This session discusses the inclusion of intersectional issues and feminist perspectives in game-focused education programs.

This panel bring forward five board games created as an assignment in a learning theories course in the graduate masters educational technology program. The primary goal of the course is for students to develop a critical understanding of classic and contemporary theories of learning, such as behaviourism, congnitivism, neo-cognitivism, socio-constructivism, humanism, and connected learning as they inform instructional practice. As part of the class assignments, students were asked to create a board game using a participatory game design method, which incorporated learning theories discussed in class over the semester. Five board games will be presented and discussed on this panel presentation.

A story that kind of looks like your typical “boy meets girl” story at first glance, except the boy doesn’t really feel like a boy and the girl doesn’t really feel like a girl.

A commentary on the weirdness of online friendships that aren’t really friendships, set in the midst of a fan convention called AwesomeCon.

A play where all the actors are audience members. Maybe one of them will be you?

A collaborative game of finding the best ending to the story. Or the worst ending. Or maybe just whatever’s the most satisfying. It’s really up to you. Anything can happen.

The presentation discusses affect in videogames through the lens of meaningful play as aesthetic experience. As digital representation, videogames can provide players a statute of parallel and alternative experience offering new interpretation of what reality is and what potentially it could be. Discussing some personal experiments, I will explain how I realized experimental videogames with the aim to convey cognitive state (A.Way), mental illness (Magic interaction) and story (Onironauta) and how this design process has meant to be able to abstract essential feature of such emotional states/ experience mood and how it has become a significant process of self consciousness also for me as creator.

“Take Care”, is a game jam that is focused on making games on the theme of “online violence” with a focus on participants’ personal wellness. Online violence is a serious topic and we did not approach this task lightly, and to run this event in a way that would satisfy everyone (funders, participants, etc.) required a lot of careful planning and discussion over several months. In this presentation, we will share how we designed the jam centered around the principles of respect and care, both during the jam and afterwards. We will talk about our approach to handling our main concerns (e.g. mitigating harm), discuss what worked and what didn’t, and also share participant feedback on Take Care. By sharing our careful thought process, designs, and failures with the Different Games audience, we are contributing to a body of knowledge of both “serious game jams”, as well as the role of self-care and wellness during intense periods of media production, regardless of the theme!

Can a game offer insights into the politics of affect and how it relates to socioeconomic inequality, even if it is built on a fictional premise and a sci-fi world? This is the core exploration for Solace State, a visual novel that aims to engage its players with emotional, human stories about political unease and discontentment, as common citizens try to navigate through embedded structures of power. The talk will focus on game design and writing considerations that highlights community-building and social identity-formation, which also encapsulate feelings of fear, hope, disorientation, belonging, and shame in shared cultural expressions and mythologies.

Games are played by all kinds of people, and we all want games in which we play characters who resemble ourselves. However, there are more ethnicities in the world than even the largest AAA budget can accurately represent. How do game developers approach this problem? This talk will explore the technical challenges involved in making the diversity of our characters reflect the diversity of our players, and it will briefly walk through some historical solutions. It will also present a variety of novel techniques used in Nuclear Fishin’ Studios’s upcoming title Four Horsemen.

In this presentation, I will analyse two historical themed video games, Age of Empires II HD Edition and Total War: Rome II, applying Critical Discourse Analyses to demonstrate how Eurocentric discourses remain in these games. I will argue that these representations are related to assumed conceptions of history, and that the medium’s possibilities for subversion remain ignored. Moving away from eurocentrism and exploring history in meaningful ways requires critical engagement to deconstruct the traditional identity of historical knowledge. I will finish by bringing some ideas on how this exploration could materialize in video game form in order to promote diversity.

Moon Hunters is a 1 to 4 player action RPG releasing to Steam and PlayStation 4 this year. The game is remarkable for several reasons: a wildly successful Kickstarter featuring primarily Middle-Eastern themes and characters, a central conflict of a rising monotheist patriarchy within a pluralist matriarchy, a female lead developer, and a development team that’s only 50% white. This post-mortem will examine how these factors influenced development, coverage, and critical reception.

When metafiction is keenly used in a videogame, it can create greater player immersion, deeper narratives, and overcome fiction breaking elements such as glitches and loading screens. In this talk, James Earl Cox III will define videogame metafiction, then dive into the four different types: (emergent metafiction: fiction that reveals itself to the player, immersive: fiction that brings the player into the fiction, internal: character-to-character, and external: designer-to-player). This talk will ultimately deliver developer friendly ideas for consideration. As metafiction within videogames is not heavily explored, there is a lot of room for thought, and plenty of room for conversation!

LUDIC Arcade is an MA project created out of research on how to think about and develop inclusive and transgressive spaces that make videogames more approachable for members of the community who do not identify as being a part of gaming culture. How can we foster conversations of the legitimacy of gamer culture? And how do we make spaces for people to consider themselves as not gamers, but rather, just players?

Intergenerational game design is claimed as a participatory approach to game design that can help design more inclusive and meaningful games (Loos, 2014; Romero, 2015). We analyse the opportunities of participatory game design for intergenerational learning from the participants’ perspective. We will discuss the making of a historical mini-game with a group ranging in age from their 20s to their 60s. Through this task design-team members shared perspectives on history and made decisions related to their game co-creation. Participants learned from and with each other about game design concepts, visual programming in Scratch, and the social construction of history.

Using a participatory action framework, the research team spent four months brain storming, designing, and producing a game that addressed issues encountered by those in the LGBTQIA+ community. Lead researcher Nathan Thompson will be joined by indie game developer, Chad Comeau and some of the project’s youth participants in order to reveal and discuss the game they created. They will also reflect on the process of participatory video game production, its potential for generating community engagement, and the impact the game had on those who have played it.

Older adults are often excluded of the game design process in the game industry (De Schutter, 2010). Moreover, the representation of older adults in game reflects stereotypes which not represents the diversity of this population. From a critical play perspective, we consider games as social, cultural and political objects (Flanagan, 2009). In order to improve games inclusiveness, we propose to engage older adults not only as end-users but as creators within an intergenerational game design process. We discuss the opportunities of guiding the participatory intergenerational game design using the gerontoludic manifesto proposed by De Schutter and Abeele (2015).

This talk compares the participatory design process of four mental health games aimed to increase understanding of “what it’s like” to live with OCD, ADD, bipolar and eating disorder. Participants were people with lived experience of the portrayed disorders. Participation happened on a continuum of “complete integration into the team” to “participant contributing at specific times during development”. The talk reflects on strategies used for collaborative idea generation, a discussion on how each team identified its vision and communicative goal for the project, found the game’s core metaphor and made decisions around game elements, negotiating participants’ and playtesters’ input.

This presentation will discuss alternative approaches to gameplay by looking at player agency through the lens of improvisational performance and in relation to goal-oriented gameplay and the role of the glitch in the agency of a game system, itself. This presentation will also discuss improvisational play as a critical approach to the stricture of game mechanics and narrative. By discussing the use of game-level building tools in the platformer Little Big Planet, Tamara Yadao, of game art performance duo foci + loci, will show some of her custom built game maps and sound spaces that she plays as instruments and performance systems.

What makes a game good, memorable and fun, versus absorbing? Where does that line lie? This talk covers elements of level and game design for comfort and discomfort, touching on glitch aesthetics and curiosity-based mechanics. It includes notes from research on casino design and procedural generation both, and some technical advice for building projects that can survive past their developer maintenance cycles.

How is digital code, physical fabrication and tool use affected by gender? How do these ideas influence our methods of education and the accessibility of code?

This presentation interrogates the possibilities and perils of being femme in the androcentric field of games, either as developers or players, from the perspective of the femme community in Montreal. Drawing on examples from local femme artists and Pixelles, a group that helps women and nonbinary folks to become game developers, we’ll consider the ways that subversion is called upon in the femme experience of digital games, both as developers and players. By making games by and for femmes both the need for community and the special affective talents of femmes can be supported, and femme identified people can eke out their own place to thrive

Growing up as a gay man, I was drawn repeatedly to women in nerd culture. I tried to change my interests, force myself to be more intrigued by men, but I was unsuccessful. I began to ask myself: what makes women so appealing? Bayonetta taught me about my own sexual state of being and the limits that gender imposes, so I make a plea to gamemakers everywhere to reimagine the state of gender in their universes.

We Are Fine, We’ll Be Fine is an auditory and tactile experience played on a wooden game board exploring people’s stories about marginalization, oppression and the navigating hope for the future. Participants unravel stories of struggle and hope by holding hands with each other while touching the board. As they progress towards the centre of the board, more stories emerge. Our presentation will talk about our project including the motivations, challenges and solutions we came up with in designing a game-based system tackling themes of marginalization and oppression.

We will discuss the development of Arrival: Village Kasike focusing on how Raindrop Games collaborated with the Taino community (indigenous to the Caribbean) whom the game is about. Creating a culturally sensitive game is challenging, especially when the development team are not members of the indigenous community. Discussion includes various successes and mistakes during development and lessons learned for collaboration on our next game together. Time will also be allotted for discussion with the audience about indigenous game development. Audience member should leave with a better understanding of how to effectively develop games about an indigenous group.

High Life! is a game that “help[s] other teens see the consequences of smoking weed and cigarettes, and drinking alcohol and maybe change their ways,” says youth co- designer. High Life! is a game that brought the urban community, game industry, and higher education academy together in developing a board game that constitutively changed the relationships between these entities and iteratively evolved the game from its paper prototype to digital format.

“In a space where everyone is sharing and experimenting with an easily reproducible tech platform, who owns an idea?

Indie Games are a tricky commodity from an intellectual property perspective. As iterative media, games need an entire community to exist. If during the course of development, others give ideas that are eventually incorporated into the game, does the game have a sole creator any more? In such a situation discussions about ownership sit uneasily.

But games are inherently cannibalistic. Games learn from other games and improve from playtests. What then is the line between plagiarism and a homage?

In a media environment that has immense potential for being community owned, is ownership even relevant to our collectivist development environment?”

The advent of a more concrete theory surrounding East Asian American females provides a space to better observe how this population interacts with video games. Research must observe how the model minority myth has neutralized stereotypes and how this might affect game play.

College can teach you how to make a game, but not how to survive in games culture or industry as a cis-woman of colour. In my presentation, I will identify the ways in which post-secondary programs can improve on to prepare students for dealing with the toxic parts of games culture that we know exist, but don’t make it onto the syllabus. Using my own personal experience, I will illustrate how these gaps in cultural knowledge can and do negatively impact a student’s experience, both within the program as well as outside of it.

Our work seeks to treat the phenomenon of [that which must not be named] as a sociological object of study, and to develop an analysis of the psychology of participants in this hate group, within the broader context of extreme reactionary movements in general.

In an attempt to push our understanding beyond a surface behavioural account of how movements like [that which must not be named] operate, we attempt to “commit sociology” and to draw out in detail the ways in which the psyche of the [that which must not be named] subject, and the more general cultural trends that it represents, are a product of identifiable social processes and institutions which are fundamental to the root structural organization of our society and its ideological complex.

Although there is increasing interest in talking about queerness in games and analyzing contemporary examples of queer game content, to date there has been no comprehensive analysis of LGBTQ game content. The project that will be presented in this talk represents a first attempt at correcting this lack. In this talk, researchers from Temple University and University of California-Davis will talk about a collaborative process involving collecting evidence of and analyzing nearly two decades worth of LGBTQ video game content. We will address the challenges of this endeavor, methods employed, and present some preliminary findings of our analysis.

Perceptions of homosexuality, same-sex practices, and non-heterosexual identities in Japan differ from those found in Western Europe and North America. Historically, practices that would have been labelled as primarily non-heterosexual in the West belong in Japan to specific social spheres that are perfectly hetero-normative. The specificity of these practices in relation to the heterosexual norm has also created a Japanese discourse establishing what happens if individuals step outside of predefined acceptable paths. This presentation explores how JRPGs reflect perceptions of male homosexuality in Japan and the dangers of stepping outside social conventions in regards to male same-sex practices.

This presentation gives an insight into a developer’s environment when creating a project that is uniquely foreign to a country’s economical and cultural acceptance but puts a regional theme in the spotlight.

This paper presents an overview of the current state of the Brazilian independent games scene from a critical perspective, in order to understand the role of gaming and game creation in the country. It discusses the aesthetic, institutional, discursive and political implications of a series of recent developments in the Brazilian independent games scene. This analysis can highlight major tension lines between the general public, creators, companies, the government and other social actors. It is also a productive perspective to understand how exclusive and discriminatory practices happen and how such practices shape the Brazilian society’s relationship with games.

Examining game design processes, such as the conceptualizing of game ideas and prototypes, through the lens of Paraguayan identity to demonstrate how cultural and ethnic identity can affect the way we approach game design.

As the DIY game scene grows and as game-making get more personal, we can observe an increasing number of games that deliberately play with feelings of awkwardness. In this panel, a rag-tag bunch of ladies and gentlequeers will take turns explaining how awkwardness figures into their game design practices, and how ideas of inappropriateness and inconvenience can be transformative in a feminist sense.

PsXXYborg is an example of arts-led research and glitch/installation game art, the result of funding and support offered by FiG (Feminists in Games) and the OCADu game:play lab. The content, both visually and conceptually engage with glitch as both a symptom of the imperfection of systems and a signal of potential rifts and further breakage. The project toured an individual player through a slow separation from their consciousness and into a purely digital reality using a dual screen FMV interaction. Videos were produced by Hannah Epstein and Sagan Yee, technology by Alex Leitch. This panel addresses some of the fragility of digital work, the visual correlation between feminism and “the glitch” and the places where glitch helped to communicate the main ideas of the work.