jeeyonshim
What do I make?
I'm Jeeyon Shim, a naturalist educator and game designer based in the Bay Area. I write emotional, resonant games that are designed to guide players to (re)connect with the natural world.
What are people saying about my work?
"Walking under trees, tending soil, or relaxing into warm water, Jeeyon's work invites you to become aware of your own emotional and physical world. She writes with brevity and transparency, never trying to bury or obscure her metaphors; I'm disarmed by the earnesty and grace in this collection of games. I'd recommend her work to anyone who is willing to be vulnerable, with themselves and perhaps a friend."
— Avery Alder, designer of Monsterhearts and The Quiet Year
Games connect us. Sometimes this connection is to fellow players, and sometimes to new stories we get to experience for a few precious moments. But Jeeyon's games do more. Introspective, therapeutic, and physical, they focus on connecting us to the natural world, our bodies, and our inner thoughts. They're deeply personal and the connections they form have a permanence no other games do. In doing so, they're helping to define a brand new wave of game design that we're just beginning to experience.
— Hakan Seyalioglu, co-founder of Thorny Games and designer of Sign and Dialect
"Jeeyon Shim is making small, intense games that reflect her lived experience in beautiful ways. Her games help connect players - to the land around them, to their senses, to their most loyal companions, to themselves. I appreciate her work as much for its precision as its beauty. Jeeyon brings both a unique voice and an implicit challenge to form and content that I find delightful and exciting."
— Jason Morningstar, designer of Fiasco! and founder of Bully Pulpit Games
"Jeeyon’s games represent the absolute forefront of play as healing, as grieving, as survival. Reading her texts sometimes scares me. She is ready to show you a full and beautiful present reality, but only if you are willing to bring your whole self to the experience."
— Alex Roberts, designer of Star Crossed and For The Queen
"Jeeyon’s games do something brilliantly unexpected in the craft in which they exist - whereas we are used to being surveyors of fantastic worlds and viewers of their mystery, Jeeyon invites us to be a part of the world. Often, the space we explore in these games is our own - replacing fantasy adventure with intimate and often intense reflection on the real around us and our place in it. We are invited, encouraged and sometimes pushed gently into a place where roleplaying games so rarely take us."
— Adam Koebel, co-designer of Dungeon World
"It would be difficult to discuss the current landscape of larp in the United States without also discussing the work, influence and indeed the personality of Jeeyon Shim, but why would you want to? As a naturalist educator, her artful investigations into our forgotten relationship with nature are designed such that players are at once skillfully guided into the heart of the subject, but gently left at the precipice of discovery, begging us to ascribe our own meaning. These are tight, elegant and earnest designs that don’t care to obscure their intent—to have played them is to have known their author, and it is the opinion of many, including myself, that this author is absolutely worth knowing."
— Alex Rowland, designer of Lion In Mississauga and Hlasko
My self-published games include:
- Pin Feathers//Cloud Studies, listed on the SFWA's 2018 Nebula Award Reading List
- Your Dead Friend
- Grog
- Dear Poppy,
- First Lesson
- Have I Been Good?
- Crimson
- and many more currently in development!
NOTE ON PRICING: All my games are set at a baseline of $5. If $5 is more than you can afford, please contact me directly by messaging me on my Twitter feed (twitter.com/jeeyonshim) and I will either send you a .txt version of the game for free or the PDF for a discount.