Rachel Heleva

Rachel Heleva is a game researcher, designer, and scout whose work examines games as systems for thought, expression, and interpretation. Her interests center on systems-driven and puzzle games, emergence, strategy, and the ways interacting rules can generate complex possibilities that players learn to read through play.

Her research grows out of years working across independent game scouting, publishing, production, and early-stage funding, where she has evaluated thousands of games and prototypes. That work has shaped an ongoing interest in how new ideas in game design emerge, how systems communicate their possibilities to players, and how experimental forms of play become legible to publishers, institutions, and wider culture.

Her current projects investigate those questions across game design, literature, and curatorial practice. In Countless Shadows treats Shakespeare’s sonnets as playable systems, using computational and combinatorial design to explore how poetic constraints generate interpretive possibility. As Executive Director of the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment in Oakland, she is also developing exhibitions, educational programs, and experimental public programming around games as playable culture, with particular attention to how people learn to make, understand, and transform games.