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).

This course combines lecture, seminar, and hands-on activities. Consider this offering to build on: Race, Social Justice, and DH; Intersectional Feminist Digital Humanities; Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed; Queer Digital Humanities; Accessibility & Digital Environments; Critical Pedagogy and Digital Praxis; Engaging Play/Playing to Engage; Digital Storytelling; Digital Fictions, Electronic Literature, Literary Gaming; and more.