I am super excited to have been invited to present at this year’s Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, CA. Thank you to Colleen Macklin (Associate Professor of Media Design, Parsons School of Design at The New School) and John Sharp (Professor of Games & Learning, Parsons The New School for Design) for including me in their roundtable: Teaching Games with Games 7: Changing the Game, which is part of the Educators Summit at GDC. The panel will be today, Tuesday, March 22, at 10:50 AM PT. This year’s panel includes:
- Kishonna Gray (Associate Professor, University of Kentucky)
- Shawn Pierre (Visiting Assistant Arts Professor, Independent)
- Lien Tran (Assistant Professor, School of Design, College of Computing and Digital Media, DePaul University)
- TreaAndrea Russworm (Associate Professor of English & Associate Dean, UMass Amherst)
Special thanks to Kishonna for suggesting me for the session. Each of us will be presenting a short activity, assignment, or practice when teaching (with) games. The panel description reads:
It’s time for games to change! While we might teach games as systems, how is game education implicated in systems and structures of power? Join us to hear from five educators working on this change to break out of these power structures to include different perspectives, voices, and approaches. Whether it be focusing on accessibility, devising strategies for anti-racist game design, recognizing the game industry as a truly global phenomenon, or being more thoughtful about environmental impacts, our speakers will show strategies for making the change we want to see in games and the game industry.
I am going to talk briefly about “queergaming” and an exercise I created called “Game Mechani-Skits,” where participants take an existing game and game mechanic and change one thing to queer it, to make it more fair, just, inclusive, collaborative, or interesting. Here are my slides:
Unfortunately, I was not able to make to to GDC in person this year. I had really, really wanted to do because it is my first one (and because it is in San Francisco). I just could not squeeze it into my already full and complicated semester. But I do hope to be able to do next year’s in person (as long as I am invited, of course).