Mexico City · Madrid
JACINTO
QUESNEL
Games curator. Visual artist. Keynote speaker.
I work one question: how do you get creative freedom back once the software has already decided for you?
Mexico City · Madrid
Games curator. Visual artist. Keynote speaker.
I work one question: how do you get creative freedom back once the software has already decided for you?
In numbers
The idea
I was running an animation program when I noticed something that kept me up at night: very talented students were handing in work that all looked alike. It was not a shortage of ideas. The software had already made most of the decisions before they opened it.
This does not only happen to art students. It happens in any team or organization that adopts a tool and slowly starts producing whatever that tool makes easy. The usual answer is to add points, badges and leaderboards. That usually makes it worse: people optimize the score instead of the work.
My work proposes the opposite move: keep the game, change who it serves. In my field that has a name — postgamification — and my doctoral thesis at UNAM is where I set it out.
Five doors
A talk your audience is still arguing about over lunch. In Spanish or English, for industry stages and academic ones.
Four to eight weeks with your team to work out why everything you make is starting to look the same, and what to change.
Programs and workshops people actually finish. Twenty years designing curricula.
I select, I write the frame, and I sit on the jury. Peer reviewer for Mexico's national arts system.
Painting and interactive pieces, by commission, acquisition or exhibition. Three exhibitions during 2026.
Work
An encyclopedia you play. It fits in a single file, works with no internet and makes zero network calls: 673 interlinked entries in Spanish and English, with seven short games around them.
Centro de Cultura Digital · CC BY 4.0 + MIT · in productionEmotional first aid in a file that fits in a message: 27 cards, 1,307 sourced lines, 505 reference entries and 180 DOIs. No account, no telemetry, no streaks.
Research prototype · 2026Painting: acrylic on paper and reflective surface, with UV-reactive layers. Within Proyecto Chata, my studio practice with Ramsés Olaya.
Proyecto Chata · 2024–2026Track record
Publications
Quesnel, J. (2024). Unleashing creativity through paidia: Free play in learning and work.
Proceedings of the European Conference on Games Based Learning, 18(1). doi.org/10.34190/ecgbl.18.1.2863López, B. y Quesnel Álvarez, J. (2023). Mundos en diálogo: el entramado simbólico entre videojuegos y series.
Revista de Occidente, (506–507), 27–42. ISSN 0034-8635Quesnel, J. y Cervera, H. (2015). Mexico.
In M. J. P. Wolf (Ed.), Video Games Around the World (pp. 355–357). MIT Press. ISBN 9780262527163Quesnel Álvarez, J. (2021). Game Jams como experiencia de aprendizaje para artes y diseño.
Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios en Diseño y Comunicación, 121–130Quesnel, J. (2022). Experiencias de trabajo-aprendizaje en juego como práctica emancipadora.
In Aportes para la construcción de teorías del videojuego, 133–141. ISBN 9786073058728Full list on ORCID and Google Scholar.
Contact
You get me, not an agency.