Courses

Course Catalog

Using Digital Games as Critical Methods of Intervention, Advocacy, and Activism in Humanities Scholarship

Digital games are often studied as texts, as objects of research. However, given that games can function as simulations, models, arguments, and creative collaboratories, game-based inquiry can be used as a method of humanities research, communication, and pedagogy, and can also function as a political intervention into humanities theories and practices. Merging these two approaches, this course explores how simple game environments and tools can be used to encourage builders, players, and publics to pursue broader social, cultural, and interpersonal understandings. Understanding digital games through factors such as computational bias, disruptive and interactive play, ethics, complicity, and user awareness, participants in this course will approach games as methods of critical intervention, advocacy, and activism. In particular, participants will learn ways that game experiences can be used as tools that disrupt and defamiliarize research, reporting, teaching, spaces, objects, purposes, embodiment, and habits of perception and practice. Course outcomes will involve exploring existing examples, discussing realistic design, development, and outcome logistics, critically reflecting on the implications of game-based engagement, and working towards the creation of individual prototypes (which need not be exclusively digital).

  1. game studies

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Tentative Schedule

Monday, June 5: Defining games: parameters, play and purpose

10:30 - 12:00: Games and play

  • Introductions: skills, experience, motivations, and interests

  • Exploring, expanding, and exploding definitions of games and play

    • Blocked in

    • Gamedefinitions.com

12:00 - 1:00: Lunch Break
1:00 - 2:30: Research-creation & critical making

  • Erin Manning (video): 10 propositions for research creation

Monday Readings:

  • Miguel Sicart - “Playfulness”
  • Ian Bogost - “Play is in Things”
  • Chapman and Sawchuck - “Research-Creation”
  • Natalie Loveless - from Making Art at the End of the World Matt Ratto - “Critical Making”
  • Marcel O’Gorman - from Making Media Theory
  • Pauline Sameshima, Research Model

Tuesday, June 6:

9:00 - 10:15: Methodological interventions: Research/communication/pedagogy

  • Robin Hunicke,Gaming Encourages Curiosity (video)

  • Tadhg Kelly—No Such Thing as Player Character (video)

  • Tracy Fullerton—Possiblity Space (video)

  • We become what we behold

  • Depression Quest

10:15 - 10:30: Break

10:30 - 12:00: Hacking Elizabot

12:00 - 1:00: Lunch

1:00 - 2:30: Games are political, are ideological vehicles

  • Paolo Pedercini “Simcities and Simcrises”

  • Molleindustria overview video

  • Bomb the Right Place

2:30 - 2:45: Break

2:45 - 4:00: Design Challenge Prompt: Repurposing rock-paper-scissors

Tuesday Readings:

  • Galloway, playing the algorithm

  • Flanegan, from Critical Play

  • Flanegan and Nissenbaum, Values at Play

  • Sicart, Ethical Gameplay

  • Landriscina, Reality to simulation epistemic cycle

Wednesday, June 7: Games as sites of activism & advocacy

9:00 - 10:15: Games as interventional environments

  • What should we do with our games?

  • World without oil

  • Studio Oleomingus

10:15 - 10:30: Break

10:30 - 12:00: Games and Identity Politics

  • Warren Spector - Artists Start Dialogues (video)

  • Killing me softly

12:00 - 1:00: Lunch

1:00 - 2:30: Design Challenge Prompt:
        Imagining ourselves otherwise and re-educating desire

2:30 - 2:45: Break

2:45 - 4:00: Project/idea development Jam

Wednesday Readings:

  • Sicart “Architects” from Play Matters

  • Frasca, Videogames of the Oppressed

  • Murray, Soraya - excerpts from On Video Games

  • Fan, Grey, Kadir, Designing games to promote racial equity

  • Kishonna Gray - Woke Gaming Introduction

  • Fordyce, Robbie et al - Woke gaming Ch12 - Avatars 

Thursday, June 8: Play, Systems, and Design

9:00 - 10:15: Playfully redesigning systems

10:15 - 10:30: Break

10:30 - 12:00: Design Challenge Prompt:
        Moving away from competition, acquisition and exploration

12:00 - 1:00: Lunch

1:00 - 2:30: Project/idea development Jam

2:30 - 2:45: Break

2:45 - 4:00: Project/idea development Jam

Thursday Readings

  • Zimmerman, from The Rules We Break

Friday, June 9: Wrap-up

9:00 - 10:15: Where do we go from here?

  • Challenges
  • Futures
  • Iterations
  • Sharing prototypes, projects, plans

10:15 - 10:30: Break

10:30 - 12:00: Institute Lecture

12:00 - 2:30: Reception/ Show & Tell