Sidney Icarus
(they/them)
G’day, Hello, Bonjour.
I’m an Australian living in Toronto, Canada.
I have over 15 years of experience designing playful and meaningful interactions across military, healthcare, government, and recreational applications. I’m a full-time digital game designer and operate an applied game consultancy “Wax Wings”. When not interrogating game design, I enjoy spending time with a coffee and my cat, Radar.
LATENT COHORT
(DiGRAA 2025)
LATENT COHORT is a game of Agentic Imagination. Engaging players find themselves activated as an unwitting Sleeper Agent. They must maintain their normal routine in order to avoid the suspicion of pursuing enemy agents.
LATENT COHORT plays with perception and a sense of hyper-awareness of our own behaviour. It reinforces agency while rejecting systemic rewards, narrative reinforcement, and organoleptic structures.
LATENT COHORT was displayed at the 2025 Digital Games Research Association of Australia’s Conference as part of their Experimental Track.
Actions Paths
(DiGRAA 2024)
Action Paths is a functional theory that describes how players make gameplay decisions based on available game-state information and their perceived options.
Action Paths was written as part of a playtest analysis project to understand why self-identified strategy game players struggled with a prototype auto-battler. I have found it a valuable tool in my playtest analysis work to understand better which “path” players are in as they play my games. I have also found great success in using Action Paths as a prospective tool to understand how much I need to inform players in order to generate the play pathway that I desire.
Decaying Orbit is a storytelling card game that received the Australian Independent Role Playing Game Community’s 2023 Game of the Year.
Decaying Orbit invites players to explore the derelict wreck of a failed space station through the eyes of the fragmented artificial intelligence. Stories in Decaying Orbit are often incoherent and difficult to define as true, creating a uniquely persistent play experience.
Decaying Orbit was published through Storybrewers Roleplaying and is available online or in game stores.
Decaying Orbit
(Game of the Year 2023)
Design Theory
I maintain an ongoing blog which dives into game design theory with a focus on player experience (PX) outcomes. I have a, largely, structuralist approach, which seeks to establish causality between the way that games are designed and the experiences we have while playing them.
My first recommendation is a blog on Conspicuous Mechanics, how some mechanics force players to resolve them before play can proceed, while some allow play to pass unchecked. Conspicuous Mechanics create a mandate form of play that helps concretise the fictional void.
Second, I recommend a blog on conceptual probability modeling and how unexpected results can arise from statistically possible (but discounted) outcomes. This blog includes both a description of the core problem, and also explores several solutions.
Third, my post in response to Actual Play luminary Brennan Lee Mulligan in which I use Montola’s invisible rules of roleplaying to unpack the conflict between rules and story for long-time traditional Dungeon Masters, and why they and their players often have different perspectives on how important dice are to our play.