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6:30 PM
Playgrounds of Power: Glitching the Game
Interactive Session|Women in the Gaming Industry
- Price Free Entry. Registration Mandatory.
This event gathers voices from across India’s gaming industry, research, and culture, where questions of power and participation are constantly being negotiated. The event is a collective conversation: part panel, part open dialogue, part Q&A, designed to spark debate and invite participation from everyone in the room.
The programme will feature gaming professionals Mala Sen, Shagufta Khan, and Deepanjali Sarna, each offering short, provocative interventions drawn from their practice. These will flow into a shared conversation that unsettles easy narratives and opens room for reflection across the whole audience.
Alongside the discussions, a gaming corner, food, and drinks will create an open space to engage with everyone to learn, exchange, and spark new conversations while imagining futures together.
Glitching the Game is hosted by Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi in collaboration with Lagori Collective and supported by GameDev India and Women in Games.
About the Project
India’s gaming sector is booming, but its growth is uneven. Gendered exclusions, workplace barriers, and systemic bias continue to define who gets to create and who is sidelined. Recent regulatory shifts around real-money gaming including new restrictions and legal challenges underline how volatile and contested the industry’s future has become. At the same time, women are opening new practices, building networks, and imagining different ways games can be made and shared. This project holds space for those tensions: documenting systemic challenges while amplifying the possibilities of feminist futures in gaming.Playgrounds of Power is a research and dialogue initiative by the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi in collaboration with Lagori Collective. It looks at the experiences of women inside India’s fast-growing gaming industry.
The Partners
Lagori Collective is a multidisciplinary research and design consultancy based in India. It is focused on advancing futures thinking, foresight, and innovation across South Asia. A key part of Lagori’s work involves participatory and speculative methodologies to address complex global challenges. Lagori also serves as an Index Node, part of a global network of non-extractive third spaces, and anchor the India chapter of Radar Futures, connecting regional and global foresight initiatives.
GameDev India is India’s oldest and largest game developer community. Since 2009, we have worked towards enabling Indian game developers in promoting their games, providing them with support, and building a strong community that helps each other and pushes the domain forward.
Women In Games is a UK-based, not-for-profit organisation operating at a global scale. The purpose of Women in Games is to build a fair, equal and safe environment empowering girls and women in the global gaming ecosystem.
About the speakers
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Mala Sen is the Director and Artist of Niku Games Studio. She completed her B.F.A and M.F.A from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan and started her career as a large-scale textile-artist and educator in the field of art. She always had a love of stories and realised that games are an excellent medium of expression. Therefore, she partnered up with Mridul Kashatria and pivoted into game development. Together, they started Niku Games Studio with the goal of making story-rich and cultural games. Niku Games Studio recently released the award-winning and critically acclaimed 'The Palace on the Hill', a slice-of-life RPG set in a fictional village in 90s India.
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Shagufta Khan is the Co-Founder and COO of Second Quest, a new global simulation games studio from India. She is a content and marketing veteran with over 18 years of leadership experience. An alumna of the IGDA Foundation’s Virtual Exchange Program (2024) and an Individual Ambassador with Women in Games (2025), Shagufta is deeply committed to fostering inclusivity and representation in gaming. She also serves as Media Director at GameDev India, the country’s oldest and largest community for game developers, where she champions ecosystem-building, mentorship, and visibility for diverse creators.
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Deepanjali Sarna is a Game Designer at Liquidnitro Games, with over five years experience in the free-to-play mobile space. She has worked at Zynga, where she also served as the Regional Lead of zPride, an employee resource group supporting the LGBTQIA+ community. Her expertise spans game economies, live ops, and player progression systems, and she is deeply committed to advancing inclusivity and representation in gaming. Deepanjali is also an Ambassador at Women in Games and has been actively involved with the Global Game Jam, hosting the Bangalore edition, while also being a long-time jammer herself. She believes that inclusive design and diverse voices are key to shaping more equitable and representative futures in gaming.
Facilitator
Alifiya Mutaher
Alifiya Mutaher is a co-founder of Lagori Collective. She is a design researcher, creative practitioner and cultural entrepreneur from Sri Lanka, currently based in Bangalore, India. With expertise in participatory research, community engagement, and futuring, she designs lasting programs, services and experiences. Over the past 10 years, she has worked with non-profits, purpose-led organisations and co-founded cultural entities across South and Southeast Asia, bringing regional experience in social innovation, environmental advocacy, food systems, healthcare, and creative culture. She holds a Master's in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons School of Design, NY. She is a 2021/22 International Rescue Committee Fellow.