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Among the young women now making games in the half-lit corners of the independent scene, there are few whose work is spoken of with more affection, confusion, and occasional alarm than Emma-Jane. Yet the real Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee is not the festival version, nor the party version, nor the girl in linen trousers somewhere between Bali and Chiang Mai explaining procedural folklore over a bottle of something too sweet. She is, before all else, an Irish game designer with a stubborn belief that old stories are not dead material, but living systems waiting to be played with badly, seriously, beautifully, and sometimes after midnight.

Emma-Jane was born in Ireland in the late nineteen nineties, in a house where stories were never very far from practical life. Fairies, saints, warnings, weather, cousins, grief, gossip, songs, names of fields, things not to be said near certain people, and the ordinary theatre of Irish family life all entered her early education long before she knew what game design was. Like many children of that island, she learned early that a story was not only something told for amusement. It could explain a place, protect a family, embarrass a neighbour, hide a wound, or keep the dead from becoming too quiet.

Her formal path was less solemn. She studied games, interaction and digital media, though she was often more interested in what happened around the work than in the approved language of the course. She made small games about bargains, curses, lost girls, haunted menus, drunk saints, impossible maps and villages that rearranged themselves when the player lied. Some were funny. Some were broken. A few were good in the way early work can be good, not because it is polished, but because it has not yet learned to behave.

In her early twenties she left Ireland for Southeast Asia, first for a short stay and then, as often happens with people who claim they are only going for a while, for a life that became divided between Thailand, Bali and occasional returns home. There she found another kind of folklore: temple stories, island rumours, tourist myths, expat nonsense, spirit houses, beach parties, half-remembered colonial histories, cheap motorbikes, serious local rituals, and the strange digital village of young makers living between time zones.

Her games now sit somewhere between folklore, systems design, party culture and small acts of rebellion against clean narrative. She is interested in rules that feel ancient but are actually invented, rituals that become mechanics, gossip that works like code, and characters who are punished not for failing a quest but for misunderstanding the social world around them. Her work is playful, but not innocent. It has drinking games, ghosts, girls who refuse prophecy, gods with bad boundaries, maps that resent being read, and menus that behave like old aunties.

She lives between Bali and Thailand, though Ireland remains the country her work keeps arguing with.