Myself in my home-office with one of my (now dead) cats. Photo by author
Hi there, my name is Erin List (she/her), aka. “Scarfront”.
I’m a human polymath, visual artist, designer, game developer, inventor, scientist, philosopher-poet, mathematician, queer-crip-feminist activist, musician, cook, archer, actress, anthropologist-ludologist, and historian-mythologist based in Graz, Austria, where I was born on June 2nd, 1995 and subsequently got raised by my family and in local schools.
I’m currently (as of around July 2025) working freelance as an artist, graphic designer and game developer mostly, while also being active as an activist for various social and environmental causes, from queer-feminist emancipation to climate justice, disability and workers rights.
This section is both an autobiography and history, that I plan to continuously update to be as accurate as possible as the years go by. In our ever faster changing world in the 21st century I’ve gotten tired of repeatedly telling my own backstory to new people I meet as well as old acquaintances. The arrival of AI has as I see it only made certain aspects of retaining any semblance of truth harder if not downright impossible. Some philosophers think that we’re living in a post-truth world. Be that as it may, one aspect that continues to be particularly annoying to me in everyday life when interacting with other people is when they judge me based on information they have about me that is either completely wrong or erroneous to put things simply. It is my belief that too many Austrian’s are downright decadent and completely oblivious to their own privileges, particularly the academic ones that mostly work in cosy offices in front of computers. Many men in particular, but lots of women too. They haven’t yet made an acquaintance with struggles that e.g. many disabled people, queer people or migrants have to go through, let alone intersectional issues.
My own history (history being things that happened before my birth) roughly starts with that of my parents. My family on my mother’s side is originally largely from the rural countryside of Styria. Both she and my father are from working-class backgrounds. My mother worked as a social worker most of her life and raised three of my siblings and myself largely by herself, since all our fathers were absent during large parts of our childhood. My father is a craftsperson and worked in various construction-type jobs. I was raised roman-catholic and baptised by Wolfgang Pucher in Graz.
I went to Kindergarten, though I left earlier than the other kids. I was capable of reading and writing German from around the age of 3, as well as doing basic arithmetic and mathematics. With this sort of mental advantage I was home-schooled by a an ex-teacher and family acquaintance in various other topics, from geography and astronomy to physics and palaeontology. I was essentially over-educated from an early age, and entered school with the knowledge of a professor. It is of little surprise then that I was often bored in the following years going to school. I got to skip first class.
As early as 13 years old I applied to IT jobs in Graz as I wanted to work with computers (which I was already doing at home) and get paid for it while doing so. I think I never got any answers to the applications I sent.
I last went to high-school at the BORG Dreierschützengasse up until 2011 in the informatics branch (now the informatics/media branch). I did not graduate there back then for a number of reasons that I personally attribute at least in part to systematic and complex social behavioural failures on behalf of the school staff. After that I applied to various schools in Graz to continue my education, as well as the Karl Popper school in Vienna. Even after doing their entrance exam (which included by now outdated IQ tests that rated my IQ to around 130) did they not accept me. I was still 16 years old at the time.
I was very briefly part of an Amnesty International Youth Group in Graz.
I applied to apprenticeships in the IT and media sector in Graz, yet none wrote back. Not having a job or being in any institutional education I instead worked on small video games, as that was just about the only thing I could think of at the time that I was able to do from home that could possibly make me any money to pay for rent.
Around the end of 2014 I made a small voluntary trip from Graz to Vienna via train to the Vienna game dev meetup. I paid around 40€ iirc out of my own pocket. There I had a nice chat with indie game dev Matthias Maschek, who encouraged my idea to found my own meetup in Graz, as nothing of the sort yet existed here to my knowledge. I subsequently did so together with Matthias Frey and Lukas Trotzmüller, after meeting the two at Spektral at a local board game night where we had played a couple rounds of Werewolf. I made a poster to sort of advertise the meetup and posted it on Twitter (which was one social media platform where lots of developers were active back then) in the hopes it would attract a couple people. We also went to a game jam that had been organized at Graz University of Technology.
In May 2015 I co-founded the non-profit association Game Dev Graz together with some other folks and am its current vice-president (as of 2025). My goal there is to support the local game development community and foster a healthy gaming culture. I’ve been doing a whole lot of community organizing together with the rest of the team ever since (such as co-organizing 100+ community meetups, 10+ game jams, and several small conferences for several hundred people). For almost none of that have I ever gotten paid financially.
At some point a psychologist at the AMS suggested to me that I might have autism. I later got formally diagnosed with Asperger-Syndrome (aka. Asperger-Autism) by neurologist-psychiatrist Dr. Gudrun Schein in 2016 when I was 21 years old. I had no prior knowledge of autism even existing. It is a rather uncommon condition after all (compared to the overall population). All in all it makes various aspects of life on planet earth more difficult for me, mostly due to many too loud environments and acoustic noise, mind-numbing and dehumanizing bureaucracy that I have to deal with instead of spending it on something more useful (like getting rid of the bureaucracy), planet-destroying capitalism, and moronic humans with too large egos to imo be allowed to have any sort of “leadership” or teaching position. All together, certain other humans and their behavioural patterns are my main obstacle. I also really dislike hypocrites and any form of discrimination or injustice when I encounter it.
I’ve been working as a graphic designer, digital print technician, photographer and visual merchandiser at pro mente Styria for a while, for around 20 hours a week. I collaborated with many people there that had some sort of “disability”, making things like posters, flyers, brochures, restaurant menus and so on. We also took care of inventory, customer support, sales and distribution. It was like an entire apprenticeship or half a bachelors degree, only without getting any official or formal recognition for it. At least we got paid for it and the products we made were actually being useful to someone. At least partial systematic exploitation and oppression still happened though due to Austria’s own bureaucracy and educational system. This country has so many closed feedback loops running amok in its machinery, it’s a wonder it hasn’t crumbled under its own paper stack yet.
For a very brief time after that I went to an Abendgymnasium with the intention to “finish” my Matura. I quickly quit that after encountering some horrible teachers and realizing that most of the things being taught there I was already proficient enough in.
After that I’ve been working at the Game Lab Graz at Graz University of Technology from September 2019 to June 2025 as a visual artist, game designer, graphic designer, HCI-researcher-scientist, lecturer-educator, LGBTQIA+ consultant and art & design director. I originally got the job after Johanna Pirker asked me if I want to work there.
Pretty much the entirety of the Covid-19 pandemic fell into that time period. Consequently much of this time has been spent doing remote work in front of computers so as to not spread the virus and so on. I was lucky and somewhat privileged at the time to have paid employment, compared to those that worked in fields like gastronomy and similar services. However, I also sustained a burnout from it. It was only in 2024 that I read Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World (3rd edition, 2019) and took notice of the design-justice network. The question that keeps bogging me since then is whether or not we have actually solved more problems at the Game Lab than we created. Video games can be a great educational or entertainment medium for sure, but the world seems as of 2026 flooded and oversaturated with video games.
Besides that the wage was in my honest opinion a bad joke compared to that of my many peers and colleagues, considering everything that I did there. It’s not that I’m in it for the money or getting rich, but I think it disgraceful that some team members should get paid much more than the others, even though it takes the efforts of the entire team that leads to successful final results. My name is also still missing from quite a few (but not all) scientific papers that I’ve been contributing to during that time period, and even some of the credits of the games I worked on. (see Matilda-Effect)
After that I’ve been a band member and drummer of the Styrian symphonic metal band Shades of Eternity for a short while, and been working as a freelance artist and graphic designer.