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.
The thesis is defended in 2026 and the text goes public on defense. In the meantime, the short version of the argument is in the ECGBL paper below.
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
Each piece is a single HTML file: it works with no internet, and “Download” saves it to your phone or computer. Nothing to install.
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 Play MAPA H.06 · betaDownload · 2 MBEmotional first aid in files that fit in a message. No account, no telemetry, no streaks, and each piece states in writing what the evidence does not support. Three so far: EL TARJETERO — 27 cards, 1,307 sourced lines, 505 references and 180 DOIs — a pocket edition for children, and EL CONTENEDOR. It comes out of the same work I did running the Game Lab at Centro de Cultura Digital: getting play into places that would not let it in. Here the place is the pocket of whoever needs it.
Research through practice · 2026 Open EL TARJETERO · betaDownload · 0.7 MBPainting: acrylic on paper and reflective surface, with UV-reactive layers. Within Proyecto Chata, my studio practice with Ramsés Olaya.
Proyecto Chata · 2024–2026Educational videogame and interactive piece for Papalote Museo del Niño: butterflies designed by visitors that fight in a top-down arena. Programming as an aesthetic experience, not a chore.
Papalote Museo del Niño · with Héctor Guerrero · 2017Track 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.18.1.2863Quesnel, J. (2024, July). Videojuegos olímpicos [audio piece].
Revista de la Universidad de México · Radio UNAM. revistadelauniversidad.mxLópez, B. y Quesnel, J. (2023). Mundos en diálogo: el entramado simbólico entre videojuegos y series.
Revista de Occidente, (506–507), 27–42. ISSN 0034-8635Cervera, H. y Quesnel, J. (2015). Mexico.
In M. J. P. Wolf (Ed.), Video Games Around the World (pp. 345–358). MIT Press. ISBN 9780262527163Quesnel, 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 9786073058728In preparation: an edited volume on postgamification, co-coordinated with Dr. Blanca López Pérez (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Azcapotzalco).
Full list on ORCID and Google Scholar.
Contact
You get me, not an agency.