Game design — teaching — consulting
Thom Király
I design games, teach people to play with systems, and help organisations understand what games are actually good for. Based in Malmö, Sweden. Working online and on site.
Get in touch →Services
I work with schools, cultural institutions, artists, and publishers who need someone who thinks about games as playful systems, not just software.
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01
Game design consulting — I can make a game!
Design, critique, and iteration support for analog games, digital games, and hybrid/artistic formats. I'm just as comfortable designing a game from scratch as I am stepping into a collaborative process to help bring a project to the next stage of development.
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02
Teaching & workshops — You can make a game!
Courses and workshops on game design fundamentals: iteration, collaboration, prototyping, UX design, playtesting, iteration, and narrative design. For students of all ages, as well as educators, artists, and hobbyists.
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03
Curriculum development
Building and structuring game design programmes and course material, for art schools, folk high schools, vocational programs and other educational settings.
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04
Cultural & artistic projects
Design and development for games made as cultural objects and artistic tools — not only as commercial products. Dance, theater, conceptual art, durational work, performance.
Selected work
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2026
When We Were Kings — World Cup expansion
Designed the game rules for the 2026 World Cup expansion of this soccer trivia board game, published by Mondial, Stockholm.
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Ongoing
Malmö Kulturskola — digital game design
Teaching digital game design to children aged roughly 10–14, primarily online, guiding groups from first prototypes toward more structured tools.
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Ongoing
Materialist Game Labs
A collective examining games, politics, and culture through left-wing political theory. We treat games as social machines, cultural objects, and tools for political imagination.
My podcast Märklighetstroget is part of the MGL feed. -
2018-2024
Folkhögskolan Skurup och Fridhem i Malmö
Ran a one-year, generalist, analog-first game design programme for beginners: fundamentals, UX design, playtesting, narrative, Twine, Scratch, prototyping and playtesting.
About
I'm a game designer and educator based in Malmö, Sweden. My work sits across game design practice and game design education — and, increasingly, in the space where art, politics, and game design overlap.
I don't come from a programming background, and I don't teach or design from inside a single engine. My approach is deliberately generalist: I care about games as systems people can learn to read, shape, and play with(in), whether that's on paper, in Scratch, in Twine, or in a finished commercial product.
I'm interested in games beyond their role as commercial entertainment. They matter as creative outlets, as systems to play with, cultural objects, social practices, and tools for learning and political imagination. That's the thread connecting my game design class for kids, the games I make, the folk high school programme I ran, and the collective for and political theory I'm part of: all of it is, in the end, teaching people to notice how games work, what systems we are part of, and how we can play our way to something different.
Contact
If you're thinking about a game design project, a teaching engagement, or something that doesn't fit neatly into either, get in touch.
hello@thomkiraly.comMalmö, Sweden