play as, "using games to imagine yourself differently, in a way that might feel safer than in your real life." Kemper also developed guidelines to design games for players with intersectional identities and an auto-ethnographic process for LARP research and documentation.Kemper, Jonaya. 2018. “More Than a Seat at the Feasting Table.” Nordic Larp. https://nordiclarp.org/ 2018/02/07/more-than-a-seat-at-the-feasting-table/
In 2025, Kemper became assistant professor of Performance, Play & Design and Creative Technologies at UC Santa Cruz. As Game Design Lead in Carnegie Mellon's computer science department's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Kemper conducted professional research on human-robot interactions in educational games and racial and gender biases in the design of children's games.
Game writing and design
Kemper co-wrote Thirsty Sword Lesbians (Evil Hat Productions), winning a Nebula Award for Best Game Writing and ENNIE Awards for "Best Game" and "Product of the Year." Kemper wrote a game based on Bram Stoker's Dracula novel called Feeding Lucy in the LARP anthology Honey & Hot Wax (Pelgrane Press). Kemper wrote Tales from the Corner Coven, a short tabletop role-playing game about bodega cats in Brooklyn, for Simon & Schuster's The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book. Kelly Knox for Nerdist called Tales from the Corner Coven "bewitching" and said, "We want to play right meow."
Kemper also wrote the adventure "The Little Mx. Scare-All Pageant" for Visigoths vs. Mall Goths by Lucian Kahn and contributed writing to 7th Sea.Black Game Studies: An Introduction to the Games, Game Makers and Scholarship of the African Diaspora. Edited by Lindsay Grace. Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press, 2021. pp. 48
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