Aric McBay

Biography 

Aric McBay is an award-winning impact game developer, author, and a founder of Polyvale Studios.

Aric (he/they) has written eleven books, including the novel Inversion, which Publishers Weekly called “a masterful world-building feat” (starred review). His non-fiction includes Movements That Win and Full Spectrum Resistance, which Frances Fox Piven called “a remarkable book that will forever change the way you understand political resistance.”

Aric has also worked as a newspaper columnist, a journalist, a paramedic, a firefighter, an organic farmer, and a community organizer. 

As a game developer, he has received a number of global awards. His game Maybe We Saved the World was Grand Prize winner of Just Play: A game jam for climate futures, and his game Diem was Grand Prize winner of the Citizens, Assemble! Competition on participatory democracy. He is the writer and narrative designer of The Light Within, an award-winning game about mental health from Pomsky Games (and winner of Unity for Humanity 2024 as well as a Serious Play Award).

Aric recently undertook a residency on journalistic games at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. He is the co-chair of the International Game Developers Association’s Climate Special Interest Group.

Aric is the chief programmer, writer, and designer at Polyvale Studios. Polyvale is currently focused on Dark Money, a game about international money laundering inspired by the reporting of (and in collaboration with) a global organization of investigative journalists: the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

Selected Works

• Germination (2027, AK Press / Black Dawn)
• Recursion (2026, AK Press / Black Dawn)
• Movements That Win (2026, Seven Stories Press)
• “Opportunities for impact games in social movements and campaigns” with Dr. eileen mary holowka, a chapter in The Game Needs to Change: Towards Sustainable Game Design (2025, CRC Press, edited by Patrick Prax, Clayton Whittle, Trevin York)
• Inversion (2023, AK Press / Black Dawn)
• “What great games and powerful social movements have in common” (2023, Anticiplay, Utrecht University)
• Kraken Whispers: An interactive text adventure (2022)
• Kraken Calling (2022, Seven Stories Press)
• Direct Action Works (2020, with Pamela Cross)
• Full Spectrum Resistance, vols 1 & 2 (2019, Seven Stories Press)

Research Interests

I'm particularly interested in the overlap of digital games and positive social impact, and the ways in which games can both prefigure and acceleration societal transformation. 

As an alumnus of the Baby Ghosts Peer Accelerator, I'm also interested in innovative studio structures, such as worker-owned game studios and co-ops.

Genres and Forms

• Novels
• Long-Form Non-Fiction
• Digital Games
• Games for Change
• Interactive Fiction
• Speculative Fiction
• Social Movements (History, Theory, Practice)