We are delighted to announce the scholars selected for the third round of the DiGRA Rising Star Spotlight. This round continues to celebrate emerging researchers whose work contributes to the richness and diversity of game studies.
Greg Loring-Albright – ECR/PP Track
Rising Star Spotlight
Greg Loring-Albright, PhD (he/him) is a scholar and game designer interested in the power of analog games to “model and critique systems” (as Amabel Holland aptly put it). His designs include Bloc by Bloc: Uprising (Outlandish Games, 2022, with T.L. Simons), about urban social insurrections and Keep the Faith (Central Michigan University Press, 2026), about religious beliefs and practices and how they evolve at greater-than-human timescales.
His research interests include analog games as media, games and simulations, and fan studies. He is interested in the political potentials and limitations of analog game forms. He teaches and researches in the Game Design program at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Harrisburg, PA, USA.
Greg’s works-in-progress include a book about how to design games about political topics, a role-playing game about Hobbits (in spirit if not in name), an open strategy game about a mayoral succession crisis, and his first-ever digital game. He hopes to find fellow games weirdos working across boundary lines at DiGRA.
Jailyn Zabala – Student Track
Rising Star Spotlight
Jailyn is a Dominican second-generation American who understands that joy and self-exploration are a luxury that not everyone can afford. Jailyn studied at Carnegie Mellon University as an undergraduate and graduated with a degree in Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction in 2022. There they discovered a deep passion for game research and human computer interaction, working on several projects researching race and games.
Currently Jailyn is a PhD candidate at Northeastern University in the Interdisciplinary Media and Design program. In those 4 years, Jailyn has published and presented peer-reviewed work including: an awarding winning article about queer TTRPG design (FDG 2024), an article interviewing queer TTRPG players about identity exploration (DIGRA 2025) and a paper exploring culturally relevant pedagogy, ecological justice and game design (CHI 2026). Throughout this work Jailyn aims to understand how games (especially analog, community-driven games) can serve marginalized communities not just as entertainment but as tools for self-determination. In doing this work, they have interacted with many different communities, presenting and running workshops at QGCon and Ds4si.
Their ongoing dissertation research centers around the power of TTRPGs as a tool for queer people to explore their identities. Their work is grounded in qualitative methods; including interviews, content analysis and practice-based design research. As a core part of their dissertation, they aim to design a TTRPG which translates their research findings into a playable experience centered around identity exploration. This work is grounded in the voices of queer community members and queer TTRPG developers, and Jailyn hopes to continue to work with academics, game designers and queer TTRPG players to highlight how playing and making games can help us flourish and resist.