Experimental Game Design & Practices of Care

by: Silvia Ruzanka , November 19, 2024

In this article, I reflect on my experiences teaching a course in Experimental Game Design from the perspective of a feminist practice of care. At its core, care is about relationality and our attunement to the world while acknowledging presence and embodiment. Thinking with care also opens alternative ways of considering our relationship to technology (Key, Gatehouse & Taylor 2022) and to human and non-human worlds (Haraway 2016). Videogames are typically associated with challenge and competition, but games can also incorporate representations and mechanics of care (Ruberg & Scully-Blaker 2021).

What is ‘experimental’ game design? First, it often focuses on designing new mechanics and gameplay systems. Experimental game design can also refer to empirical methods, such as proposing and testing a hypothesis through a game, or about an element of a game’s design (Waern 2015). We can also consider experimental game design in terms of what it means to make experimental art. An avant-garde stance ruptures aesthetic structures, from game to anti-game. The experimental tradition within cinema presents different stories, different characters, and points of view outside of the mainstream. While the course design I describe is firmly about game design and is for game design majors, I place it in the context of experimental art practice. In addition to art games and playful artworks, this opens game design up to additional histories and modes of questioning. Questioning draws attention to assumptions that are built into students’ understanding of games and game design. Questioning in an experimental art practice leads us to messier engagement with the material. It allows students to be present with the material, and to work with the past and the present to form new futures in a mode not unlike Haraway’s concept of compost (2016). We can then think of questioning and experimentation as core components of a feminist practice of care.

I structure the course in three modules, each with a central question that motivates the readings, discussions, and projects. We begin by first asking how to define games and then critique these definitions. Second, we ask why do we play? What are we motivated by, what do we wish to say with games, and what impact do we want our games to have in the world? Finally, how do we play, and who do we play with? What are the situations, embodied experiences and interfaces of games, and what alternatives can we create? Who are our games made for, and what social spaces and relations can we create through games? For each project, we break into groups of around five students, with between three and five weeks for each project. I taught this course in the Fall of 2018, Fall of 2019, and Spring of 2020, with a typical enrolment of around 15 to 20 students. Example projects from these semesters show students responding to all the questions particularly in terms of relationality, either in relations between players or in complicating the relationship between the player and the game. In reflecting on the course, the concept of a feminist practice of care comes into focus as a way we might understand the meaning of an experimental game design practice and an experimental art practice.

Care 

How do we understand care? Because care is so familiar and everyday, its meaning may seem self-evident. Our common understanding of care is often in the sense of caring about things or taking care of things. In this understanding we forget another meaning, a kind of care that has a responsibility and attunement to ourselves and our world: a caring-for. In thinking about care, I turn first to Heidegger’s conception of care (2010) as central to the question of being. Heidegger comes to the question of being as a critique of Western metaphysics, its representational thinking, and the way this has structured our understanding of reality. Being and Time begins to question the assumptions on which all Western metaphysics is built, by looking at what this tradition has forgotten and concealed. Though there is much to critique in Heidegger and his political views, I agree with Andrea Conque that there is also ‘much to be gleaned’ or ‘appropriated’ from his thinking (2016:65).

Heidegger states that ‘The being of Dasein is care. This being exists entangled as thrown. Delivered over to the “world” discovered with its factical there and dependent upon it in taking care, Dasein awaits its potentiality-of­ being-in-the-world in such a way that it reckons with and on whatever is in eminent relevance for the sake of its potentiality-of-being’ (2010: 392). He talks about care in two senses: concern (besorgen) and solicitude (fursorgen). Concern is a directedness towards the world and things. It is our primary mode of ‘taking care of things’ in our familiar, everyday world. Solicitude is a directedness towards other beings in the world and has two possibilities: the inauthentic, a leaping-in and taking over; or the authentic, a solicitude that leaps ahead, anticipating another’s potentiality, possibilities, and giving them back their care. ‘Giving back their care’ is to say that the other’s capacity for their own directedness towards the world is returned, rather than being subsumed. One can be thought of as ‘taking care of’ and the other as ‘caring for.’

There is a kind of care that is directed away from us and sees the world as things that are of use to us, and a kind of care that is directed towards ourselves and how we relate to the world and beings in it. While care is universally part of everyday life, Heidegger draws attention to an understanding of care that had been forgotten. Care may have many meanings, but the care that is understood as how we exist has been obscured.

Though Heidegger is essentially concerned with ontology, there is a politics of care emerging in Being and Time—care that is for beings to come into Being in themselves. He goes partway but falls short on the social and political implications of care. It is also easy to forget that care also describes a kind of labour, and that this responsibility and labour are often gendered, unevenly distributed, unevenly valued, or invisible. Joan Tronto (1993) and other feminist thinkers foreground these aspects of care not only as a general good but as a foundation for developing different structures of morals and ethics (Gilligan 1993; Larrabee 2013; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Bozalek, Zembylas & Tronto 2020). In moving care from margin to centre, Tronto questions the boundaries that define what can be used to constitute a system of morals in the first place and develops an analytic framework that can be used to make sense of and critique power relations, inequities of gender, race, class, sexuality, or economic position in terms of care.

Tronto describes four phases of caring that she developed with Berenice Fisher (Tronto 1993). Caring-about is the recognition of the need of care. Caring-for is the responsibility of care, and care-giving is the work of care. Finally, care-receiving is the response of the person, or the thing cared for. This acknowledges care not just as an orientation or an action of the self towards the world, but as a relation of interdependence. These phases provide a means to tease apart nuances in relations of care and reveal places where care is active but hidden. We always care: it is what we do, the essence of what we are. Feminist thinkers foreground the question of how we care as we participate in an active, ongoing process. To care is a response-ability. Care is the embrace and the bringing-together of the modalities of our existence, the spatial and the temporal, the rational and the embodied. How they come together structures how we are in the world and how we interact with the world.

Institution, Program Background & Course Context

The institution where I taught this course, as part of a Bachelor of Science major in game design and development, is a private research university in the Northeastern United States. The university enrols around 6,000 undergraduates, with a population that is 55% male, 45% female, and is predominantly White or Asian (around 42% White, non-Hispanic; 20% Asian; 12% Hispanic/Latino; 5% Black/African American). The game design major has around 180 students and is somewhat less diverse than the university overall (around 56% White, non-Hispanic; 11% Asian; 8% Hispanic/Latino; 5% Black/African American). The game design major is around 26% female, compared to 45% for the university overall.

Experimental Game Design is a required course in the major core sequence, typically taken in the third year after students have taken introductory game design courses and intermediate team-based production courses. It is taught in rotation by different faculties in the program, using a variety of approaches. Some versions of the course have focused on one large project, and others use a model of rapid prototyping with a game every week. Overall, it is thought of as the course students take once they have the foundations of their craft in making games, and where they are encouraged to experiment and push boundaries.

Course Design

A feminist practice of care acknowledges the nature of care as process. It focuses on establishing and maintaining relationships and on the ongoing maintenance and work in which we allow ourselves to both give and receive care. Applied to game design, the focus is not solely on the object we create and the concerns we think that object responds to, but one in which we are thinking through and thinking with care for our response-ability to ourselves and our relations to the world. The first step is to question and interrogate the assumptions we have developed about the nature of games to begin with. In teaching, I think of this practice as caring-for without leaping in, returning to Heidegger’s notion of authenticity (2010). In the introduction to the collection Posthuman and Political Care Ethics for Reconfiguring Higher Education Pedagogies, which calls for bringing together care, ethics, and posthumanism in order to expand the frame of possibilities, the editors write, ‘From a feminist new materialist and posthumanist position, teaching, learning, reading and writing practices involve close, respectful, inventive and responsive relationships of careful attention to details, doing justice to texts and to students’ (Bozalek, Zembylas and Tronto 2020: 3). I would add games, game-making tools, and game design practices, as materials for creative production, but also as texts and as entities that we are in relationship with. As bell hooks states in Teaching to Transgress: ‘any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone’s presence is acknowledged’ (hooks 1994: 8). In these pedagogies of care, we extend presence not just to students and teachers but to the more-than-human, to the material that engage with and create with. In this course, the entryway is through the concept of experimenting.

Experimenting entails opening space for dialogue through careful questioning of fundamental assumptions. These might include assumptions about what makes a game ‘good’ or ‘fun,’ who games are for, or how game development in a team should be organised. The process of questioning opens the way to acknowledging alternatives: different viewpoints, motivations, and interpretations; games for other players; different ways of playing games; or new ways of thinking about what a game is. The lens of experimenting loosens assumptions about the final result, with less emphasis on aspects such as gameplay features, production quality, or design balance and more on thoughtful engagement and relationship to the question, the process, and one’s teammates. I see experimenting and questioning as ways for students to come to their own ideas and into their own being, rather than have answers provided or imposed.

The first lecture frames the course in this manner:

1. This is an art class
2. But it is also a class about games
3. Above all, it is about:
4. EXPERIMENTING

The course is structured around three projects, each posed as a question that interrogates games and play. For each project, students work in small groups, assigned through different ludic methods such as dice and cards. Students are encouraged to make games using any game engine, tools, platforms, and methods they like.

All of these projects frame ‘experimenting’ in the context of experimental art. But what do we mean by experimental art? Defining experimental art seems almost redundant. As art can always be considered experimental, what sets explicitly experimental art apart from art in general? As Jill Bennett states, ‘When we describe art as “experimental,” then, we are often referring not to a formal testing procedure but to the inclination to test social boundaries and conventions; in other words, to contemporary art’s roots in the history of the avant-garde’ (2012:1). Derek Attridge argues that

The greatest artists, perhaps, are those who are most sensitive to the cultural context in which they are working (which is, of course, inseparable from the social, political, and economic environment), most open to the ideas, forms, sounds, shapes and feelings it occludes and the possibilities that exist for accessing them, most daring in letting those possibilities become real in their work, and most skilled at knowing when what they are making has reached its full realization (2018:10).

Experimental art, in this sense, is about possibility and relationality, a play with care. To be experimental is to play with, and to be open to, possibilities. If we are to think about how to create a more inclusive game design, we need an experimental approach, because we need to play with possibilities that have been closed off. Designing a game through an experimental art practice is a means to open up not only to new thought, but to play with other ways of being. Cayla Key, Cally Gatehouse and Nick Taylor argue that ‘Care as a feminist practice is about attending to what, how, and when things get caring attention and come to matter and what, how, and when things don’t. It is a relational, embodied, and ongoing practice which is necessarily particular’ (2022:677). The questions that structure the projects in this course are precisely about the what, how, and when of games and play.

Project 1: How Do We Define Games?

The first project prompt asks, ‘How do we define games?’ But before tackling this question, we first examine the equally difficult question of how we define art. We look at a series of examples, beginning with that most iconic work of art, the Mona Lisa (1503), and then Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1917), then a t-shirt with the Mona Lisa printed on it, then a portrait photo taken in front of the Mona Lisa. For each, we ask, ‘is this art?’ We ask the same question while looking at works by Rikrit Tiravanija, Corey Arcangel, Carolee Schneemann and others, each of which pushes back on attempts at a definition. This leads us to Arthur Danto’s argument via Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964) that art is defined not by beauty, taste, or truthfulness, or even as an image or object, but that art is about embodied meaning (Danto 2013). From here, we can consider the experimental not just in terms of experimenting with materials or developing new tools and techniques, but as ways of testing representations against experience. I introduce Roman Jakobson’s concept of the dominant (Jakobson 1981), the focusing component of a work of art that defines the structure and determines or transforms everything else in the work. Experimental art, then, is experimentation with embodied meaning; and we can say that the experimental also makes the dominant unfamiliar.

The first assignment is to apply this same process of definition and experimentation to games:

Dig deep into your days from Introduction to Game Design and History and Culture of Games and write a definition of what makes something a game. Then, make a game that pushes back on that definition or dominant.

The intent is not just to have students question standard definitions of games, though that is certainly an important outcome; it is also about getting students into a mode of questioning that they will utilise throughout the semester. The decision to ask students to write their own definition and then challenge it, rather than present them with a definition to challenge, is deliberate. It makes the exercise less about defining an oppositional relationship, and more about going through both definition and criticism as a dialectic process.

One example project created for this assignment is a game titled Why Is My Controller So Cute? The group had one artist, one writer, and four programmers. They chose player input as an essential defining feature of games and then made a game that ‘removes input.’ What the students meant by this was not removing interactivity entirely, in the sense of comparison between games and media such as books or films. Rather, they were interested in removing reliable input, the sense of control and agency in the player input loop. In Why Is My Controller So Cute? the game controller is a character who frequently disregards or ‘messes up’ the player’s input. This, of course, makes the game difficult and frustrating to play, and the group deliberately designed and wrote the character to be ‘cute.’ The game is framed as a typical side-scrolling platformer and is almost unplayable. However, the real point of the game is more about the player’s relationship to the controller character. This project was an interesting response to the prompt in that it challenged definitions of games in a way that seems at first to be about breaking the rules but is really about shifting attention to a part of the game system that is typically taken for granted and expected to be transparent.

A second example of a student project for the assignment on game definitions was The Lonely Fisherman. This group began by thinking of games in terms of rules and fairness, the degree to which mechanics, probabilities, and outcomes are transparent or hidden from the player. Like the Why Is My Controller So Cute? group, they decided to focus on a common defining feature, the idea that a game should have a beginning and an end. To remove this feature, they built a game as a Chrome browser extension. The fisherman character appears unpredictably, inserted into or overlaid on other web pages. He wants the player to interact with him—to play the game—and if ignored, he becomes increasingly demanding. Removing ‘control of when it ends’ takes place in multiple ways. There is no way to end the game other than uninstalling the browser extension, and it activates at random. This removes the player’s control over when to begin and when to end the game. Additionally, it breaks the distinction between the space within the game and space outside the game, where the game ‘ends’ in the sense of a boundary.

Both examples are about relationships to part of the game system or to the game as a whole, and to the framing or form of the game rather than the content contained within it. The lonely fisherman demands care. It is similar to the virtual pet genre of games, but we might also think of the way it spills over into everyday web browsing as breaking the boundary around when and where we care for the game character. In Why Is My Controller So Cute? the ‘controller’ shifts from being simply defined by usability to being its own entity. We might then think of the relation between player and controller in terms of care. Does the controller take care of our needs? Do we care for it? Perhaps in breaking gameplay, the controller comes into its own authentic being.

Project 2: Why Do We Play?

We play games for challenge, for competition, for the social experience, for excitement, for stories—overall, for fun. But really understanding why we play, what attracts different players to different games, and what makes one game memorable and another forgettable—this is the mystery at the heart of game design. All art forms can sustain us in myriad ways, provide numerous kinds of enjoyment, pleasures, comforts, and a deeper understanding of the world and ourselves. This is true in games as much as in any other medium—but in game design we often work within common patterns and assumptions about the limits of the medium that may be artificially limiting. Where are the unexplored spaces in games? What new ways can that question—’Why do we play?’—be answered? What emotions and experiences can a game provide beyond the typical expectations? How might we expand the aesthetic possibilities of the videogame?

For this project, I assign four readings: ‘The Definition of Play’ in Man, Play, and Games by Roger Caillois; ‘Videogames as avant-garde art’ by Brian Schrank, from Avant-garde Videogames: Playing with Technoculture; Brian Upton’s ‘Playing without Winning,’ from The Aesthetics of Play; and the online essay ‘Videogames are Boring’ by Brie Code (Caillois 1958; Schrank 2014; Upton 2015; Code 2016). These readings are selected to set up a process of definition followed by experimentation, similar to the process that the students followed in the first project. A common way that theorists try to understand fun is through categorisation. Caillois, along with Raph Koster (2004), Nicole Lazzaro (2004), Johannes Huizinga (1949), Greg Costikyan (2002), Brian Sutton-Smith (1997), Katie Salen Tekinbaş and Eric Zimmerman (2003), and many others, have developed frameworks and categories to explain different motivations for play and different kinds of fun. This is useful, but any system of categories immediately produces exceptions, particularly in something like games. So, I ask the students, ‘What are some things that Caillois and others are missing?’ For example, Schrank’s (2014) survey of experimental games and art projects, many of which blur the line between definitions of ‘game’ and ‘artwork,’ looks at the development of the game medium in relation to art history and the rise of ‘avant-garde’ art in the 20th century. And if games are an art medium, then what Upton (2015) is looking for is an overall aesthetic framework of games and play, a solid method of analysis that we can use to make sense of them. Here, he examines what happens when you remove something fundamental—the idea of ‘winning’—from the game, and how that forces us to look more carefully at what the play experience provides when that essential element is missing. Removing the win condition is, of course, one form of pushing back on the dominant in games. Brie Code’s 2016 essay for the videogame industry website Gamesindustry.biz goes further, arguing that ‘maybe everything we know is wrong’ (2016). Writing from the perspective of a professional developer, she asks why so many people actually do not enjoy playing videogames, and what game designers might be missing. For Code, it is not enough to just remove things that players dislike, whether that element is a story trope, a setting, a game mechanic, or a design feature such as winning. Instead, she asks us to rethink the entire purpose of games. She is not interested in excitement, competition, spectacle, and mastery, or in the methods of critique and deconstruction in avant-garde art. Instead, Code states: ‘I’m interested in care, in characters, in creation, in finding a path forward inside games that helps me find my path forward in life. I am interested in compassion and understanding. I’m interested in connecting’ (2016). Her argument for the importance of care in games was, at the time, one of many directions and possibilities the students were presented with. However, I would now argue for care as a deeper principle that ties together multiple threads in the course, and in fact a radical way of considering what game design is. I will return to the importance of care in a later section of this paper, but for now, I will continue to the assignment at hand:

In this project you will examine this question: Why Do We Play? What do we hope to get out of games? What emotions and experiences do we want games to provide? Thinking about art more broadly, what do we hope to get out of art, and what emotions and experiences do we seek in art?

Create a digital game that responds to questions of why we play and what games can give us, using the ideas from at least 2 of the readings.

Positive Reinforcement was a game about encouraging and promoting healthy lifestyle habits, particularly for players with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The game presents a selection of real-world tasks, arranged in a tree. The player clicks on a task icon to mark it as completed. When a tree of tasks is completed, this unlocks an achievement and a new tree of tasks. The group’s design process began with the observation that in their experience, the majority of mainstream games fall into Brian Sutton-Smith’s category of contest-driven play (Sutton-Smith 1997), with other types of play, such as informal social play and vicarious play, relatively unexplored or simply viewed as ‘experimental.’ They also drew inspiration from Brie Code’s call to make games for people different from ourselves (Code 2016), and designed the game with, and for, a friend of one of the students, a middle-aged woman with ADHD and little experience playing modern video games.

This project stood out because of its personalised design. The students acknowledged the limitations of making a game with a playtest audience size of n=1 in the context of a typical design process. However, making a game for one person and working closely with them to design it is itself an act of care. There is an assumption baked into game design that the goal should be to make the game appealing to a broad group of players, to a large and unknown audience. Games are assumed to be products for mass consumption. The idea of making a game for one person seems almost absurd in its inefficiency. Remove the context of mass-media production, however, and we can think of making a game for one person as a deeply personal and caring act. It also allows for specificity, for games that are completely unique and special.

What can, or should, a game about mental health do? Ruberg and Scully-Blaker point out limitations of ’empathy games,’ noting that they are typically ‘invested in prompting players to care about others rather than in giving them the tools to care for others’ (2021:664), as well as the pitfalls in creating games about a mental illness without close collaboration in the development process from people with lived experience of it. In contrast, we might see Positive Reinforcement as a project that is explicitly about caring-for rather than just caring-about, in both the result and in the development process.

Project 3: How We Play and With Who

The third project continues the idea of connecting introduced in Project 2. We look at games and interactive art projects that involve physical spaces and objects, starting with Richard Gabriele’s project in which he turned Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) into a mini-golf course (Gabriele 2017). Duchamp’s ‘readymades,’ sculptures made from everyday, mass-produced objects, are prime examples of Arthur Danto’s concept of art as embodied meaning (Danto 2013). In Gabriele’s piece the urinal transforms from an everyday object to artwork to game (though game as art). But if the original Fountain was shocking in its transgression, Gabriele’s transgression of the new boundaries of the art object neutralises both revulsion and reverence to land in between in the banal. At the same time, by turning Fountain into a game, Gabriele extends Duchamp’s own interest in making his work interactive.

From here we look at chaotic party games such as B.U.T.T.O.N. (Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally Ok Now) (2011) by Copenhagen Game Collective, and Tenya Wanya Teens (2013) by Keita Takahashi, Venus Patrol and Wild Rumpus; interactive artworks that deal with relations in physical space like Scott Snibbe’s Boundary Functions (1998); or works that deal with online connection overlaid on physical space like Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming (1993). We look at projects with interfaces that are musical instruments, like Open Score (1966) by Robert Rauschenberg and the Experiments in Art and Technology research group, Guitar Gods (2002) by The Jackals and RR The Headbanging Simulator (2016) by Antonin Fourneau. We then examine games that require players to work together, like Mary Flanagan’s Giant Joystick (2016) and Bounden (2014) by Game Oven, or to fight each other with comic violence, like Slapfriends (2015) by Terence Tolman and Jax Ceceri. Finally, Painstation (2001) by Volker Marawe and Tilman Reif marks an extreme point in raising the stakes and pushing the boundaries in the unspoken expectations of games, that games do not physically impact us in reality. With these projects in mind, the students tackle the third assignment:

Create a game that responds to the idea of the physical and social space of play: what spaces we play in, what the physical objects and interfaces are, and how they create interactions between the players.

The game must be for 2 or more players in a public space (think party games rather than online multiplayer).

The game must have a digital component and also incorporate physical space, objects, or actions.

Your game might involve:

– an alternative interface

– a customised or specific physical object (for example, what can an arcade cabinet become?)

– physical actions and interactions in addition to the digital ones

– a physical environment made specifically for the game

– costumes and wearables

– unusual ways of using existing game interfaces

Mystery Medium was a supernatural noir detective game for two players, with HTC Vive virtual reality headset and a custom-made interface. This game was created for the third assignment, to create a game that explores questions of how we play and with whom. One player is the Detective, working to solve a murder. They are given a case file (a manila folder of photographs and documents) and an evidence board (a corkboard with pins and string). The second player is the Medium, with paranormal powers, able to see glimpses of clues through visions in the VR headset. The Medium tries to describe what they see to the Detective, who then arranges evidence on the board. The pieces of evidence have RFID tags. Sensors in the back of the corkboard detect which pieces of evidence have been added to the board and where, which then prompt new ‘visions’ for the Medium, until the pair have solved the mystery. The game was a finalist at the 2019 Intel University Games Showcase in San Francisco, an event held alongside the Game Developers Conference with teams from 29 different colleges and universities. The team was notable both for the unique interface and for being the only all-female team in the Showcase.

The Red Thread of Fate was a project from the Spring 2020 iteration of the course that incorporated the ‘why do we play,’ ‘how do we play,’ and ‘who do we play with’ questions into one longer project. Like Mystery Medium, this was a two-player cooperative game, with each player given partial information and being dependent on the other to succeed. The title of the game comes from a Chinese proverb about an invisible red string that connects people who are destined to be together. Each player tries to find their way through a maze-like tangle of red thread, tracing their finger along the lines, but without any indication of which line is correct. The game deliberately tries to lead the player astray with misinformation and deceit. The other player can see hints of the correct path and must communicate them to their partner to help them find their way. The group was interested in having success by being dependent on eye contact, relationship-building, and communication to get the players to a place of trusting each other more than the game is showing them. Due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown of RPI’s campus mid-semester, the project was only partially completed, but the design process and prototypes showed a unique way of approaching all the key questions together.

These are asymmetric cooperative games in which the two players work towards a common goal but have very different things they can do. In these examples, the players also inhabit different spaces, and cooperation specifically hinges on communication. This is not just cooperation in the sense that working together improves the chance of success. The players are dependent on each other’s support to be able to act at all. Both games incorporate new interaction technologies. Rather than serving as a facilitator for communication, technology is used as a barrier to place the players in different spaces. This creates the requirement for the dynamic of mutual support through communication and the relation of care between the players.

Incubator Program

 In addition to the undergraduate and graduate curriculum in games, the school runs a games incubator aimed primarily at recent graduates and independent developers in the nearby region. The goal of the program is to support early-stage game studios in the process of forming companies, with material covering game design and business topics such as marketing, community management, and preparing a pitch deck and presentation for a publisher. It has been offered in a variety of formats, typically as a six-week summer intensive. The primary focus is on building companies, business plans, marketability, and producing commercially viable games. The program is operated by faculty and staff from the university, with additional external guest speakers and mentors.

In the summer of 2020, I was brought in to consult on a rapid pivot in the program. There were several challenges facing the team. This was during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The university had shut down its campus and sent students home a few months earlier to finish the spring semester remotely. Over the summer, the campus remained largely closed against a global backdrop of stay-at-home orders and social distancing. The incubator had previously been structured as an intensive in-person program, frontloaded with day-long lectures and group activities, which did not translate as well into a remote format.

There was a crisis point within the first week, with interpersonal conflict exacerbated by a combination of the online format, time zone differences, cultural differences, and the global context of stressors. While the issues were ones that usually could be resolved through dialog, the remote format made this significantly harder. It was clear that a major change was needed. The program re-organised the instructional team, and assistance was needed to rapidly redesign the course. The new design shifted away from lecture content to a primary focus on weekly design prototypes, and I recommended that the first prototype brief be to make a game about care. This served several purposes. It refocused the participants’ energy on a constructive project, it resonated with much of what they were experiencing in their own lives at that moment, and the prompt was worded to connect ideas of care on a personal level and on a global level. Additionally, it was a way to open a dialog about care in its different forms, and it helped the group to process and move past the space of conflict. The result was an enthusiastic regrouping that set the stage for a successful remainder of the six weeks. One of the notable games that came from this cohort was Tree Trunk Brook (2020) by The Sheep’s Meow, ‘a tiny adventure game about hiking during the pandemic.’ It is a quiet game, where you walk through the woods, take pictures, find lost items, and talk with other hikers. Tree Trunk Brook was a kind of refuge for players who felt trapped, both in the literal sense of stay-at-home orders and in the psychological sense. It is a game very much of the pandemic era; the indoor visitor centre is closed, everyone wears masks, and observes social distancing, even out in the woods. But it is also a game not just about being outside, but about forming connections and caring for others.

Experimental Game Design as Practice of Care

In designing this course, the central idea was to connect experimental game design with ideas and practices in experimental artmaking. Each of the projects brings students through a process of experimentation through questioning, expanding outwards from theoretical, through personal, to social. This was itself an experiment, and one which I undertook as a teacher with an attitude of openness to the results. I did not come into the course with a clearly defined expectation of what the work would look like or a definition to give students for what kinds of games would count as experimental and which ones wouldn’t. This was an initial challenge for some students, who were accustomed to having more precisely defined and constrained assignments and to optimising their work for a grading rubric. Structuring the course around core questions struck an effective balance between openness and constraint. Using questions rather than thematic prompts or project briefs reinforced the idea of the experimental as a process of questioning. Having both dialog through critique and individual written responses after each project was useful for students to reflect on the meaning of what they were making and on the process of questioning and discovery they had gone through.

A consistent thread across all iterations of the course was the importance of care. Some of the strongest student projects and responses were explicitly engaged with notions of care: relationships with characters in the game, developing a caring relationship with another player, or making a game to help someone else. This may partly be due to students making games about care as a way to counter dominant conventions in game design. Alternatively, it may be that the course gave students permission and a space in which to make games they wanted to make. I suspect it is also, in part, a natural result of centring questioning. Questioning is key to moving past conventional essentialist perspectives, which is particularly important in STEM fields. Part of this is having students question their own assumptions and biases in the process, but in a nurturing rather than confrontational mode.

Games that aim to raise awareness about a social issue or seek to engage players with something in the world are, in essence, games of caring-about. We can think of games that are about forming interconnected relations as games that are about caring-for, such as in the mentioned student games The Lonely Fisherman, Mystery Medium, and The Red Thread of Fate. In each of these games, the player takes on responsibility towards other players or towards a virtual character. Why Is My Controller So Cute? complicates this relationship of care, aiming to make the controller character simultaneously a source of frustration and a persona that the player will care for. We might think of The Lonely Fisherman as an example of care-giving, and the Fisherman’s response to the player in terms of care-receiving. Tree Trunk Brook encompasses all four phases, from caring about the state of the world to caring-for and care-giving towards the other characters and the environment in the game. We might also view the creation of a game as an act of care-giving and the response of players as care-receiving in difficult times.

Bo Ruberg and Rainforest Scully-Baker interrogate the actuality of care in games, asking ‘who is cared for? What is cared about? Does this create new possibilities for resistance or does it reinforce the status quo[?]’ (2021:669). Before the question of who is cared for and what is cared about, we might first begin with how we care. The goal of this course is not to direct students to the answer, but simply to have them go through the work of thinking about how to care through coming together with their groups in dialogue on the readings, games, and artworks and their own experiences.

There are multiple ways we can care, which is to say, there are multiple ways we can be in the world and relate to the world. Experimentation is a way in which we can play with how those things come together. We can accept the structure of care that has been passed on to us and that we experience in the present, but experimentation allows us to imagine other ways that this coming-together can be formed and shaped. Experimentation is a way of expressing care as practice.

This course also resonates with Ergin Bulut’s call for a visual materialist pedagogy for videogames (Bulut 2013). Bulut’s visual materialist pedagogy is ‘not just an attempt to create alternative ways of seeing, but rather an attempt to combine labour with aesthetics, constantly bearing in mind the danger of commodification as a gamer in two respects: consumer and producer’ (2013: 410). He draws from Walter Benjamin to draw out labours that are present in games: the labour of production through playing the game, and the labour of seeing. It is a two-fold approach: one aspect is to look at aesthetics not through a moral lens but as a material practice, while the second lies in critiquing history as an unfolding process rather than a linear progression. Care is precisely about what Bulut refers to as the ‘here and now.’ We are embodied in the world, and the ‘here and now’ acknowledges the materiality of our existence and the power relations that cause us to be labourers.

Care is not only about special moments. It is about the everyday act of being. Though the everyday is when we are furthest away from understanding being, it is where being is the most expressed. Thinking about care is also addressing the question of what possibilities exist for action: what do we do, and how are those possibilities pre-shaped?

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) adds the dimension of thinking with care, including thinking-with, dissenting within, and thinking-for. Here, she makes a link between thought and acting in the world, forming an overall practice of care. This practice of care is ultimately directed towards ‘maintaining and repairing’ our world, including both the human and the non-human (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Tronto (1993) calls for an understanding of care as defined through attentiveness, responsibility, and responsiveness. If the experimental in art or in games is characterised by awareness of cultural context, testing boundaries and conventions, and openness to new possibilities, we can then view the experimental also in terms of attentiveness, responsibility, and responsiveness.

Games are a way to see the impact of the structures of care that shape how we exist in the world and what things we deem important and worthy of our concern. We might, therefore, see experimental game design itself as a practice of care.