Boal on a Boat – Teaching Critical Game Making

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Prax Patrick
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

This paper presents and evaluates a plan for a 2-weeks teaching moment with a series of lectures and a seminar in a Game Design course on advanced level that teaches students to critically examine their design task as game designers. This means that this is a critical intervention that can be used to educate critical makers or reflexive professionals. The center piece of the course is an assignment that asks the students to create a design prototype that is highly problematic from moral and ethical perspectives that are discussed in the course literature and lectures. The paper explains in detail the setup of the lectures and seminars and shows the results of a first trial. Any game design education (and potentially even other digital making like IT or Information Systems) that aims at educating reflexive professionals or critical researchers should be able to adapt this teaching moment.

 

Designing Global Empowerment? Activist Self-Narratives in Culturally Mixed Settings

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Harrer Sabine
2019 DiGRA '19 - Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA International Conference: Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo-Mix

This paper reviews the experiences of game workshop facilitators in a culturally mixed activist setting based on narrative interviews with representatives of the Game Girl Workshop (GGW), a Denmark-based feminist initiative established in 2010. By identifying emergent themes and concerns in the organizers’ self-narratives, this study aims to unpack some current challenges activists from the Global North face when working towards empowerment in cross-cultural educational settings. Crucially, what can be experienced as "empowering" differs depending on cultural factors. This study looks at the practices and narratives GGW activists have developed in response to this intercultural challenge. The focus on workshop organizers’ narratives is motivated by two opposed ambitions. The first ambition is to honor and acknowledge the facilitators' activist experience and tacit knowledges which have allowed them to follow through with their aspirational, mostly voluntary work in the games field. The second ambition, conversely, is to identify and redress some problematic assumptions surfacing in the facilitators’ self-narratives as popular, yet potentially harmful stereotypes about Eurocentric entitlement and the Global South. By balancing these two ambitions, this study aims to validate the previous work GGW and other western feminist initiatives have done to change the status quo of game making, while identifying Eurocentrism and western entitlement as persistent myths to be resolved by current and future activists.

 

Troubling ‘Games for Girls’: Notes from the Edge of Game Design

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Flanagan Mary
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

This paper presents notes from the field focused on a large project to design an activist, multi-user game aimed at middle school girls. A thorny issue in developing games for girls is the categorization of female players and universalizing their preferences. In the paper I provide diverse feedback on current game-based research project, RAPUNSEL, hoping to provide a multiplicity in the category of "girl" so that new game designs may challenge the many stereotypes inherent in computer culture. I then discuss the game design in RAPUNSEL and how a designer may provide for multiple play styles.

 

New Design Methods for Activist Gaming

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Flanagan Mary Howe Daniel C. Nissenbaum Helen
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

Significant work in the gaming and HCI communities has focused on systems that support human values such as privacy, trust, and community. Designers and engineers have become increasingly aware of ways in which the artifacts they create can embody political, social, and ethical values. Yet there has been little work toward producing practical methodologies that systematically incorporate values in the design process. This paper is aimed at introducing systematic methods for the iterative discovery, analysis, and integration of values into the work of game designers and technologists. It is our hope that such work will shed light on the benefits and challenges of employing a values-oriented approach across a variety of design contexts.