About

Leena van Deventer

Leena is working on Dead Static Drive at Reuben Games with Mike Blackney.

Continuing her work researching the online right, Leena is also writing at hetconned.substack.com, mapping the culture war fantasies being invented and sold by the contemporary online right. In this work she describes "hetconning" as a political technology used to straight-wash history, and explores how this temporal engineering is necessary to advance the goals of the right-wing project and further erode the rights of LGBTQIA+ people. 

Leena is the Deputy Chair of the Board of the Victorian Women's Trust (Melbourne, Australia), and sits on the Board of Directors at the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (Massachusetts, USA). 

She earned a Masters in Arts Management (with Distinction) in 2019 from RMIT University, and served on the Narrative Jury of the Independent Games Festival awards (IGFs) from 2019-2024.

Leena taught interactive storytelling over 7 years at various universities, including RMIT, VCA (UniMelb), & Swinburne University. In 2015 she won the inaugural “Pioneer Award” at the MCV Pacific Women in Games Awards (presented by Xbox) for “the woman who has, over time, paved the way for women in gaming & helped build the Australian and/or New Zealand games industries”.

Leena has worked on several games, including as a Senior Copywriter on a Cannes Gold Lion Award winning "Run That Town", & as narrative consultant on the Twists & Turns app for the 2014 Melbourne Writers Festival, featuring choose-your-own-adventure tales geotagged to the laneways of Melbourne.

Among other publications, she's written for The Guardian, Crikey, The Shot, The Big Issue, Kotaku, & Metro Magazine, & co-authored a book on misogyny in videogames culture for Affirm Press (Simon & Schuster) in 2016 with Dr Dan Golding, called “Game Changers: From Minecraft to Misogyny, The Fight for the Future of Videogames”.

Leena has extensive experience with radio & public speaking, & was the games correspondent for Tech Talk Radio (3WBC 94.1FM) for 2 years (approx. 100 episodes) has appeared on JoyFM & 3CR, & RRR’s Byte Into It, and Triple J’s ‘Hack’. Leena was a monthly guest on ABC 774’s Geek Club segment for the “Drive” program with Rafael Epstein before the pandemic. She's spoken at The Wheeler Centre, the Freeplay Independent Games Festival, Melbourne Writers Festival, the Emerging Writers Festival, ACMI, Word for Word Festival, Ainslie and Gorman Arts Centres, Computer Games Boot Camp, Code Like A Girl, Screen Futures Summit, AVCon, Writers Victoria, UWA, VWT's Breakthrough, & the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.