Sharang Biswas

Biswas designed Feast, a game that takes place during a meal and uses eating as a game mechanic.^[1][2] Feast was featured in an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.^[3] Feast won the 2017 IndieCade "Dark Horse" award^[4] and the 2020 "Most Innovative" Indie Game Developer Network Award.^[5]

Biswas has won four ENNIE Awards for game writing: the 2024 Silver for "Best RPG Related Product" for KOBOLD Guide to Roleplaying,^[6] the 2023 Gold for "Best Family Game/Product" and "Best Rules" for Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game,^[7][8] and the 2023 Judges' Spotlight Award for Moonlight on Roseville Beach: A Queer Game of Disco and Cosmic Horror.^[9] In addition to Feast, Biswas won the 2019 Indie Game Developer Network "Most Innovative" award for Verdure.^[5] An Elegy for the Hive Witches from The Gauntlet's Codex Zine was also nominated for the IGDN "Most Innovative Award," in 2020.^[10] Biswas' game Hex Ed appeared in the anthology You and I: Roleplaying Games for Two, which was nominated for an IGDN "Most Innovative Award" in 2019.^[11]

In 2020, Biswas co-designed a LARP adaptation of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance for the Museum of the Moving Image, using puppets and other props from the museum's exhibit of the show's character design.^[12] In 2021, Biswas became an Artist in Residence at the Museum of the Moving Image.^[13] He has continued to produce interactive installations for the museum.^[14][15]

Biswas was co-editor with Lucian Kahn for the Pelgrane Press LARP anthology Honey & Hot Wax in 2020,^[16] which was nominated for an IndieCade award and an Indie Game Developer Network award for "Game of the Year."^[17][18] Biswas contributed a game to the anthology called "The Echo of the Unsaid" about sexual tension between heterosexual male college roommates.^[19]

Biswas co-edited Strange Lusts, an online anthology of interactive fiction about sex and sexuality, which was published in 2021 by Strange Horizons.^[20] He wrote Absolution in Brass: A Game of Guilty Steampunk Zombie-Cyborgs for Simon & Schuster's The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book.^[21] He wrote an adventure in Shadow of Operations, the official one-shots book for Grant Howitt's game Spire.^[22] He wrote the adventure "Who Says Witches Don't Like Chinese Food?" for the Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall scenarios book.^[23] He was on the writing teams for Tanya DePass's game Into the Motherlands^[24] and Green Ronin Publishing's Cthulhu Awakens.^[25]

Biswas' speculative fiction has been featured in Fantasy Magazine,^[26] Lightspeed (magazine),^[27][28] Nightmare Magazine,^[29] and Strange Horizons.^[30] Charles Payseur for Locus reviewed Biswas' short story "Season of Weddings", which was published in Lightspeed: "Biswas keeps the tone and feel of the story flirty and fun, and painting an interesting picture of a shared and expansive collection of pantheons all interacting, being messy, and, for all their immortality, very human. It’s delightful!"^[31] Paula Guran for Locus reviewed Biswas' story "Waiting for Jonah", which was published in Nightmare Magazine: "it’s a good story that employs an unusual use of some equally unusual fairies."^[32]

In 2025, The Iron Below Remembers was published, Biswas' novella reimagining the British Isles if South Asian imperial interests had colonized much of the globe instead of European countries.^[33]

As of September 2024, Biswas is an adjunct faculty member of NYU Game Center.^[34] Biswas was a visiting film and media studies professor at Dartmouth College, where he co-organized a collaborative speculative fiction project between authors and Dartmouth science faculty.^[35] He has also taught games studies courses at Fordham University.^[36]

Biswas wrote the chapter "Sex and Game Design (Part 2): Mechanics and Verbs" in the book Passion and Play: A Guide to Designing Sexual Content in Games by Michelle Clough.^[37] He wrote a 2019 article for the University of Waterloo's Games Institute about the use of live action role-playing games for building queer community.^[38] He was interviewed about LARP for the academic journal Analog Game Studies.^[39]

While working with Tech Kids Unlimited, Biswas collaborated with researchers and autistic students to assess the potential of video game design workshops in empowering autistic youth.^[40]

Biswas holds a Master of Professional Studies (M.P.S.) from Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and a B.A. and B.E. in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering from Dartmouth College.^[41][42]

Biswas was a special guest at Flame Con 2024.^[43] He was a 2024 guest of honor at Ropecon.^[44] He gave a talk at the 2024 Brooklyn Book Festival about games adapted from literature.^[45] He gave a talk at the Game Developers Conference about portrayals of sex in video games.^[46] He spoke on the game designer panel "Playing with Identity: Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Queer Power Self-Definition" at Flame Con 2019, discussing the impacts of queer identity on game design and play.^[47]

Biswas also works in games journalism. Biswas has been a frequent contributor to Eurogamer.^{[48][49][50][51]} He has also written articles for Kill Screen^[52][53] and Dicebreaker.^[54] He was a judge for the 2022 Dicebreaker Tabletop Awards.^[55]

Biswas grew up in Abu Dhabi and originally emigrated to the United States to study bioengineering at Dartmouth College. He discovered game design while taking a "fun class" with the designer and games researcher Mary Flanagan to offset his engineering prerequisites.^[56] Biswas is gay.^[57]

Game Writing/Design Credits