Game Jams in the Curriculum: A Feminist Pedagogy

by: & Robin Sloan , October 31, 2024

In September 2022, over one hundred first-year BA (Hons) Game Design and Production students at Abertay University embarked on our module Developing Game Concepts, which introduced them to game design theory and practice. As their first point of contact with game creation in an educational context, we were particularly mindful of our responsibility for establishing an inclusive environment and setting expectations for the game design process.

Our students come from diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. This includes different routes to Higher Education (joining directly from Secondary Education or transferring from Further Education). At the same time, all our students have varying degrees of familiarity with technology and development tools. For many, the module was their first encounter with working in teams and in-person. This was of particular concern following the disruptions to teaching caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Of note—and in line with trends across games, computer science and technology-oriented degree programs (Women in STEM 2023)—our student cohort was disproportionately comprised of male students.

In this context, we posed the following research question: How can an introductory game design module be redesigned to demonstrate an inclusive design process to a diverse cohort of students?

Through a review of the literature and reflection on our own practice, we posited that reframing the module using a game jam model would enable us to address the myriad challenges of inclusion in game design education. Game jams can support community formation and peer learning, addressing the challenge of skills diversity and bridging the expertise and experience gaps through knowledge exchange. Game jams can also be designed to introduce students to a diverse range of design practices and tools, and through the use of themes and diversifiers promote inclusive design practices and critical engagement with current and future EDI challenges.

Furthermore, the use of game jams in the classroom enabled us, the tutors, to jam alongside the students. This approach allowed us to flatten the classroom hierarchy and demonstrate good practice in embracing dialogical design underpinned by our diversity of perspective and lived experience (hooks 1994). This approach is in line with the ideals of feminist pedagogical principles and critical pedagogy, which promote blurring of the traditional teacher/student boundaries, empowerment, and community formation, building confidence in individual voices, respecting and embracing personal experience, and challenging traditional methods of theory and instruction (Webb et al. 2002; hooks 1994). In taking this approach, Developing Game Concepts is a case study that illustrates how game jams and participatory teaching can serve as a feminist game design pedagogy to support active learning and citizenship.

In what follows, we discuss how the format of Developing Game Concepts promoted the principles of feminist pedagogy. We argue for the game jam format as a method of applied game design teaching and for teaching best practice through demonstration and teaching-by-doing in a flat hierarchy classroom.

Firstly, we consider how established modes of teaching games could present biases towards different learning styles. Here we critique the modes of learning game design that are driven by technology, software, and development. Instead, we propose a need for game design classes that promote inclusion, diversity of voices and perspectives, and opportunities for students to appreciate the inherent social, critical, and reflexive attributes of game design as a creative problem-solving process. This analysis incorporates our reflection on practice as game design educators.

Next, we present our approach to the design of the entry-level game design module, Developing Game Concepts. We discuss the inclusion of game jams in our game design curriculum, their impact on students, and our collaborative design practice. Our analysis is informed not only by feminist thinking on games and game design pedagogy, but also by our own gendered experience as educators, game makers, and citizens. We discuss the game jam model to unpack how game jams offer opportunities for a diversity of voices, experiences, and learning styles to be promoted within the class.

Finally, we discuss how framing students as peers promotes inclusion and how we, as educators, participated in class activities alongside students by designing our own game. The selection of the topic for our game—the experiences of women walking alone in public spaces—made visible to students that games are political and have social and personal contexts when experienced by diverse players. Our process of developing the game during class and discussing and demonstrating every stage of development to students modelled best practice. It illustrated how dialogic design practice values lived experience and diversity of perspective, while the topic inspired students to explore other serious topics in their games. As a partnership between designer-educators with different gendered experiences, we reflect on what we learned from our design process and our sharing of experience openly in the classroom and with interaction from our students.

Game Design Pedagogy: The Status Quo

Our Game Design and Production degree attracts students with a solid vocational interest in games and prior experience playing video games. This can benefit students’ curiosity, dedication, engagement with the course, and motivation for self-directed learning and independent study (Zagal & Bruckman 2008). However, alongside these benefits, game design pedagogy faces numerous challenges. Rebecca Rouse and Amy Corron capture some of the ones we consistently encounter in our classes in ‘Levelling Up: A Critical Feminist Pedagogy for Game Design’ (2020).

One of the main challenges we encounter is the ongoing struggle with diversity and inclusion in the games industry (Ukie 2022) and in games (Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media 2023). This leads to exclusionary practices in gaming (Shaw 2015) and a lack of gender diversity in students who undertake game-related courses (Harvey 2019; Women in STEM 2023). Furthermore, the toxicity associated with ‘gamer culture’ can permeate the classroom and disrupt the learning environment for students and lecturers (Ruberg 2019). Foregrounding technical and practical skills leads to a devaluation of critical thinking and cultural studies (Shaw 2010), while students tend to value practical knowledge at the expense of theoretical knowledge and critical engagement with games (Zagal & Bruckman 2008). Therefore, the status quo of games pedagogy tends to be skill-focused, apolitical, and instrumentalist (Rouse & Corron 2020).

Many students who enrol in game design programs will also identify as ‘gamers’ or fans of games, which, counterintuitively, can have a negative impact on learning game design practice through what Zagal and Bruckman call a naïve understanding of games (2008). Prior experience playing games can develop biases against the learning outcomes for game design modules. The pre-university gaming experience can be focused on specific titles or genres rather than a diverse range of games and play styles. It can result in a games vocabulary limited to descriptive terminology originating from reviews and ‘Let’s Play’ videos. As a result, assuming a degree of objectivity and critical distance when discussing and analysing games can be challenging (Zagal & Bruckman 2008). Students may confuse playing for fun and entertainment (as ‘gamers’) with playing for critical analysis and understanding (as future designers or game scholars). Playing and designing games require different skill sets, which many students sometimes struggle to understand, particularly in the first year of their degree.

In our pedagogical experience, we have noticed a segregation of theory and practice, the two often separated in the curriculum into game studies modules (assessed through written assignments) and design modules (assessed through portfolio of practice). This has led to a devaluation of theory and research by students, ignoring the vital role they play in framing design thinking and driving innovation. At the same time, the games industry expects graduates to demonstrate a high level of proficiency with specialised software and technology. This can increase the pressures on game development programs to focus on providing technical and practical modules at the expense of modules that develop critical and soft skills. The neoliberal approach to Higher Education can, in turn, fuel student expectations about course content and skill development, such that any attempt to challenge the pedagogic status quo can be greeted with resistance and negative module feedback (Bradbury-Rance 2020; Rouse & Corron 2022; Zagal & Bruckman 2008).

To address these numerous challenges, we believe that game design education requires alternative and increasingly creative approaches to delivery and assessment, which encourage creative expression and balance practical and technical skill development with soft skill development. Furthermore, we believe that the status quo in games education can act against moves to curate a diverse and inclusive environment. Therefore, alternative approaches are needed to help platform diverse voices, facilitate inclusion, value lived experience on equal footing, celebrate the value and uniqueness of each voice (hooks 1994), and develop critical thinking embedded within design practice. This entails ‘accepting the work of education as always already a political project and making the choice to teach toward liberation and social justice’ (Rouse & Corron 2020), and a call for game design classes to promote inclusion, diversity of voices and perspectives, and opportunities for students to appreciate the inherent social, critical, and reflexive attributes of game design as a creative problem-solving process.

Developing Game Concepts Case Study: Game Jams as a Model for Inclusive Design Education

Our intervention was with the module Developing Game Concepts, a first-year core module and introduction to game design. Until 2022, the module was delivered as an introduction to the games industry, covering the different development roles, developing and presenting a pitch, producing a marketing plan, and generating the documentation for the self-defined game concept. In many ways, the industry focus of this module aligned with the status quo in games education discussed previously. As Developing Game Concepts is the students’ first encounter with game design, we wanted to shift the focus from the games industry to game design practice. We aspired to:

  • Create a community of practice, facilitate peer learning, feedback and knowledge exchange.
  • Take advantage of the diversity of perspectives, experiences, and skills our students bring to the program.
  • Promote inclusive design practices and critical engagement with current social and industry challenges.
  • Lower the barrier to entry by focusing on design skills and prototyping, introducing alternative tools that require little or no prior (coding and technical) knowledge.
  • Build confidence in our students and empower them to voice, express, and communicate their ideas.
  • Encourage students to share work-in-progress, embrace feedback through playtesting, and put critical distance between themselves and the work.
  • Build students’ portfolios, focusing on documenting processes and publishing games.
  • Help students understand the importance of prioritising rigour in process over quality of outcome and apply best practices in game design by practicing rapid prototyping cycles.
  • Demonstrate the value of engaging with theory and research.

To address these aspirations, we reviewed game-a-week initiatives, game jams used in educational settings, feminist pedagogies principles and ways of modelling or demonstrating best practice in game design. Game-a-week challenges are week-long development cycles with simple rules: make and release a game each week (Ismail 2014; Wallick 2014). We hoped this approach would allow us to address some stated aspirations, particularly developing student confidence and portfolio, soft and practical skills, and teamwork and community formation. Developing and testing game concepts rapidly and discarding them if they do not address the player experience goals (Fullerton 2018; Lemarchand 2021) benefits game design students as it allows them to not become overly attached to—or protective of—a concept and move towards designing for challenges and audiences. This would also ensure that students understand the importance of rapid prototyping and playtesting in the development cycle. This format enables them to develop soft skills (communication, teamwork, conflict resolution) by learning how to work collaboratively, taking advantage of the team’s strengths, and moving away from individualistic tendencies of only valuing personal contributions and ideas.

There are some risks when using this format in a formal education setting, particularly quality and time pressure. Students can become stressed over the quality of submission when this work is formally assessed, which can work against creative risk-taking and experimentation. The limited time provided for turnaround can also generate anxiety due to the intense short development period (Foddy & Wilson 2018). To mitigate these risks, we integrated longer development cycles, taking inspiration from the slow game jam format (Abbott et al. 2023), emphasising process and experimentation over quality of outcome, and devising ways of separating the prototypes from summative assessment.

Game-a-week challenges are usually unstructured and work best with open briefs, but seeing as the module is entry-level and our first-year student cohorts have a diverse range of skills and confidence levels, we wanted to introduce constraints to stimulate creativity and offer students some structure for the creative ideation process. This is what game jams excel at.

Game Jams are collaborative and interdisciplinary game-making events with short development cycles which enable teams to create game prototypes in response to a series of design constraints, usually a common theme and a range of diversifiers (optional additional constraints, often supporting EDI approaches). Jams facilitate soft and technical skills development, peer learning, and the formation of communities of practice (Aurava & Sormunen 2023; Aurava et al. 2021; Fowler et al. 2016; 2018; Kolek et al. 2022; Locke et al. 2015; Meriläinen et al. 2020; Pirker et al. 2018; Smith & Bowers 2016; Lai et al. 2021). Their inclusion in the curriculum presents opportunities for developing inclusive and diverse game design practices (Aurava et al. 2021; Deen et al. 2015; Kerr 2021; Kennedy 2018; Paganini et al. 2021; Scott et al. 2014), for raising awareness and facilitating critical engagement with serious topics (Abbott et al. 2023; de Jans et al. 2017; Hrehovcsik et al. 2016; Myers et al. 2019; Matthews & Thomas 2022; Ramzan & Reid 2016). These factors led to our decision to introduce game jams as the practical component of the module to facilitate active learning and develop an applied understanding of the lecture content. Furthermore, running the game jams as a class activity in a shared, open lab would facilitate the formation of communities of practice, creating a collaborative learning environment, which is one of the goals of feminist pedagogies (Webb et al. 2002).

Our redesign of the Developing Game Concepts module was predicated on using the game jam model as a vehicle for equity, diversity, and inclusion in an introductory games module. We timetabled the core weekly practical as a whole class activity for six hours on the same day in our specialist labs. Students were assigned to seventeen teams of 5 to 7 students each, and all teams attended the same open-plan lab space, affording them the freedom to talk with other teams, observe their practice, and play each other’s prototypes. As tutors, we were present in the space to answer questions, offer feedback, and provide guidance on request. Students were also required to meet with their team and jam together outside of scheduled class time as an unsupervised practical activity. Trusting students to approach us with questions and requests for feedback as well as scheduling unsupervised practical activity aimed to empower them to self-direct their learning, manage their time, and self-organise their projects.

To address the challenge of connecting practice to critical thinking and theory, we delivered ten lectures accompanied by essential reading and viewing. We demonstrated how research can be integrated into practice by making our process available and visible to students in class. The pre-recorded lecture series introduced students to fundamental concepts relating to types of play, games and players, ideation and collaborative concept development, design principles and the design process, formal game components, player experience, prototyping, playtesting and iterative development, game feel and polish, documentation, and critical design practice. The implication was that the ideas discussed in the lecture series should be explored through collaborative creative practice rather than in a separate written assignment. We jammed alongside the students in class to help support students with the practicalities of using research to inform practice. We showed them how we use theory in our design practice and apply the various tools and techniques discussed in the lectures in our development process. By making the design and development transparent to students, they could observe best practices first-hand and understand the connection between the theoretical concepts discussed in the lectures and design practice.

Over the semester, we hosted four game jams, each lasting two weeks and culminating in a pitch, which teams had to present to all other teams and the tutors. During the final three weeks of the semester, students would select one of the four prototypes produced in the jams for further development through playtesting and iteration, polishing, and finally publishing on the open creative platform itch.io. The itch.io game jam page functioned as a repository, allowing us to collate all the games produced by the seventeen teams.

Each game jam had a theme and a set of diversifiers, and it focused on designing for different types of platforms.

  • Game Jam 1 had the theme ‘storm’ and focused on designing playground or pen-and-paper role-playing games.
  • Game Jam 2 had the theme ‘darkness’ and focused on tabletop game design.
  • Game Jam 3, which had the theme ‘Halloween,’ focused on modding (modifying) and using content creation tools and engines.
  • Game Jam 4, which had the theme ‘the Caribbean,’ focused on using alternative (non-mainstream) engines.

The diversifiers ranged from subverting game tropes and exploring alternative and physical controllers to encouraging students to engage with a diversity of voices, perspectives and identities, inclusive and accessible design, environmental themes and topics, and political and social issues like social and gender inequalities, poverty, or Scotland’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. By including these in the diversifiers, we encouraged students to engage critically with different types of design practice driven by serious topics.

We assessed students based on a portfolio submission rather than a single technical coursework. The portfolio consisted of documentation showcasing their individual contribution to the final game. We aimed to encourage experimentation and skill development by removing the pressure of assessment from the game jams and facilitating learning and community formation in a stress-free environment, thus mitigating the risks of using rapid prototyping challenges in the curriculum (Foddy & Wilson 2018).

Finally, we organised an end-of-term showcase with invited students, lecturers, and local game developers as an opportunity for students to celebrate their achievements and empower them to share and discuss their work with industry professionals outside of class. The showcase and four end-of-jam presentations enabled students to develop communication skills, pitching their games to diverse audiences in diverse contexts. To help support students with the pitches we offered a suggested four-slide structure: team name and logo, game title, tagline and USP (unique selling point), genre and target audience, and gameplay. Each team had 3 minutes to pitch, and we timed the presentations and interrupted at the 3-minute limit to encourage students to develop a professional attitude to communication by timing and rehearsing their presentations. Advice and additional resources were also provided on the Virtual Learning Platform, including links to industry advice on pitching and examples from #PitchYaGame. The presentations were informal, and students encouraged and supported each other, offering feedback and comments on other teams’ pitches. Each team received an identical jam participation prize: sweet treats, jam jars and badges. Like GGJ, these were not meant to enforce a competitive environment but a supportive and collaborative one where participation is celebrated and rewarded. The pitches and final showcase contributed to building a community, enabling students to meet their peers, develop professional relationships, and strengthen their confidence in discussing their work and design process.

Developing Game Concepts achieved the goals outlined above through its design and delivery and promoted an applied, game-jam-based method of teaching game design. In what follows, we will expand on the case study by discussing how we modelled best practice by developing our own game, Right 2 Roam (Bozdog & Sloan 2023), in class alongside students and how doing so further demonstrated the benefits of adopting feminist pedagogy principles in the design of games education.

Developing Game Concepts Case study: Lecturers as Participants in Game Design Activities

Lynne Webb, Myria Allen, and Kandi Walker outline six principles of feminist pedagogy: ‘reformation of the relationship between professor and student, empowerment, building community, privileging the individual voice, respect personal experience in its diversity, and challenging traditional views of theory and instruction’ (Webb et al. 2002: 68). Some of these have already informed the design and delivery of Developing Game Concepts as discussed above. However, privileging individual voices, embracing personal experience in its diversity, and reforming the relationship between lecturer and student was best achieved through our participatory approach to game design pedagogy. While we made ourselves available for feedback and guidance during the six-hour practicals, we made clear to students that we were active participants in the game jam process and would be responding to the game jam themes alongside them. Demonstrating design practice during the jams and flattening the classroom hierarchies between teacher and student ensured that students regarded us as peers, and we foregrounded an inspirational rather than an instructional approach to teaching. Furthermore, this allowed us to develop our practice-based research into board game design and integrate our research practice into our teaching practice. This enabled us to dedicate time to our own practice research in the context of increasingly limited research time, inspiring students to use class time to actively invest in their own skill development. This is essential for an effective engaged pedagogy: ‘teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualisation that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students’ (hooks 1994: 15).

The concept that we decided to implement was a board game which captures the inequities of access and safety in public space. This was entitled Right 2 Roam and is based on the gendered lived experiences of walking alone in public places. This was developed throughout the term to illustrate the different stages of the development process to students, to explain through practice complex theoretical concepts like procedural rhetorics (Bogost 2007) and to inspire students to engage with activism as part of their design practice. Through our jam response, we wanted to demonstrate best practices to our students as well as encourage them to not shy away from the potential of games to address topics such as inequality, systems of oppression, human feelings and emotions, personal experience as well as a diversity of perspective, and complex social and political phenomena. Working in class alongside students made our collaborative and iterative design process transparent, but it also made visible our discussion of diverse lived experiences, understanding, and negotiation of design decisions around a serious and prescient topic.

The first stage of the design process is research, an essential aspect of development that is often neglected by students. From the earliest stages of concept development, our aspiration was to draw on theory and existing best practices in persuasive games and procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007). We also looked to personal and documentary games, critical play, and feminist and queer play while discussing our critical frame for game design and our aspirations for what players would experience and take away from the game. We discussed our research with the students and showed how we take inspiration from media beyond games as well as analysing various game systems to understand how their design supports specific player experience goals. We naturally do this as part of our design practice, but in class we dedicated time to making this visible and articulating the rationale and impact of research to students, demonstrating how this foundational stage impacts our design choices and is translated into game systems and aesthetics. Through this we helped students understand the essential role research plays in the design process and inspired them to incorporate it as part of theirs. We took inspiration from games in The Mechanic is the Message series (Romero 2008), We Can Play (Julibert Games 2022), Freedom: The Underground Railroad (Mayer 2013), Papers, Please (Pope 2014), Bury Me, My Love (The Pixel Hunt 2017), Dys4ia (Anthropy 2012), The Game: The Game (Washko 2018), That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games 2016), and The Longest Walk (Tarvet 2022). This enabled us to discuss theoretical concepts like levels of abstraction in the board design, supporting interpretive play through use of generic game components, intentional feeling of complicity, unfairness and frustration as player experience goals, moral dilemmas and hard choices, tension as a result of emotional investment and empathy, using gameplay mechanics (rolling the dice) as metaphor, and lived experience as inspiration for narrative content. Furthermore, it enabled us to introduce students to a range of activist and serious games that they are not normally exposed to and expand their knowledge and definition of games, game genres, types of player experience, and player interaction patterns.

In addition to this practical research, we demonstrated to students how to engage with desk-based research focused on the topic. In our case, this involved stories of walking alone, women’s marches, and walking practices. The complex relationships between walking, gender, and power were already one of our main areas of interest so we wanted to demonstrate to students how we can capture some of these complexities through board game design as this was the focus of Game Jam 2. As students would come to our workspace to see what we were working on we introduced them to a range of tools, including how to use Google Scholar, the online university library, and the Statista database as well as how to systemise research notes, in our case using Post-it notes for grouping ideas thematically. This demonstrated that we are not asking them to do something that we are not doing ourselves and using our own process to introduce them to research tools and techniques.

During the concept development stage, we demonstrated to students how to articulate player experience goals, and then core gameplay loops and features that support them. Because unfairness was the targeted player experience goal in Right 2 Roam, we showed students how we were creating an intentionally unbalanced system through unfair starting states and odds (players are given either D6 or D10 dice), reliance on chance and randomness, and different levels of challenge. We explained to students how each of these features affects the system, and they experienced how these impact player experience through playtesting. Furthermore, we showed students how we asked play testers questions and took notes to record anonymised answers and our own observations. In the early concepting stages we used different techniques to brainstorm, such as sketches, flowcharts, colour coding, writing down ideas on flipcharts, identifying problems, proposing solutions, and discarding them through discussion. By making this R&D work transparent, we aimed to address a recurring issue, which is that students tend to focus on solving technical issues in the engine before solving design problems on paper.

As we were playtesting, we also demonstrated how player feedback informs iteration. Students watched us as we developed different playable prototypes, learning how to quickly design paper prototypes to playtest the concept as soon as possible and how to implement quick development cycles, producing a high number of iterations (see Figure 1). This aimed to demonstrate best practice and prototyping principles introduced in the lecture content, and showed the students how we were designing prototypes to address specific issues and answer questions through play (Fullerton 2018; Lemarchand 2021; Macklin & Sharp 2016). We also demonstrated that a prototype does not need to be polished, and that visual art assets are not important in the prototyping stages. In our pedagogic practice, we have observed that perfectionist ideas of polish and beauty are what often hold students back from sharing work and playtesting early in the process. Sharing our ‘ugly’ work in progress with the class reinforced the principle that the purpose of prototyping is to quickly solve design problems. By discarding ideas and features through playtesting we demonstrated that attachment to ideas in these early stages is not beneficial and that changes occur often in rapid prototyping, which is why being precious about the work is not sustainable.

 

Figure 2. A Range of Paper Prototypes Used to Demonstrate Different Prototyping Techniques and Approaches.

 

By keeping our process in this stage transparent, students could observe the importance we placed on playtesting for balance and for player experience. We showcased how to observe and take notes of playtest sessions, how to run playtest sessions and ask questions, how to prioritise feedback, and ultimately how to decide what features benefit or distract from the player experience goals.

Our open sharing encouraged students to do the same, engaging with prototyping early and playtesting throughout the jam cycles (see Figure 2). Students continued to engage with paper prototyping even for the digital jams and continue to maintain this practice in their second year. This was unusual for our students prior to Developing Game Concepts: students were more likely to develop digital prototypes which are costly and less effective in supporting students to think through their design prior to implementation.

 

Figure 2. Student Prototypes: Work in Progress on Developing Game Concepts.

 

Not long after we had made our first paper prototypes, we found that our iterative rounds of playtesting were generating thoughtful reflections and contributions from our students. Particularly eye-opening were playtests in which players of different experiences and perspectives were brought together. Often these were players who were friends or colleagues, who knew each other relatively well, but who nonetheless were discovering new things about each other through 15-20 minutes of playing the board game. To an extent these views were gendered, and often echoed the discourse between us as designers. Over time, our playtesting and open sharing of our design process (we worked in open labs so students, fellow academics, and other passersby could interact with us) became integral to our final product. Many of the final decisions around game board spaces, cards, and narrative were informed by conversations we had with those who came to play the game or simply to speak with us. Students observed how we opened our process to others and witnessed first-hand the potential games can have in starting conversations about power and privilege and facilitating personal exchanges of perspective and experience. Making the process completely transparent made us as designers and lecturers vulnerable, flatteningreversing eventhe class hierarchy, we were appealing to students for feedback, seeking their expertise and insight. This contributed to building a mutual relationship of trust; we demonstrated not just how to offer considerate feedback but also how to receive and respond to it.

Right 2 Roam has since been published and is being used for engagement with a range of external partners and communities. The news stories on the University website and in local media, and the sessions we organised in 2023 for students to experience the game in its final form, showed students that a game developed during a game jam, in class, can be further developed and published.

Our sharing of process and working alongside students to demonstrate every stage of the development process has positively impacted the quality of portfolios, with tangible improvements on presenting documentation, referencing research, articulating playtesting take-aways and the stages of the iterative design process. Our modelling of engagement with serious topics and focus on the political potential of games has proven inspirational, student entries on the DES101 Game Jam itch.io pages range from historical events (the invasion of France, the history of the Caribbean, the sinking of the MV Captayannis in the Firth of Clyde) to critical engagement with human experience serious topics (sugar production in Greenock, Scotland’s ties to slavery, depression, queer experience, loneliness and friendship).

The module redesign alongside our approach to its delivery and emphasis on redefining the relationship between professor and student through participation in class activities enabled us to build a strong community of practice predicated on mutual respect and trust. We hope that our open and dialogic design process that embraces a diversity of voices, perspectives and experiences will continue to inspire our students to look beyond existing and limiting perspectives on games and continue to challenge unfair systems in play and more importantly in life.

Conclusions

Reflecting on the delivery of Developing Game Concepts in the 2022-23 academic year and the Module Feedback Survey, we can confidently articulate several findings. Module feedback was a good indication that students not only responded positively to the delivery but also increased first-year students’ confidence as evidenced by increased participation from first-year students in the Global Game Jam and Abertay University Game Development Society Jams. The feedback of other members of staff indicates that the module had a positive impact on the students’ soft, communication and practical skills, and their abilities to share work in progress more openly and to actively seek and respond to feedback. Both student and staff feedback has been overwhelmingly positive on the impact that the module had on creating a sense of community and solidarity, while the students have started a Discord channel and took an active part in organising and running a Fresher’s Game Jam for the 2023-24 student cohort. Furthermore, and atypical for our former students, many of the students in the 22-23 cohort have taken the initiative in actively supporting the module by returning to the class to play the prototypes and offer feedback on the 2023-24 cohort prototypes and presentations, increasing communication between the year groups. Students appreciated the ability to work in teams and make friends, the creative freedom facilitated by the module, the collaborative nature of jams, the lack of technical skill requirement on entry, the opportunities for peer-learning and feedback, developing their practical as well as soft skills, and developing their confidence in expressing and presenting their ideas.

The Student Module Feedback also indicated some areas for improvement. Even though the game jam prototypes were not assessed, some students were still overwhelmed by the intense jam cycles. Some students also struggled with working in teams for the duration of the module, particularly teams where student engagement was disproportionate. In trying to address some of these challenges, a series of changes were implemented in the module. Firstly, decreasing the number of jams to three allowed for longer development cycles (three week-long jams) and thus diminished some of the time pressure. Secondly, the teams were changed in between each jam cycle, ensuring that students had the opportunity to work with and get to know more of their cohort. And finally, teamwork-based projects were removed from the assessment altogether. Students now learn and develop skills throughout the module during the team game jams, and then dedicate the final 3 weeks of the module to applying the knowledge and skills to developing an individual game concept that they submit for assessment. This final solo jam has the theme ‘identity’ and encourages students to express their individuality and creativity free from the pressures of a team environment. These changes have already made a positive impact and the module feedback from 2023-24 indicated no other areas for further improvement, with student response to the module being overwhelmingly positive.

The student sentiment is captured through a free comment section in the module survey, and the following comments are typical and illustrative of the student experience:

  • ‘Des101 has been amazing for developing teamwork skills and showing the benefits and struggles that come with it, as well as being a great introduction to game design by getting right into making games right off the bat’
  • ‘My core module (DES101) has been the most fulfilling for me. This is due to multiple factors, but mainly it is due to the structure of the course being far more solid than my other two modules. I have always felt that I know what I am doing in my core module, and it has provided me with the opportunity to work in groups as well as work by myself which has furthered the development of not only my Game Development skills, but also my interpersonal skills.’
  • ‘It has been great to start from the very beginning, with no expectations that you will have ever touched any of the programs before.’
  • ‘This course has helped me develop my skills in areas i was once uncomfortable in such as presenting in front of a large crowd or working as a team.’
  • ‘With Des101, the 3 group jams prior to the time given for the solo assessment were a great experience to get used to uni, and developing timekeeping habits when developing games, giving me a strong start to the solo period, with more self-confidence than I would have expected.’

Developing Game Concepts focused class activities and assessment on integrating theory and research within design practice and emphasising the importance of player-centric design through rapid prototyping and playtesting cycles. Our blended model of delivery—game jams alongside a participatory model of delivery (staff jamming alongside students) —offered opportunities for diversity of voice, of experience, and of learning style to be demonstrated and promoted within class. Taking part in the class activity and doing the game jams alongside our students enabled us to share best practices through demonstration, whilst at the same time bridging both the student/teacher and research/teaching divide. We approached game design less as a technical challenge and more as a problem-solving one, emphasising to students the importance of solving design problems first, and technical problems second. The two authors come from different disciplinary backgrounds, Dr Mona Bozdog is a performance-maker and Prof Robin Sloan is a computer artist. Through collaboration we embraced the creative potential of interdisciplinary knowledge exchange as well as diversity of perspective and gendered experience, thus inspiring our students to approach design in a similar dialogical and collaborative manner.

Our transparent design process enabled us to demonstrate the importance of theoretical and practical research, engaging with collaborative and dialogical design practice and problem-solving, acknowledging skill limitations and methods for developing the required skills through practical research, showcasing methods for balancing and documenting practice, foregrounding iteration based on playtesting and critical reflection, and emphasising the importance of dissemination and knowledge exchange by articulating take-aways in postmortem formats. Our mode of instruction was to use our creative practice as teaching ‘material,’ we made the games during class, opened them up to feedback from students through playtesting, and shared work in progress and our design documentation with the class.

Sharing our design practice with the class also offered us the opportunity to demonstrate how games can engage with serious topics, and how embracing different perspectives and sharing lived experiences can shape the design process to support meaningful and engaging play experiences. We encouraged students to engage with the diversifiers to develop critical thinking and practice, to embrace diversity and inclusive design, and to understand how games can raise awareness and enable an applied understanding of current societal challenges. Our process of designing Right 2 Roam demonstrated how to engage with desk-based research and stories of women walking alone, how to capture and discuss personal experience, and how using game systems can show systemic inequalities of movement and safety in public places. Through this, not only were we demonstrating to students how to apply theoretical design knowledge in practice: formal, dramatic and systemic game components (Fullerton 2018), procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2010), and UX design principles (Norman 2013; Hodent 2017) but also the positive impact of diverse perspectives, voices and lived experiences on design practice. This inspired students to explore the potential of board games to engage with serious topics, gendered inequalities and civic engagement and embrace the potential of dialogical design based on exchanging lived experiences and diversity of perspectives.

Our approach to timetabling has proven effective in the context of ever-increasing student numbers. Typically, we would split the cohort into three groups of 30-40 students, each scheduled for a 2-hour practical. We opted instead for a 6-hour block delivered to the entire cohort, which ensured less repetition with an equivalent time commitment from the academic staff. This type of delivery facilitated the engaged, participatory approach outlined here, in addition to the advantages to the previously discussed student learning experience. We acknowledge that we are in the privileged position of having both access to facilities and estates and institutional support, which allowed for this flexibility in timetabling. Our game jams approach is predicated on institutional support and trust, as well as on available spaces and access to facilities and specialist equipment. However, the prototyping stages of the jams are less reliant on specialist equipment and software, and a modular approach in smaller groups could be a viable solution to addressing these challenges.

Through Developing Game Concepts, we transformed the classroom into a place where experience is valued, and individual voices and experiences encouraged (hooks 1994). While the team jams, to a degree, could encourage a competition of voices in which the most assertive usually direct the overall creative vision. We tried to discourage this through our emphasis on ideation as a collaborative process in both the lecture content and in-class jamming practices. This was further supported by focusing on privileging the individual, personal games in assessment. The final solo game jam offers the opportunity for all voices and experiences to come to the fore on a public platform through publication on itch.io and final module showcase. This is not a perfect system, but it helps to counter some of the individualistic and silencing tendencies that could prevail in a group jam. Through our pedagogical approach we aimed to instil confidence in our students to challenge these tendencies in a group setting in the classroom. This was achieved by encouraging and valuing each lived experience and individual voice equally and demonstrating the advantages of a collaborative and dialogical approach to practice through our own jam experience. We are hopeful that this confidence to challenge hierarchical design processes continues outside and beyond the classroom.

Developing Game Concepts piloted a novel approach to teaching game design, an approach informed by the principles of feminist pedagogy. By using game jams in the curriculum, combined with participatory teaching, the module supported soft and technical skill development, active learning and citizenship, community formation and peer-learning, diversity of voice and perspectives, knowledge exchange, and introduced students to a diverse range of design practices and tools. Flattening classroom hierarchy enabled us to demonstrate good practice in embracing the potential of diversity of perspective and lived experience exchange through dialogical design. The module facilitated empowerment and community formation, building confidence in entry-level students, and inspiring them to respect and embrace personal experience in its diversity.

 


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Games

Bury Me, My Love (2017), developed by The Pixel Hunt.

Dys4ia (2014), designed by Anna Anthropy.

Freedom: The Underground Railroad (2013), [board game] designed by Brian Mayer.

Papers, Please (2014), designed by Lucas Pope.

Right 2 Roam (2023), [board game] designed by Mona Bozdog & Robin Sloan.

The Mechanic is the Message (2008-ongoing), [board games] designed by Brenda Romero.

The Game: The Game (2018),designed by Angela Washko.

That Dragon, Cancer (2016),developed by Numinous Games.

The Longest Walk (2022), designed by Alexander Tarvet.

We Can Play: Women Who Changed the World (2022), [card game] designed by Julibert Games.

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