ALK: Ashlee Lawson-Kilpatrick

Ashlee Lawson-Kilpatrick, MSW, is a Video Game Social Worker bridging clinical mental health expertise with game design, storytelling, trust & safety, and community health. Drawing on 4+ years of crisis intervention, trauma-informed care, and behavioral risk assessment, she helps studios and communities build safer, more emotionally resilient spaces for the 3.7 billion people who play games worldwide.

Selected as 1 of 10 fellows from 576 applicants (1.7% acceptance) for the Take This Accelerate Fellowship and named an IGDA Foundation Velocity Exchange grantee, Ashlee completed an independent capstone project combining video games and mental health, interviewing video game industry professionals on representation and how to improve its quality across the industry. She is a published independent scholar on gaming representation and player wellbeing; her research article, “The Black Female Protagonist (And the Importance of Representation to Black Female Gamers),” examines how inclusive narratives foster belonging for Black female gamers.

Her background spans family crisis intervention, therapeutic integration of games like Animal Crossing, The Sims, and Pokémon, and real-time community moderation for a 100+ participant gaming event — giving her a ground-level understanding of how game content and systems shape player mental health, from individual play to community culture.

Video Game Social Worker