Feminist Pedagogies for Games: An Introduction

by: Rebecca Rouse , Josefin Westborg & Amy Corron Youmans , November 19, 2024

Feminist Pedagogies for Games: An Introduction

Discussions about pedagogy and games bring to mind the many uses of games in teaching other disciplines. For example, games have been employed in teaching math playfully or competitively. Elsewhere, they have provided experiential learning possibilities via interactive simulation (Brummel et al, 2010; Klopfer 2011; Kapp 2012; Bowman & Standiford, 2015; Kalmpourtzis 2018; Mercer et al, 2021). There are also pedagogical games discussions with a more theoretical approach in mind, such as how to design (Cullinan & Genova 2023) or how the method of using games relates to learning theories (Westborg 2024). In contrast to these common trends in the field, this issue focuses on the teaching of game design itself.

The games discipline in higher education is at an exciting point of early maturation, with many games departments reaching ten- and twenty-year milestones. While in the arts and humanities at large we see significant ideological advances to promote criticality and inclusivity, particularly concerning the integration of feminist perspectives and methods in the classroom, in the pedagogy of teaching how to make games we find a gap. With some European undergraduate games programs celebrating their twentieth anniversary—for example, at the University of Skövde in Sweden—the moment has come for a deeper analytical reflection on implementing innovative feminist pedagogies in teaching future game designers.

Inspired by the Swedish connotation and usage of the term ‘pedagogy,’ we apply the concept broadly across all aspects of education from the classroom to institutional and political levels. This special issue highlights ongoing feminist teaching work in progress and envisions a brighter future for our field. Undoubtedly, our discipline has advanced in both research and practice, as evidenced by the growing wealth of feminist scholarship on games (Gray, Voorhees & Vossen 2018; DePass 2018; Kocurek 2020; Sarkeesian & Cross 2015; Chess 2020; Kocurek 2016) and the many games, both digital and physical, that themselves express feminist viewpoints and concepts (Dot’s Home 2021; Hair Nah 2017; #feminism 2016; Variations on Your Body 2014; Gone Home 2013; Brudpris 2013; Alfa/Omega 2012; Dys4ia 2012; Mad About the Boy 2010). Thus, we are well-positioned to advance our work in the classroom.

Most approaches to teaching the practice of game development at the undergraduate level and below have not tended to critical approaches such as those afforded by feminism in the classroom. They have most commonly focussed on a more general outlook, as evident in textbooks by Salen and Zimmerman (2003), Schell (2008), Fullerton (2014), and others. Thus, the shortage of literature that presents game design to students from a feminist standpoint means that the classroom remains a space somewhat ‘untouched’ by feminist thought, which, on the one hand, may be seen as problematic. However, we are also presented with potentially fertile ground and exciting potential.

The dominant methods of teaching games to date have concentrated on skills. The inherent pedagogy in the field adopts and fosters a stance that deceptively comes across as ‘apolitical.’ It is a problematic, old-school ideological attitude that comes as a legacy inherited from parent disciplines such as computer science (Malazita & Resetar 2018; Corron & Rouse 2022). Yet this purported neutrality is still a political stance that habituates students to neoliberal and individualistic mindsets. These dominant structures have a concealed power. Even if teachers want to apply feminist pedagogies in games classrooms, the learning curve presents challenges and obstacles to finding the best strategies to implement changes. While there are resources on applied feminist pedagogies in general (see Paechter 2002, for example), feminist pedagogy for game design has just started to develop, and there is only a limited number of available studies, even if there are some notable exceptions already in circulation (see Rouse & Youmans 2022).

Given this context, it might be appropriate to explain what we mean by ‘feminist pedagogies’ and ‘feminism’ in education. While feminist philosophy broadly originated in women’s rights movements, it has grown to encompass movements for social justice at the intersections of several dimensions of human experience, such as gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, ability, and sexual orientation (Ahmed 2017). In education, feminist pedagogies critically engage with the inequities and injustices faced by students, teachers, administrators, and other people linked to or affected by educational institutions, particularly those belonging to historically and systemically marginalised communities (Omolade 1987; hooks 1994). Feminist pedagogies ask critical questions about education: ‘who are we teaching, and what can we learn from them?’ ‘what should one learn so that they can challenge injustice in their lived experiences and communities?’ ‘how can the environment of education help challenge oppressive political structures and cultural norms rather than conform to them?’ (hooks, 1994; 2010).

Feminist pedagogies for games, in particular, foster a sense of collaboration as they explore how such questions manifest in relation to the content, practices, and culture of gaming and game design/development. For example, they examine ways of teaching game design that integrate students’ cultural backgrounds and experiences, rather than dismiss them (Ladson-Billings, 1995). Or they explore how games courses/curricula can be (re)-designed to centre the inherently political nature of game design, development, and analysis. Or, more broadly, they focus on what administrators in universities can do to prevent gatekeeping people of colour from careers in game development. While such a diverse set of examples illustrates the broad scope of feminist pedagogies, it also exemplifies their common goal—making the intersections of games and education more just, inclusive, and democratic. The aim of this special portfolio of articles is to showcase inquiry into such intersections and illuminate pathways for all people affiliated with educational institutes to integrate feminist pedagogies into practice.

This focus issue is a collection of contributions that explore and engage with feminist pedagogy in games education in various ways. Across the articles, some common threads emerge, including the deep desire and drive of educators to incorporate feminist methods in games pedagogy as a way to critically engage the field. Some articles are rooted in the rich learning experiences of many inventive approaches. Others critically learn from the messiness of outcomes when seeking to expand the purview of the classroom beyond canonical boundaries and the challenges and friction sometimes faced when working to innovate at what we can identify as a learning edge in the games discipline at large.

Let us look briefly at each of the articles:

The issue opens with Mending the ‘Magic’ Circle: Crafting Feminist Pedagogy in Game Design by Anne Sullivan (York University, Canada) and Anastasia Salter (University of Central Florida, USA), who offer a joint reflection on two design courses that were developed from a feminist crafting perspective. They examine influences from textile art communities, crafting practices, and mentorship and collaboration approaches to ponder the playful experiences of failure they witnessed. While game design spaces, including the game design classroom, have often been male-dominated, Sullivan and Salter draw on traditionally feminine-coded practices and communities for developing their games classrooms as community-focused, sharing-oriented, and failure-friendly. The article concludes with hands-on takeaways for teachers to consider creating a constructive tone for their classrooms, making space for failure, and designing a curriculum to facilitate generous collaboration.

This article is followed by Neurodivergent Feminist Teaching & Play by Anna Nygren (University of Gothenburg, Sweden), which provides a feminist neurodivergent and neuroqueer perspective on both play and games, and education. The article employs a creative approach to queer the traditional academic format through self-reflection boldly. The author shares her experience as a teacher who has been diagnosed with autism, and what is needed to support a neurodivergent alternative focus.

The third article, The Epistemic Peril of Teaching Games Whilst Queer by Josephine Baird and Sabine Harrer (Uppsala University, Sweden), explores the tension and precarity of acting as both the subject and object of games education involving LGBTQIA+ representation. The authors present the concept of epistemic peril, which is ‘the condition of having one’s knowledge contributions dismissed as biased, political, irrelevant, or not valid, by virtue of inhabiting marginalised subjectivities’ (Baird & Harrer 2024). Through reflection on their professional and teaching experiences in games education, as well as highlighting examples of marginalisation of the LGBTQIA+ population in the United States and abroad, the authors fully explore what it is like to teach and participate in the games education field while experiencing the effects of epistemic peril, and how this has affected both their participation in the field and games education overall. Baird and Harrer conclude with a call for a collective response with a solidarity approach, drawing attention to how we all are affected by epistemic peril.

Playing #gamergate in the Classroom: A Collegiate Feminist Approach by Mona Bozdog, Lynn Love and Robin Griffiths (Abertay University, Scotland) is a contribution that outlines the design and implementation of an edu-larp focused on Gamergate (GG) in a university-level Critical Studies course. The GG larp aimed to engage students in discussions on power dynamics, social systems, and biases in video game culture. The larp was designed using feminist pedagogical practices to stimulate dialogue and self-reflection and encourage students to explore complex topics by embodying characters. Facilitators were used to introduce narrative prompts to guide interactions and mitigate the risk of a toxic backlash as a result of the sensitive subject. While the larp successfully fostered deeper engagement and critical thinking, the authors also reflect on the negative aspects of such methods. They tend to be time-consuming, emotionally demanding, and reliant on the goodwill of the academic team. Even though institutional support was lacking, this article demonstrates the value of embodied learning and feminist pedagogy in addressing provocative subjects within education.

The next article, Experimental Game Design and Practices of Care by Silvia Ruzanka (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA) is a reflective piece that explores the development and teaching of a bachelor-level course that merges experimental game design with feminist perspectives on care. The course integrates experimental game design with feminist principles of care and artmaking, encouraging students to challenge conventional game mechanics and explore relationality, embodiment, and social interaction themes. It asks students to question assumptions about games, fosters critical thinking, and prompts a reflective approach to game-making by focusing on cooperation, care, and social interaction. Through this approach, students are invited to engage deeply with social issues, ultimately treating game design as an act of care.

Revising and Revamping a Feminist Gaming Class by Ashley P. Jones (Wartburg College, USA) takes the reader through the iterative curriculum development process of a course deployed across different higher education contexts. A trajectory toward increased peer learning is identified, along with goals for future development to facilitate further expansion with practices enhancing inclusion and accessibility. Using the lens of practice architectures and with a focus on experiential learning, Jones examines the relationship between her intentions as a teacher, the teaching contexts, students’ responses and outcomes as she developed several versions of a course focused on games and culture, in which connections between social issues and games are pertinent.

Game Jams in the Curriculum: A Feminist Pedagogy by Mona Bozdog and Robin Sloan (Abertay University, Scotland) illustrates how the authors approached challenges in a course for bachelor Game Design students designed to introduce theory and foster an inclusive learning environment. The challenges were due to the diverse skill levels and the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly regarding teamwork. To address this, the module was restructured around game jams, which encouraged peer learning, community building, and inclusivity. This approach, rooted in feminist pedagogy, emphasised collaboration, flattened traditional hierarchies, and celebrated diverse perspectives. Students and educators worked together, with lecturers actively participating in game jams, modelling design processes, and tackling critical topics such as gendered experiences in public spaces. By the end of the course, students had developed the skills to create meaningful, player-centred games and were prepared to engage with complex topics both in game design and beyond. The authors conclude with how the participatory teaching model, flattening of hierarchies, and an open classroom environment created community, facilitated empowerment and inspired students to embrace personal experience.

This article is followed by Teaching Intentional Design Practices: Feminist Game Design by Ahu Yolaç (Lawrence Technological University, USA), which presents a practical teaching toolkit rooted in feminist and critical pedagogy to assist games educators in helping students explore more inclusive and transformative game design processes. Rooted in the author’s experiences with student resistance to engage in more critical, inclusive, and intersectional design practices, the toolkit offers instructors a structured approach to guide students through developing the goals, social value, mechanics, narrative, and visual elements, design system, audience, and future of the game and its community through a feminist lens. After providing a solid feminist and critical theoretical background for the toolkit, the author invites readers to experiment with it and create new systems and tools to enrich our collective knowledge further.

Situating Rhetorical Listening as a Collaborative Pedagogical Tool by Julia E. Kiernan (Lawrence Technological University, USA) reflects on student-centred teaching practices that focus on listening facilitation as enacted by the faculty member. Listening here is understood as a rhetorical practice that is politically situated, in which the listener must work to remain active in an open stance but at the same time take a careful analytic approach to contribute to more meaningful communication. Key pedagogical strategies from Kiernan’s experience teaching various game studies courses are discussed, including reflection on student evaluations and the exchanges during peer teaching reviews.

The issue concludes with Taught to Awaken: The Experience of Games Student-Turned-Teacher by Sandra Alexandersson (University of Skövde, Sweden). The author provides a thoughtful and creative reflection of her experience, first learning about and experiencing feminist pedagogy in games education, assuming the role of a student and then engaging in the use of feminist pedagogy in her classrooms. Written in an autoethnographic diary-style account, the article explores the author’s past as a games education student experiencing resistance to learning and her journey through learning more about feminist pedagogy to broaden her understanding. Ultimately, the text is a reflection of conscious growth and adaptation. Inspirationally, it contributes to the argument for feminist pedagogy in advocating for change in games education and invites readers to jump on the feminist bandwagon.

Conclusion: Toward Games Education for All

Reflecting on the range of practices and perspectives presented in this focus issue, we, as editors, wish to call out to our male colleagues in the field to invite and inspire their future participation. While our call for proposals was circulated through all the significant games research networks, which are male dominated, we received minimal contributions from male researchers, with only one male author featured in the special issue. However, it is worth acknowledging that we had male colleagues contributing to the peer review process, but the male perspective is missing from the conversation presented here. This absence is not surprising and reflects the experiences we and many other women have had in their careers. Still, it brings up interesting questions, challenges, and opportunities worth mentioning here.

While the games field is male dominated, the field of pedagogical research is not. When debating feminism, gender, and equality, we commonly see even less male participation. Interestingly, given the male-dominant nature of the games field, including not only academia but also industry, this means that most of the students in the classrooms that are discussed in this special issue are male. For example, articles in this collection from Ahu Yolac and Sandra Alexandersson specifically reference this demographic, as it results in a sometimes-tricky dynamic for female faculty members.

When it comes to questions of marginalisation and equality, it is important to note who it is that often takes up these questions. As discussed in The Epistemic Peril of Teaching Games Whilst Queer by Josephine Baird and Sabine Harrer, this usually results in a disproportionate labour load falling on those who are already marginalised. How can the field of game design education move forward? Perhaps we need a critical turn, as has happened previously, in pedagogy and design. In pedagogy, we saw the critical pedagogy movement during the 1970s and, in the Swedish context, the ‘normkritisk’ movement from around 2008, while in design movements toward universal design from the 1960s and design for all date from the early 2000s. Suppose none of these movements have resulted in complete solutions to inequality; nevertheless, they have successfully normalised the work on equality and opened a more welcoming platform for pursuing such critical discussions and practical investigations as part of the recognised academic pursuit.

While game design education has not yet reached such a turning point, with this focus issue, we aim to encourage each other and everyone working in our discipline. We invite, in particular, our male colleagues to think about how they choose to teach, to open themselves to understanding teaching as a practice of care (i.e., facilitating, listening) as opposed to performance practice (i.e., the sage on the stage). We imagine that it may be due to experiences of female socialisation that it is an easier shift for some female colleagues to teach as facilitators of others’ creativity, as female egos have often been socially programmed to do this.

In conclusion, we ask all our colleagues and students to consider what feminist pedagogy is in games carefully. Who is missing from participating and practising it, and why? These questions and many others raised by the articles in this collection provide ample, fertile ground for future research. We look forward to the larger continued conversation and thank all our colleagues who participated as contributors, reviewers, and editors to bring this issue forward.