Member of the Month: Ray Kimball
The Member of the Month feature periodically highlights our amazing membership and the things they’re doing. June’s Member of the Month is Ray Kimball, EdD, Founder and CEO of 42 Educational Games Coaching and Design.
What kind of work do you do?
For my business, I serve as an educational games coach for educators, primarily in the higher ed and corporate/nonprofit sectors. I help educators take that first big leap into games-based learning, which can be super scary for people who have never done it before. For roughly what people pay for a conference, I help them find a game that’s a good fit for their learning objectives, make any modifications necessary, and then send them off to do great things! I’ve also worked as a Development Editor, primarily with the Reacting Consortium. In that capacity, I work with game authors who need help getting their game to the next stage of publication, whatever that may be. Finally, I work on my own games. I’m proud to announce that Eyeball to Eyeball: The Cuban Missile Crisis, a parlor LARP that NASAGAns playtested in Toronto in 2022, will be crowdfunding later this month!
Why are you a NASAGA member?
Because I believe in its mission, and because it’s good for business! NASAGA conferences are like nothing else in the world: they are such uniquely playful places where it’s easy to find like-minded individuals and resources. NASAGA’s commitment to growing the next generation of game-based learning pioneers is unmatched elsewhere. I’ve personally seen how the organization commits resources to get new blood in the conference rooms and working on behalf of others. Finally, being a NASAGA conference sponsor for the last two years has been great for my business. It gives me a chance to show off the work that I do and get a sense of how I can best meet customer needs. I’m proud to serve as NASAGA’s Communications Minion, and I encourage other members to look for ways to do meaningful work within the organization.
What’s your favorite NASAGA memory?
Since I have to pick just one, I’ll go with the playthrough of Coyote and Crow during NASAGA 2023 in St. Louis. What an amazing experience! First, getting to watch the GM technique of bringing together total strangers into a group and getting them playing in 10-15 minutes was incredible. Lots of lessons there for my own practice. I had heard about C&C, but never really got the chance to dive into it. I found it to be really well designed, inspiring, and original. It truly challenged me to think about the world through different perspectives and think about a lot of things that I’ve taken for granted. Can’t wait to see what’s available at NASAGA 2024!
NASAGA’s theme for the 2024 Conference is “Fair Play.” What does “Fair Play” look like in your professional practice, and what do you do to promote it?
For me, the main manifestation of “fair play” is making sure that every player has the ability to fully understand the game they are playing and what a potential path to success is for them. Many of the Reacting Games I work on have major and minor roles, and not everyone can win outright. That can make playing one of the underdog roles really daunting and cause people to tap out early. One really cool emerging trend in Reacting Games is multiple victory conditions for each player, so it’s possible for every player to claim some kind of win, even if they can’t get the Big Win. The more we can lay out multiple paths to win for every player, the more likely we are to keep players engaged and make them understand that they truly are involved in “fair play.”
