Mending the ‘Magic’ Circle: Crafting Feminist Pedagogy in Game Design

by: & Anastasia Salter , October 30, 2024

© Photo by Almos Bechtold/Usplash

The game design classroom, and by association the game studies classroom, continually struggles with the same conflicts, culture wars, and exclusionary practices that dominate the game industry itself. Feminist interventions have pushed for change both in and out of the university: Shira Chess’ work calls for the restructuring of play spaces, offering the model of a ‘gaming circle’ as a way to create a sustainable ‘means of feminists taking back leisure’ and play (2020: 17). The work of collectively pushing down the barriers around what has historically been termed the ‘magic circle’ of play has never been more pressing: given the attacks on feminist and anti-racist practices at universities across the country, spaces for play and learning have become ideological battlegrounds.

In our classrooms, we turn to a different, traditionally feminine-coded space for a model of how to rethink the gaming classroom: the craft circle. The craft circle is defined by a group meeting based on a shared interest in crafting or particular crafts. Often these crafts are textile-based such as knitting, needlework, or quilting, because they are transportable and relatively quiet, which make them well suited for social gatherings. Traditionally, craft circle meet-ups revolve around craft activities, often with informal education happening on-demand through sharing, mentorship, and collaboration. These activities reflect how Susan Luckman describes craft, as a ‘highly collective activity, drawing upon shared knowledges, resources, and experiences’ (2023: 1). The collective educational activities bind the craft circle together, as Miriam Gibson explains: ‘craft skills function as cultural tools through which individuals gain agency within their communities’ (2019: 28) thereby creating sustainable growth as new members join and old members leave, but the knowledge, resources, and experiences continue to be shared.

Beyond sharing, mentorship, and collaboration, craft circles are also failure-positive and embrace playful failure. In part this is due to the prosocial aspects of the collaborative and educational focus of the crafting communities. However, the space to fail is also naturally created by what Glenn Adamson calls the ‘second-class identity’ of craft (2007), with craft being associated with reproductive labour and devalued, even in games themselves (Sullivan et al., 2020). Because there is less value placed on the product, there is less external pressure to produce perfect results—and a community built on sharing, mentorship, and collaboration ready to jump in and help whenever necessary.

The craft circle’s focus on community-based on-demand learning through sharing, mentorship, and collaboration, as well as the failure-positive outlook make it a well-suited model for rethinking the gaming classroom. Such work fuses craft with activist intervention, bringing the lens Betsy Greer has termed ‘craftivism’ to the making of games as personal, political, and contested objects (2014: 7). These practices move the game design classroom away from an emphasis on objects as outcomes, and instead encourage what Natalie Loveless has called ‘generative recrafting’ (2019). Here, we contextualise ‘recrafting’ through the lens of textile arts, drawing on Loveless’ framing to build in our classrooms a practice informed by research-creation that both acknowledges game design traditions and patterns, and mends, re-threads, and stitches new imaginaries with the potential for subversion.

In their call for transforming games pedagogy, Rebecca Rouse and Amy Corron emphasise the importance of a ‘feminist, dialogic approach to teaching in the games classroom,’ recognising that pedagogical work is already political (2020). In this article, we put our game course experiences in dialogue, offering examples of bringing textile craft community traditions into two very different universities—University of Central Florida and Georgia Tech—that share the unfortunate distinction of being situated in politically embattled states, where making space for feminist pedagogy is particularly challenging. By sharing the design choices and frameworks that inform our classrooms, we hope to extend the conversation and potential for these practices outside of our universities. Each account of our pedagogical structures is individually framed, but the two experiences are connected through the influence of textile arts communities and crafts on our practices, with a focus on how we engaged with sharing, mentorship, collaboration, and playful failure.

Playable Texts and Technology and Critical Making for Humanist Scholarship at the University of Central Florida

Anastasia Salter

This case study focuses on two courses I initially developed as envisioned companion classes for the Texts & Technology PhD program, an interdisciplinary PhD program housed at the college level at the University of Central Florida. The program is unusual in many ways: it is not affiliated with a single department, and instead encompasses possible areas of specialisation that include digital humanities; digital media; editing, publishing, and interdisciplinary curating; public history; rhetoric and composition; and scientific and technical communication. Thus, courses offered at the program level must meet the needs of students traveling any of those paths, with an emphasis on building the connections to technology across humanities disciplines. Part of this involves preparing students to engage as makers, a term with substantial baggage and a gendered history of association with STEM practices and an emphasis on technologies such as 3D printing and laser cutters. These two courses—Playable Texts & Technology and Critical Making for Humanist Scholarship—are intended to disrupt those norms and provide students with space for creating their own practice: not necessarily as makers, but as crafters.

Critical Making for Humanist Scholarship was first offered in fall 2021 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and thus was born as a fully online, asynchronous course—a modality which first appears at odds with the emphasis of making on the hands-on and material, but one that would ultimately stick, shaping the course for subsequent offerings in fall 2022 and most recently in spring 2024 (Salter, 2024). The tension over the traditional framing of ‘making’ has been drawn out by Debbie Chachra, who has criticised an over-emphasis on objects that devalues other forms of labour: ‘Making is not a rebel movement, scrappy individuals going up against the system. While the shift might be from the corporate to the individual (supported, mind, by a different set of companies selling a different set of things), it mostly re-inscribes familiar values, in slightly different form: that artefacts are important, and people are not’ (2015).

The framing of critical making draws attention back to the work that can be devalued in this process: what Chachra describes as the work of those that ‘analyse and characterise and critique,’ which is critical to the work of education and the craft of game-making. Matt Ratto has coined the phrase ‘critical making’ to refer to the movement to reflective processes of making in classrooms not traditionally associated with design, which invites ‘materially productive engagement that is intended to bridge the gap between creative physical and conceptual exploration’ (Ratto 2011: 252).While my critical making course is primarily focused on digital methods, the grounding in ‘physical and conceptual exploration’ as a bridge towards digital making is at the forefront of the course, which begins with exercises on the creation of images and comics and frequently includes physical prototyping before development.

The other course, Playable Texts & Technology, arose out of an experimental special topic on Electronic Literature I taught in summer 2022, and has only been offered in its full form once in fall 2024 (Salter, 2023). As part of my commitment to transparent pedagogy, the syllabus for each of these courses is available on GitHub through the pages and repositories cited here. These repositories document the history of the classes, demonstrating through the embedded versions the iterations in both my selections of materials and the voices I have been able to bring into my classroom conversations.

The two courses were envisioned as providing history, theory, and practice as interwoven components leading towards confidence in the craft. Critical Making is structured as a craft circle, operating from weekly patterns, and sharing the results through reflections that are as focused on process as they are on outcomes. The full materiality of that course is documented in a co-authored book with Emily Johnson, Critical Making in the Age of AI, forthcoming from Amherst College Press in 2025 as an open-access resource of patterns intended for remixing and use in a wide range of humanities courses. This structure focuses on making through iteration, with plenty of room for failure and reflection.

My focus in this discussion is the second course, which more directly addresses games and game design, but also benefits from similar dissociation of those terms from a traditional industry context. In Playable Texts, we explore contemporary forms of ‘playable’ texts and technology, which broadly encompasses many genres of electronic literature, hypertexts, video games, literary fiction, and electronic poetry created using the affordances of the computer and networked media. Working from the prehistory of Oulipian constrained writing through to early hypertext experiments of Shelley Jackson to contemporary interactive fiction and games such as Kentucky Route Zero and Disco Elysium, we develop an understanding of both the history and current trends in born-digital literary experimentation and practice. Through the lens of these digital texts, we explore the potential for reimagining the book through new interfaces, interactions, and technologies. While we engage in literary readings of code and design choices in interactive and procedural work, no knowledge of code is necessary, and the word ‘games’ is intentionally de-emphasised to broaden student’s engagement with the category of play and encourage participation by students who don’t see themselves as gamers. The goal in the integration of design components is similarly to invite those not necessarily seeking to practice game design to explore the potential value of bringing their voices and perspectives into an interactive medium.

The course objectives are thus focused on both digital games and electronic literature, with an emphasis on studying small, personal, narrative experiences closely:

  • Develop an understanding of electronic literature as a form, including the terminology and theoretical frameworks necessary to discuss born-digital works.
  • Explore the connections between electronic literature and traditional text, including experimental and Oulipian influences.
  • Understand the role of code and procedural (or rules-based) systems in transforming potential approaches to literature.
  • Analyse the intersection and influence of electronic literature on mainstream genres, such as literary games and walking simulators.
  • Critique emerging and experimental born-digital works in the context of changing platforms and technologies impacting their creation, distribution, and reception.
  • Understand current debates and concepts from game studies through a range of critical and theoretical lenses.

The materials and texts for this course reflect the same intentionality: the four books assigned in full sit at the intersection of digital narrative, electronic literature, and games, raising different cultural lenses to these playable texts:

  • Hayles, N. Katherine (2008), Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.
  • Ensslin, Astrid (2014), Literary Gaming.
  • Chang, Alenda (2019), Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games.
  • Gray, Kishonna L. (2020), Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming.

The primary objects of study cover an even wider territory, beginning with notable early works of electronic literature by authors such as Shelley Jackson, Deena Larsen, Michael Joyce, Talan Memmott, Carolyn Guertin, Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, Stephanie Strickland, and Judy Malloy. The high representation of women among early electronic literature authors brings a different history to digital culture than a path that starts in works marketed as games, immediately positioning feminist interventions (such as Guertin and Luesebrink’s still-provocative feminist collaborative hypertext Progressive Dinner Party) as a critical piece of the larger history.

 

Figure 1. One iteration of Tournedo Gorge, featuring Julia Child and JavaScript colliding.

 

Building on those foundations, I introduce works that invite remixing, beginning with Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge (2009). This piece of interactive poetry might not at first seem like a playable text: it is at its heart a grammatical remix, themed in Nick Montfort’s version around a visit to the landmark gorge at the Taroko National Park in Taiwan. However, the play begins when students are invited to go under the hood of the poem and rewrite it in their own image, inspired by other playful and critical remixes, such as Kathi Inman Berens’s Tournedo Gorge (2012). This work is part of a subset of transformative versions of the original work that the editorial collective of the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3, selected to demonstrate the importance of building code-based work that facilitates play. This foundation provides a means for a feminist intervention through recoding, as Berens describes in her author statement:

I wrote Tournedo Gorge because I wanted to mash the space of computation with the female, domestic, and tactile. Early on at the ELO 2012 conference, about six women found ourselves in the john by the sinks talking about code. I was interested by this. Even though there was nothing forbidding about men or the environment of coding, nevertheless there we were: women standing in a lopsided circle in the only physical space expressly marked as female, talking about what we can and can’t do with code. A conversation that didn’t persist when we walked out the bathroom door.

I don’t know JavaScript. Working on this poem, I now know one pinky-fingernail-shaving’s worth of js. But I also don’t *not* know js. (Berens 2012)

Berens’s piece is both a feminist statement and an invitation to view code and cooking in parallel. The underlying work is easy to remix, and through the process, a creator may well acquire some of the knowledge of code that Berens describes. In addition to the code—the JavaScript—of the work, Berens made significant aesthetic changes, manipulating the CSS and HTML to add a bold pink background to the text as well as an image of her own practice of cooking. Through this redesign, she brings out the parallels between the code’s source code and any other recipe and provides an example that invites students into one of the first craft assignments of the semester: building their own Taroko Gorge remix.

Drawing on the method of the craft circle, the Taroko Gorge remix exercise is first introduced through the close play of several examples. Then, I provide a detailed walkthrough of every step of remaking Taroko Gorge before providing a space for discussion and sharing, with several guiding questions focused on process:

  • How did you decide what to change? Did you run into any frustrations as you worked on making the changes?
  • What stands out to you in the resulting generation? Share a screenshot or two of your favourite moments.
  • Do you see your remix as falling into our current definitions of electronic literature or playable texts? Why or why not?

The results from the first iteration of this course ranged from Taylor Swift-inspired lyricism against folklore backgrounds to ghost-hunting poetics and bedtime stories. While the underlying structures of each poem are the same, the changes to font, colour palette, text, graphics, and intention result in wildly varying works—just as ten quilters might work from the same pattern and end up with a spectrum of creations.

Large scale digital games do not invite this type of play: they are overwhelming and hide their production secrets, including their code, from the player and would-be designer. Analog games are an excellent way to bridge that gap in the game studies classroom, as educators who work in physical classrooms have found analog games are open for ‘remixing’ in ways that open up creative experimentation (Dumit and Belc 2024). In an in-person course, I will frequently invite students to rewrite rule sets and dissect physical structures of analog games before embarking on remixing digital objects: however, that process is ill-suited for the constraints of an asynchronous online course, particularly as analog games are not only expensive to acquire but also require the development of ‘analog literacies,’ which Antero Garcia describes as connected to digital literacies, but specific to the materiality and communication through the system (Garcia: 2020).

As the online course progresses, I continually centre smaller works that invite the user in. In cantering these works and pulling them apart to invite students to see them in full, I approach games as craft, encouraging students to develop a relationship with interactive objects that draws on the ‘weaver’s handshake’ (Elkins 2021). The editors of Handwoven magazine, a periodical dedicated to weaving, describe this communal practice as one of material exchange and learning:

Not familiar with the weaver’s handshake? It’s when you see a piece of handmade cloth on a fellow weaver that you feel drawn to reach out to admire and examine (with permission, of course). It’s a special greeting that immediately links us through a mutual love of fiber (Handwoven Editors 2024).

The key phrase I want to develop in the classroom community is ‘admire and examine’—that is, one of the goals of this appraisal is to understand how an object is made, which requires a form of close reading and intimacy with the work. A key component of this practice is making the crafters visible and creating space for dialog between students and experienced makers: however, this is also challenging because of the realities of resources and availability. In the first iteration of this course, I hosted weekly virtual guest speakers including both established scholar-creators and emerging, recent graduates: Kathi Inman Berens, Lyle Skains, Leonardo Flores, Rui Torres, Sarah Laiola, Bridget Blodgett, Mark Kretzschmar, Chloe Milligan, John Murray, Alenda Chang, Daniel King, and Melissa Kagen. This exchange allows reveals like that of Lyle Skains’s work to take place in accordance with the weaver’s handshake—it provides an opportunity for us to take apart the practice, as well as the frustrations, behind the works we play. This craft metaphor is made more specific to the students through the dialogues I have with speakers, which emphasise this practice of exchange and invite scholars to share how they have developed their craft.

The gamer’s handshake, by contrast, would more likely be associated with gatekeeping and credentials checking: Kelly Bergstrom has noted the challenge of this cultural baggage extending into the games classroom, encouraging educators to consider the value of designing our curriculum ‘as if all our students were first time players’ (2021: 38). This feminist pedagogical stance echoes that of the textile guild and informs the progression of assignments in my course. Edmond Chang emphasises the importance of making space for the beginner and not assuming ‘skill or literacy’ with games in his framework for close playing, which offers a method for ‘understanding the intersection of form, function, meaning, and action’ (2010). He describes this as a process of developing an understanding across the layers of a game:

It is an attention to more than just the content of the game (which is often what students and mainstream game reviews and even Congressional hearings about video game violence privilege), more than just the mechanics, and more than the graphics. Rather, it is an attention to how all of these things are in articulation or antagonism. Knowing how to play a game is not enough. Knowing what the game is about is not enough. And know how the game works, even at the level of code or interface, is not enough. (2010)

In the context of electronic literature and personal games, this type of close play can peer down to the layer of code, allowing the type of examination so valuable in learning a craft. This in turn is possible thanks to the crafter’s practice of sharing the code, or patterns, underlying a work. Many of the tools that I emphasise in my class reflect these crafter’s values: they are inherently open-source, and designed to allow disassembly, understanding, and remixing from the component parts. These tools include Twine and Inform 7, both tools for making games, broadly construed, for the web that are popular with designers in interactive fiction communities and those using itch.io, a communal hub that allows for sharing work for free, small fees, or even ‘pay what you can’ donation systems. Itch.io thus becomes both a site of study for the course as well as a community for engaging the craft, as students are encouraged to learn from what is shared and share back their own contributions.

Of the two tools I offer, Twine and Inform 7, Twine makes more frequent appearances in the game studies and game design classroom. Twine is a hypertext system that provides a user-friendly interface for building single HTML file works with linked content and mechanics that can range in complexity from simple if/else dependencies to complex systems involving inventories, puzzles, emotional baggage, and multimedia integration. What makes Twine particularly crafter-friendly is the way each work carries its underlying patterns with it: any .html file made with Twine can be imported back into the engine and effectively reverse-engineered, revealing all the design components back to the close player. This can be particularly telling in works like Lyle Skains’s The Unbearable Heaviness of Cats, a pandemic project that embeds reflections in every one of its 213 passages, each telling an additional story of the author’s state of mind and challenges throughout the making (2020).

Other Twine works I teach in the course similarly offer powerful personal perspectives: Dietrich Squinkifer’s Quing’s Quest VII engages with the history of games and gamers, crafted as a commentary on exclusionary practices. The game also includes an appropriate jab at both the electronic literature world and our own ivory towers of academia—planets proposed for migration after the fall of Videogames to the ‘misogynerds’ include ‘New Mediaart,’ ‘Weirdinternet,’ ‘Hypertext,’ and ‘Academia’ (2014). Another iconic piece, Anna Anthropy’s Queers in Love at the End of the World, makes an impact in moments: the work invites the player to frantically click as a timer counts down, playing out the last moments of a love story where the ending is inevitable (2013). The game holds an elegant, imitable simplicity—the central mechanic of the timer is often requested for tutorials following play.

The assignment invites students to work with either platform using either my model games, which feature the same story about sneaking in to change one’s course grade rendered in both Twine and Inform 7, or using one of the many open source works as a pattern for inspiration, as described in the assignment overview:

Start from the tutorial and sample code provided for either platform, or pick a work from the released source code options to modify, and think about transforming it to model a small portion of an experience you would find compelling: this might be driven by character or setting, or it might be a meta-reflection on the platform or technology more broadly, or you can just poke at the code to see what works. There are lots of resources online for getting into the complexities of both platforms if you are interested, but for this short exercise I encourage you to stick with simplicity and not to get caught up in debugging or frustrations.

As before, students are asked to share and reflect, creating a crafting circle where they can learn from one another’s experiments and get close to the code and process. The reflective questions guide that exchange:

  • As you experiment, consider the role of the platform’s affordances in shaping your work: how does the interface shape your thinking?
  • What did you create or change? Share a screenshot or two of your favourite moments.
  • How does this platform shape your understanding of literary gaming? Cite Ensslin and connect to one of the genres discussed.

These more complex patterns continue the journey begun in Taroko Gorge. New directions taken in the students’ works ranged from Zelda-esque adventures to escape rooms and new takes on the classic Clue board game, which returns to the invitation of the analog to remix into digital forms.

Game Design as a Cultural Practice at Georgia Tech

 Anne Sullivan

This section focuses on the Game Design as a Cultural Practice course in the Computational Media program at Georgia Tech that I redesigned from the ground up in 2021, just as we were returning to campus post-COVID.

Course Overview 

The Computational Media program at Georgia Tech is housed by the College of Computing, the School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC), and the School of Music, which leads to a truly interdisciplinary curriculum. Students in the program choose two concentrations from two sets of threads; one set is computationally focused, and the other humanities and media focused. Regardless of the threads chosen by students, they must all take a core set of courses which include computer science, humanities, and media theory and production. Therefore, every student is required to grapple with the challenges of interdisciplinary work through their studies in the program.

The Game Design as Cultural Practice course is offered to students taking the Games thread and is mostly taken by students in their 3rd or 4th year in the program. It is described as ‘an upper-division undergraduate course that uses critical analysis and production of video games to engage with critical issues of contemporary US culture.’ At this point students have had many of their core courses, but few of them have dealt with both technology and humanities at the same time. Therefore, one of my goals for this course is to have the students apply the knowledge they have gained so far, and my projects are designed to require them to combine theory and practice through the projects. However, due to the high variability in thread choices, students may or may not have had game design practice in their previous coursework.

To approach these challenges, I broke the course into 5 modules:

  • Critical Game Design Practice
  • Gender/Sexuality
  • Race/Ethnicity
  • Nation/Globe
  • Final Project

Each module (other than the final project) includes readings, digital and analog games to play, activities such as vlogs or design challenges, and a game design document or prototype for a project related to that module. The final project requires the students to take a previous design or prototype and create the game in full. The students are allowed to design physical or digital games and, if designing a digital game, are allowed to choose which game engine they would like to use, with everything from Twine to Godot/Unity/Unreal allowed.

For each module, I used feminist and antiracist pedagogical practices when choosing readings and assigned games. While I included ‘standard’ texts, I included an equal number (or more) of texts and artifacts from women, non-binary, LGTBQIA+, and/or BIPOC authors and designers. Doing this provides students with the knowledge of what is highlighted by the hegemonic norms, but also includes critical perspectives and gives equal time to underrepresented voices. For example, in the Critical Game Design Practice module, students read selections from:

  • Hayles, N. Katherine (2008), Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.
  • Anthropy, Anna, and Naomi Clark (2014), A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design.
  • Flanagan, Mary (2013), Critical Play: Radical Game Design.
  • Gray, Kishonna L. (2020), Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming.
  • Koster, Raph (2013), Theory of Fun for Game Design.
  • Zubek, Robert (2020), Elements of Game Design.

Each module also included assigned games for the students to play, and they were tasked to create a 5-10–minute vlog reviewing the game and discussing specific topics we had covered in that module. Like the texts, the games were chosen not only for how the game content relates to the module topic, but also based on who did the creation, which underscores how cultural aspects play a role in game design. Some of the games the students analysed include:

  • September 12th compared to Call of Duty— (critical game design)
  • Reigns: Her Majesty— (gender)
  • Boyfriend Dungeon— (sexuality)
  • Hair, Nah— (race)
  • Papers, Please! (global)

Throughout the course, students also signed up to share and discuss games that they had found which fit the theme of the current module. This activity tied back to the crafting circle concepts of sharing and mentorship, which helped self-motivate learning and kept the game list feeling fresh.

In the first iteration of this course, I found that students were less willing to experiment and connect with different concepts than I expected. After doing an anonymous survey, it became clear that the students were too worried about their grades to leave room for playful failure. Therefore, in future iterations, I began adopting ungrading practices throughout the course (Kohn and Blum 2020). Each module had 1-3 formative assignments before the summative project that ended the module. The formative assignments provide a chance for students to get feedback early and often, and they were all graded as pass or fail. If a student failed a formative assignment, they were allowed to redo it until they passed. This relieved the grading pressure for the students and gave them the space to try more experimental designs. Because they would get feedback earlier in the process, they also knew if their experimental design wasn’t meeting the requirements in some way. Ungrading also had an additional unforeseen benefit, in that students were more open to group work because there was less cost if they were paired up with someone who they struggled to work with. These all worked together to provide a much more failure-positive atmosphere for the course.

Crafting Assignments

 For the class activities and assignments, I view game design and production as a craft form, and one which is often collaborative. Given the critical goals and the collaborative practice necessary for the class, I turned to crafting circles as a framework for structuring the assignments and activities. Sewing bees and crafting circles have a long political tradition, particularly in the United States. Even as early as the American Revolution, bees were known as gathering spaces for women, providing social structures for collective creation, critical discourse, and activist planning without the oversight of husbands and other male family members (MacDonald 1990). While women’s role in the home has changed through the years and crafting circles have opened up to be slightly more gender-inclusive, these gatherings are still regularly used for collective creation and critical discourse.

Being inherently social spaces, it is perhaps natural that crafting circles have created playful structures for social games over the years, often forming organically and through iteration (Sullivan et al, 2018). According to our previous research, games are generally: collaborative, provide playful structure for creativity, and result in something being made by the end. Additionally, social games played in crafting circles also highlight the values of the crafters playing them: learning through practice, creative expression, and humanitarianism. Likewise, the goal of the Game Design as Cultural Practice course is to have students collaboratively and creatively design and create games which align almost perfectly with the types of games played in crafting circles. Furthermore, the course focuses predominantly on learning through practice, creative expression, and critical analysis of US culture (which often centres human welfare). Because of this, I chose to use the social games created by crafting communities as the foundation for the assignments in the course. This also becomes an interesting talking point during our class discussions around learning as play, as I use different aspects of the course design as examples for the students to consider. For an in-depth set of case studies, I will focus primarily on the first and last assignment of the course.

First Assignment: Game Design Swap

A common social game within crafting circles is a ‘swap,’ which comes in many varieties, but is generally a game in which all participants are assigned a partner for whom they make something (and from whom they will receive something in return). One form of the swap is a double-blind swap, where participants do not know with whom they have been paired, but about whom they have received some information. In-progress items are shared to social media, where those participating can comment and give feedback on the items, not knowing which is theirs. Once the items are complete, the swap partners are revealed, and they are able to exchange items and talk about the process. This provides a design constraint challenge, offers chances to try new things outside of what a particular crafter might normally make, affords methods for feedback, and allows for opportunities for socialising with new people.

The aspect of socialising with new people is what makes a swap particularly suitable for a first assignment. Additionally, as many students who are new to game design may struggle with designing games beyond their own personal and specific tastes, the swap structure can help move them beyond that limitation early in the process. Beyond that, swaps offer a creative challenge which gives the whole assignment a playful twist; it provides a nice balance of constraints versus creative expression. Therefore, I designed a Game Design Swap assignment for students to do over the first 2-3 weeks of class. I keep the swap on the short side as I want students not to feel too precious about their game ideas. The full project assignment consists of 4 parts, each of which includes some combination of in-class discussion, administration, and assignments.

Part 1—Create a Gamer Motivations Profile (providing information to their partner)

  • In class: We discuss the different gamer motivations and how everyone plays games for different reasons. I use the Quantic Foundry Gamer Motivations (https://apps.quanticfoundry.com/surveys/start/gamerprofile/) as a way to structure this discussion.
  • Assignment: Students are tasked with going to Quantic Foundry to take the quiz and turn in the URL to their personal gamer motivation profile.

Part 2—Design for your Partner (create item for your partner)

  • Administration: I make a master list of paired students (or a trio if there are an odd number of students)
  • Assignment: Students write a one-page game design document for a new game they come up with, that they think would appeal to their partner based on the motivation profile.

Part 3—Feedback on the Design (get feedback from your partner)

  • Administration: I give each participant’s anonymised one-page game design document to their partner(s).
  • Assignment: The partner provides feedback on the design based on what they do and do not like about the idea, and what might suit them better.

Part 4—Iteration and Reveal (swap and socialise)

  • Administration: I give the anonymised feedback on the game design document.
  • Assignment: Incorporating the feedback, students make a second iteration on their game idea and refine their one-page design doc.
  • In class: After they have finished their assignment, we reveal the pairs, the students meet and talk about their refined game ideas and discuss the process.
  • In class: we reflect as a group regarding:
    • designing for other people
    • opportunities and limitations of the gamer motivation profile system

This assignment plays a strong role in building a sense of community among the students and building the bonds and trust required to have the critical discussions required in this course. It immediately puts everyone at the same level as giver and receiver, while also invoking buy-in as they are making for someone specific as opposed to just fulfilling an assignment.

Last Assignment: Final Project

The final project of the course is meant to tie together all the things the students have learned and give them a chance to put it into practice one last time. For this assignment, I modified the structure of the social crafting game called the ‘bee.’ Like the swap, there are many variations on a bee, but they all involve a group collaboratively working together on a project. One aspect of bees is that they have asymmetric play, where one participant is designated as the ‘Queen.’ The Queen decides on a theme, and everyone (including the Queen) makes a part of that project based on the declared theme. A popular variation is called the ‘round robin,’ in which the Queen declares a theme and starts the project. The Queen then hands it off to someone else in the group to add to it following the theme, and then it gets transferred to the next person and the next, until it returns to the Queen to finish the project. It is typical in bees (including the round robin) for everyone participating in the bee to get a chance at being the Queen, so that everyone ends up with a finished project at the end.

For the final project, I modified the structure of the round robin to work within the class setting and used it as the framework for the assignment. Up until the final iteration, each module ends with a smaller project, so by the final, students have created 4 small projects. All the projects in the course were done in small teams—with the exception of the first (the game design swap) which was done solo but with feedback from another person. For each project, the students changed teams, in part to relieve the pressure of having to work with the same set of people all semester, but also to give students a chance to get to know more people on the course.

For the final project, students were allowed to choose their own groups (with 2-4 people) and then were tasked with choosing any of their previous projects from the course to combine and refine. For example, one team might choose the project that student A had worked on for the 2nd module on gender and sexuality and the project student B had worked on for the 4th module on national and global issues. They would then have to choose what and how they would incorporate parts of each and what to modify, add, or remove to the design and create a functional game. It may seem that this could be cause for issues if people who were previously in a team are now split up into different groups and they both want to use the same base project, however in practice this has not been an issue. The teams are welcome to start with the same base project(s) and they will end up going in different directions because of the different team members.

While this is not a true round robin, it does borrow from the themes of working from what others have done and working to create a cohesive project from collectively created parts. Like the swaps, the challenge comes from the creative constraints while also guaranteeing that everyone in the team is represented in the final design. Additionally, the round robin structure is particularly well-suited for a final project. Because round robins (and bees in general) require the Queen to go through the parts and create a cohesive whole, there is a natural avenue for reflection and refinement that happens through this process. Likewise, with the final project, the students go through their previous work, read the feedback they have received throughout the course, and reflect and refine when designing and creating their final project.

Takeaways & Conclusion

While game courses are struggling with many of the same issues as the game industry around toxic culture and exclusionary practices, the changes we have introduced in our respective courses have had positive impacts on the collaborative nature and culture of the classroom. By adopting the craft circle’s focus on community-based, and informal, on-demand learning through sharing, mentorship, and collaboration, it fostered a more experimental and failure-positive environment which nurtures student learning and growth.

Shaped by our experiences using craft as a metaphor, we recommend the following for others looking to create a more positive culture in their game classrooms.

Set a Collaborative Tone with ‘Admire and Examine.’

The structure of the crafting circle centres admiration and examination, central to the weaver’s handshake—admiration which comes from the understanding of the work involved in creating something by hand, and examination and exploration through the open-source nature of craft work which leads to inspiration and learning from other people’s work. Framing a course around admiration and examination inherently changes the tone of the discussions and how work is done in a course. While admiration alone can lead to lack of critical thinking, removing admiration altogether can lead to othering and gatekeeping behaviours.

In Salter’s Playable Texts course, ‘admire and examine’ are used as the basis for doing close readings of open-source games, getting more in-depth with each assignment. Salter also invited designers of the works played in the course as guest speakers to provide designer insight into how and why different works were made. As students understand more about the craft, they are increasingly able to have more admiration and more fruitful examination of the works.

In Sullivan’s Game Design as a Cultural Practice course, admiration and examination were introduced in a slightly different manner, with the assignments built around social and collaborative craft games. For example, the first assignment where students design for each other gives the students equal footing, while also giving them equal roles as both designer and player. With this structure, they are able to better appreciate and admire the work that goes into designing a game, as well as gaining the skills to examine how design affects play.

Make Space for Reflection and Failure

Craft circles are failure-positive spaces, embracing playful failure and even creating challenges and creative games around perceived failures. Part of creating a failure-positive space is allowing room for reflection, something which is naturally built into crafting by the nature of handwork being a slow process. In the classroom, there are many ways to create space for reflection and failure. In the Playable Texts course, Salter incorporates iterative design in the assignments and has specific assignments for reflection. Sullivan uses ungrading practices in Game Design as a Cultural Practice, with formative assignments being graded complete/incomplete, and allowing students unlimited attempts to complete the assignments. Instead of grades, feedback is given to the formative assignments to give students a chance to reflect and refine future iterations.

Design the Activities and Assignments to Incorporate Sharing, Mentorship and Collaboration.

Finally, sharing, mentorship, and collaboration are all critical to the ethos of craft circles. These values work together to create a welcoming environment regardless of skill level and are key to creating a space for ‘admire and examine’ and making room for reflection and playful failure. Therefore, they played a central role in how we designed our classes.

Sullivan’s course incorporated collaboration naturally through group projects, with sharing and mentorship woven in through the structure of the assignments. However, in Salter’s course, where group projects are not practical, students have assignments where they all start from the same code base but are able to expand upon it individually. They then share and reflect on the assignment. This is similar to craft circles, which may start with the same materials or design challenge and then share their results collectively. The shared starting point creates a shared, collaborative environment with an ease for potential mentorship, despite not working together on the final results.

Conclusion

Using the above methods in our classroom, we have seen a positive impact on the work, in-class discussions, and critical thinking skills of our students. Some of the pedagogical changes we have enacted have been adopted by colleagues at our respective universities, and we look forward to continued opportunities for this work to be shared and adapted by others.


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