Engaging/Expanding Communities through Game Design

Designers, instructors, and activists have used a variety of techniques in recent years to both expand the groups making games and the types of civic missions games can help tackle. Panelists will explore the significance of a program for promoting game design among adolescents from underrepresented communities; share new insights gathered from a participative, intergenerational game design project; and examine what we can learn about civic outcomes from designing civic games.

Jennifer Jenson & Negin Dahya:

In this presentation, Dr. Negin Dahya (University of Washington) and Dr. Jennifer Jenson (York University) present findings from a videogame development project with marginalized girls and boys in two under-served urban communities in Toronto, Canada. Drawing on their backgrounds in digital media studies, videogame students, gender studies and feminist theory, pedagogy and technology, Dahya and Jenson address the intersection of race, class, and gender in the sociotechnical worlds of young videogame developers. In addition, Dahya and Jenson consider the role of videogame development for teaching and learning computational thinking and other STEM related skills in schools.

Margarida Romero & Eugène Loos:

“Designing games for older people they really want to play requires a participatory design of digital games (Blat, Arcos, & Sayago, 2012; Vanden Abeele, & Van Rompaey, 2006). Participative game design is a powerful learning experience where different generations reunite for creating a game (Loos, 2014). The goal is not only the game final product but the game creation process. In this presentation, we introduce an intergenerational game design experience developed in Québec (Canada) where older people act as narrative directors, secondary level students as game designers and a pre-service teacher as an instructional designer.”