All my life I’ve been a fierce force of imagination, persistence, and hard work: like a dragon hunting for gold. But instead of treasure, I’ve been searching for stories to tell and ways to make an impact.

Born in Belarus, I studied journalism in Bulgaria and worked in marketing in Russia, but storytelling has always been my true passion. I create narratives that allow people to explore fresh perspectives in a safe, immersive way.

As a queer, neurodivergent woman from a patriarchal country, I’m passionate about shedding light on complex topics through my work. Over the years, I’ve designed more than 100 LARP games, written 10+ original tabletop campaigns, and worked as a script supervisor on the short film Mein Name Akim (2024), which tells the story of transgender refugees in Germany.

During my MA in Serial Storytelling at IFS Cologne, I honed my skills across genres, working on solo projects as well as collaborating in Writers' Rooms.

Currently, I’m co-developing a visual novel game with a co-author as a passion project.

Now that I've completed my degree, I’m eager to bring my creativity to TV and gaming, crafting stories in both English and German.

Dragons never stop breathing fire. And neither do I, with an endless flow of ideas and stories I can’t wait to share.

Alena Lysiakova

🎧 Too much sound can ruin your audio game.

Audio designers love layering: music, background ambience, footsteps, breathing, radio static, wind, distant sirens, and emotional underscore. 

And suddenly your “immersive experience” feels like standing inside a broken washing machine. 

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most people don’t play audio games in perfect silence. They’re commuting. Cooking. Walking. Folding laundry. 

Audio storytelling competes with real life. If your game requires 100% concentration at all times just to understand what’s happening, you’re designing against the format.

Cognitive overload is real:
🐲 Constant SFX + dense dialogue = fatigue
🐲 Overlapping voices = confusion
🐲 Permanent music bed = emotional flattening
🐲 No breathing room = listener burnout

Immersion doesn’t come from “more sound.” It comes from intentional sound. Silence matters. Contrast matters. Clarity matters. Design audio like oxygen.

Good audio narrative design respects the listener’s brain, because the worst experience isn’t “hard,” it’s exhausting.

#NarrativeDesign #AudioGames

Alena Lysiakova 🐉

Narrative designer and screenwriter ▶️ Let's create stories that make an impact

Here’s something most audio writers don’t plan for 👉 players will mishear things. 


Names. Instructions. Locations. Important clues. And no, it’s not because they’re inattentive. It’s because audio competes with real life.

If your entire branching logic collapses because someone misheard “Mara” as “Nara,” that’s not player failure. 👉 That’s architectural fragility.

Designing for mishearing means:
👾 Avoid critical distinctions that rely on similar-sounding names
🐲 Reinforce important information through variation, not repetition
👾 Use context to clarify meaning instead of assuming perfect recall
🐲 Make systems resilient to imperfect listening

In audio, clarity isn’t about simplifying the story. It’s about building redundancy intelligently. The player shouldn’t need studio-level focus to follow your game.

If your structure only works in perfect silence with perfect attention, it’s not built for the real world.

#NarrativeDesign #AudioGames #InteractiveStorytelling

The uncomfortable truth about writing for audio: sometimes experience gets in the way. 🐲 


I coach a lot of writers transitioning into interactive audio, and I keep seeing the same pattern: the more experienced the writer, the harder it can be to adapt.

Not because they’re not talented, but because they’re used to controlling the frame.

In audio, you don’t have visuals to lean on. You don’t have text people can reread. You don’t have cinematic shortcuts.

You have a voice. Timing. Space. Silence. Choice phrasing. Cognitive load.

And if you try to force screenwriting logic or prose logic onto audio without adjusting, the story simply doesn’t breathe. 

💡 Audio is a different architecture. It demands different pacing, different exposition control and different emotional calibration.

That’s why transitioning with a coach helps. Not because you don’t know how to write, but because someone needs to point out the invisible friction early.

You can read all the documents you want. Clarity usually comes when someone listens and says, “This works. This doesn’t. And here’s why, specifically for audio.”

Different medium requires different muscles. And once they click, audio becomes addictive.

#NarrativeDesign #AudioGames #StoryCoaching

Dating used to be awkward dinners and nervous eye contact… now it’s co-op bosses and shared loot drops. 🎮💘

In my latest article, I dig into why playing together is becoming the new dating, and how games are quietly reshaping connection, chemistry, and even heartbreak.

👉 https://lnkd.in/eU6XgMn8

If you’re into storytelling, relationships, or just fascinated by how games intersect with real life feelings, this one might hit a nerve.

#GamingCulture #Storytelling

Open article: Why playing together is the new dating by meer.com

🎧 Your audio game must survive interruptions


People don’t play audio games the way they play visual ones.  They’re walking. Cooking. Commuting. Someone asks them a question. A notification pops up. The subway arrives.

And suddenly your carefully crafted scene is paused for five minutes.

🐲 When they come back, the player shouldn’t feel lost. That’s why good audio narrative design builds re-entry points into the architecture, those small structural cues that help the brain reconnect:

👾 A character briefly restating the immediate goal
👾A reaction that reminds the player what just happened
👾Environmental cues that re-establish the situation
👾A choice that naturally summarizes the stakes

These moments are navigation; because audio games exist in the middle of real life, not inside a perfectly controlled gaming session. 

💡 If your story only works when the listener gives it uninterrupted attention, you’re designing for an ideal player that doesn’t exist. Good audio architecture assumes interruptions and quietly guides the player back in.

#audiogames #narrativedesign #storyarchitecture

All screenplays benefit from being visual. 
💡 But for vertical storytelling, it’s not a nice bonus: it’s survival.


In a traditional film or TV script, you can sometimes get away with dialogue carrying the scene. Two characters talking in a room can still work if the emotional stakes are strong enough. In verticals, that scene is dead on arrival.

The viewer is watching on a phone, often half-distracted, scrolling with their thumb, ready to abandon you at any second. If nothing visually happens, the story simply disappears. 👉 Vertical scenes need immediate visual signals.

You don't need long exposition or dialogue. Just one visual action that tells the entire story beat.

🐲 That’s the real discipline vertical storytelling teaches you: if the audience can understand the moment without sound, you’re probably doing it right.
#Screenwriting #VerticalSeries #Storytelling

In visual games, players always know where they are. There’s a map, a UI, and a quest log. Basically, something grounding them.

In audio there is nothing like that. Which means if you don’t deliberately build structural anchors, your story starts to drift.

Structural anchors are recurring elements that help listeners orient themselves without realizing it.

It could be:
🐲 A specific location you return to
🐲 A character who always reappears between major beats
🐲 A ritual moment (a radio check-in, a diary entry, a nightly call)
🐲 A recurring sound cue that signals transition

These anchors are architecture. Without them, scenes blur. Branches feel random. The player doesn’t feel lost because the plot is confusing; they feel lost because there’s no spatial or emotional reference point. Audio needs repetition with intention.

When players hear that familiar voice, that recurring space, that structural checkpoint, their brain relaxes. Orientation returns. Engagement stabilizes.

#NarrativeDesign #AudioGames

Just added another tool to the storytelling toolbox. 🎮

I’ve completed the course “Unreal Engine 5: Blueprint Scripting 101.”

As someone who usually lives on the narrative side of games, it’s always interesting to peek under the hood and understand how the systems actually work. Turns out Blueprint logic is not nearly as scary as it looked at first glance.

More ways to connect story, mechanics, and player experience — always a good thing. 🐲 Now back to building worlds.

Open article: Udemy Course Completion Certificate by ude.my

I’ll be attending Series Mania Forum on March 24 to 26.


Do you want to talk series and verticals? 🎬  
🐲 Let's meet and talk over coffee in Lille. 

#SeriesMania #VerticalSeries #Networking

CEO, Principal Analyst Intelligent World•Helping AI-Driven Companies Generating Success•Top10 AI-Data-IoT-Influencer

The world is becoming AI-driven — but most organizations struggle not with AI technology, but with AI decisions.

I help enterprise leaders navigate GenAI and Agentic AI decisions, moving from early research and experimentation to decision-ready intelligence and confident implementation at scale.

As a global top-10 AI & data influencer and CEO & Principal Analyst at Intelligent World, I work at the intersection of:
➨GenAI & Agentic AI
➨Enterprise AI strategy & governance
➨AI market intelligence & decision frameworks
➨Vendor evaluation and selection

Across AI, data, cloud, and automation, I see the same pattern repeatedly:
AI initiatives fail when organizations lack structure, context, and evidence in their decision-making.

That’s why my work focuses on:
➨Creating AI decision landscapes that structure complex markets
➨Helping leaders understand trade-offs, constraints, and risks
➨Supporting defensible AI decisions for executives, architects, and procurement teams

At Intelligent World, we develop neutral, evidence-based intelligence that supports:
➨Enterprise AI platform selection
➨Agentic AI architecture decisions
➨RFP design and procurement alignment
➨Board-level and audit-ready AI decisions

If you’re an enterprise leader, I help you make sense of the GenAI and Agentic AI landscape before committing to vendors or architectures.

If you’re an AI technology provider, I help you understand how enterprises evaluate AI decisions — without promotion or bias.

AI success doesn’t start with tools.
It starts with clarity, structure, and informed decisions.

Ronald van Loon

AI winners will not be decided by models alone, they will be decided by networks.

At Mobile World Congress, I spoke with Peter Linder, Head of Thought Leadership at Ericsson Americas, about a shift many leaders are underestimating.

Right now, AI conversations are dominated by cloud and foundational models. Centralized compute. Massive data centers. GPU scale.

But inference is changing the game.

As AI moves from text-in, text-out to multimodal AI, agents, and physical AI embedded in devices, the architecture becomes distributed. Some workloads stay in the cloud. Some move to the edge. Some run directly on devices.

What connects it all? Mobile networks.

Real-time AI requires real-time data. That means reliable, secure, low-latency connectivity. Especially on the uplink.

We are moving from a download-centric world to one where uplink performance and latency define value. Sensors, autonomous systems, industrial AI, and AI agents cannot tolerate dropped connections or insecure data flows.

For telecom and cloud leaders, this is the monetization inflection point.

The first wave of 5G largely preserved 4G business models. The AI wave is different.

Network slicing, open APIs, differentiated connectivity, and edge inference are not technical features. They are revenue levers.

The next AI leaders will not just build smarter models. They will build smarter networks.

Learn More: https://lnkd.in/eA8n8ZSJ

#MWC26 #EricssonMWC Ericsson Ambassador Ericsson Software #5G #Connectivity #Telecom #Innovation #DigitalTransformation #CloudComputing #Technology

CEO & Principal Analyst, Intelligent World | Global Top10 AI Influencer | Helping Leaders Navigate GenAI & Agentic AI Decisions

What if the future of telco monetization is not faster speeds, but guaranteed outcomes?

At Mobile World Congress, I explored with Jose Luis De La Vega how one message was clear: we are moving from selling bandwidth to selling performance.

Differentiated connectivity, powered by 5G network slicing and network APIs, is turning connectivity into a premium product, not a commodity.

Think about the World Cup, Formula 1, concerts, large-scale retail moments.
Consumers already pay thousands for access. Paying $5 to $15 more for guaranteed low latency, seamless transactions, secure payments, or premium streaming is a logical next step.

This is not theoretical. Operators in Asia are already monetizing event-based passes, gaming latency boosts, and influencer-grade streaming packages.

For executives, this is a mindset shift.

Stop asking, “How do we sell more data?”
Start asking, “What outcome are customers willing to pay extra for?”

Low latency for gaming.
Guaranteed uplink for creators.
Secure slices for financial transactions.
Dedicated capacity for immersive AR and VR.

Network APIs open the door for developers to build 5G-native applications, just as 4G enabled Uber and the app economy.

The strategic implication is clear.
Premium connectivity will redefine telco ARPU in 2026 and beyond.

The winners will be those who package performance as a product, not just connectivity as infrastructure.

Learn More: https://lnkd.in/eA8n8ZSJ

#MWC26 #EricssonMWC Ericsson Ambassador Ericsson Software #5G #Connectivity #Networking #Telecom #Innovation #DigitalTransformation #Technology

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The Battle

Alena Lysiakova

Ronald van Loon

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Performance ScoreAlena Lysiakova's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreRonald van Loon's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Alena Lysiakova

Ronald van Loon

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Alena Lysiakova's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreRonald van Loon's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreAlena Lysiakova's LinkedIn Performance