Playing #gamergate in the Classroom: A Collegiate Feminist Approach

by: , Lynn Love & Robin Griffiths , October 31, 2024

Introduction

This article discusses the design and delivery of a GamerGate (GG) edu-larp (educational live action role play) as a standalone activity within a larger University level Critical Studies course. The edu-larp aimed to engage students in issues of power, hierarchy, social systems, and lived experience around video game culture, whilst drawing their attention to the impact of their personal experiences, preconceptions, and biases as they emerge through play. GG is a particularly provocative subject; therefore, we explore how a larp allowed us to examine complex questions in an educational setting whilst navigating the potential for toxic backlash that can be encountered when using traditional didactic approaches to challenge students’ values, beliefs and notions of video games. A Critical Studies module in the context of games would be remiss in not discussing the many challenges faced by the games industry, many of which were rendered painfully transparent in the GG controversy. We also aim to reflect on the institutional challenges and professional implications of engaging with edu-larp in a modern university.

In this article, we outline the specific institutional and collegiate context of the delivery of the larp within Abertay University as a frame for the discussion of the challenges of fostering critical debate and increasing students’ confidence to challenge problematic game design conventions and industry bias from a feminist pedagogy perspective. We discuss larp and the affordances of play to provide framing for the presentation of the design process, delivery, and reception of the GG larp. We write from a practice-as-research perspective, highlighting key design decisions, iterations and the role of reflective and collegiate practice (Rouse & Corron 2020) throughout this process.

Finally, we analyse the GG larp, drawing from practitioner reflection, student feedback and academic thinking around edu-larp. We reflect on the use of embodied play to enable, enliven, and (de-)escalate critical debate around serious topics whilst also providing safety for academics and students by drawing on the GG larp design approaches, and we make recommendations for how the approach could be developed in future iterations. We also reflect on the personal and academic impacts of collabourating in an all-female design team in a male-dominated department and subject.

Institutional & Collegiate Context

Bozdog started her first full academic post in January 2019 with an appointment as Module Lead on Critical Studies, a 3rd year Computer Arts (CA) module. This was an exciting opportunity to redesign the module and engage students with critical thinking and discussion around video games and digital media more broadly. The Computer Arts programme within the School of Design and Informatics at Abertay University in Dundee, UK, has a significant number of students who are interested in Game Art, Art Production, and Animation pipelines, particularly in the context of video games. The module was delivered to a cohort of around 70 students and focused on introducing students to critical approaches to games and media, as well as academic writing.

As a modern university, Abertay’s CA programme attracts students from a range of socio-cultural backgrounds. The majority join HE straight from high school, whilst others arrive on our course as direct entries from College (Further Education). Unlike our game design and programming courses, CA has consistently attracted a gender-balanced cohort.

Traditionally the Critical Studies module has been less favourably reviewed by students in module feedback, because it is regarded as a theoretical module which does not directly contribute to their portfolio. As such, and in line with Zagal and Bruckman’s observations (2008), students do not see it as a ‘useful’ module. The challenge was to engage students with the topics discussed and encourage them to see critical thinking and research as knowledge that ultimately benefits their practice.

Bozdog believed that designing alternative class activities such as debates, critical play and game analysis, film screenings and discussions, in addition to our larp session, would help students to develop an applied understanding of the topics discussed each week and develop critical vocabulary and confidence in building and supporting an argument. Each weekly lecture was focused on a different critical lens, from narrative theory to queer studies, feminism, postcolonialism, and identity, politics and power. The practical activities took the form of discussion based on independent reading and playing which was thematically relevant to the theory introduced in the lecture.

The GG larp was designed as a single two-hour practical activity for week 6, Politics and Power, delivered in Autumn 2019. Bozdog introduced students to the concepts of Ideology and Culture, Hegemony and Subculture and Political Art. In discussing systems of oppression and influence, Bozdog asked students to think about freedom of speech, social media, and propaganda in relation to art and games. Students were asked to familiarise themselves with GG through reading; they were provided with a suggested reading list which included Katherine Cross (2016), Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw (2015), Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell (2016), Adrienne Massanari (2017) and Elvira Torill Mortensen (2018).

GG was a perfect topic for discussion in the Identity, Politics and Power section of the module. However, the polarising nature of the topic (Chess & Shaw 2015) compounded by insecurities about her own lack of teaching experience and anxieties about the potential hostile responses to the topic (Consalvo 2019) from game students prompted Bozdog to seek support from colleagues Griffiths and Love in designing and delivering a practical activity that aimed to facilitate critical discussion and debate around GG. Video game students can sometimes have a naïve understanding of games (Zagal & Bruckman 2008) and strong opinions informed by their perceived ‘gaming capital’ (Consalvo 2007) that can lead to toxic backlash when their opinions and values are challenged (Ruberg 2019).

The Critical Studies module had a history of toxic backlash, with previous submissions including those which presented unsupported and triggering misogynistic perspectives in the analysis of feminist media. The reputation of this module and Bozdog’s self-perceived academic inexperience created anxiety around the delivery of a session engaging with GG. Ruberg discusses how such toxic gamer behaviour in a classroom context can make academics feel small (2019). As a result, Bozdog sought the support of fellow academics in designing and delivering the session, recognizing that the topic was important to cover but that they did not ‘want to go alone into this subject.’

Love and Griffiths’ contribution to this module was not recognised within the institutional workload model, and therefore the time taken to design and deliver the larp was additional to their existing workload commitments. Bozdog believed that this represented an ‘immense kindness.’ At the time, Love had nine years of HE experience, whilst Griffiths was new to the role, having started a year prior. Institutions expect more senior academics to mentor and support colleagues, but typically provide limited or no space or time for this to happen beyond impromptu interactions and informal mentoring (Hanasono et al. 2019). Instead, good will and friendship drove the team to establish a collaborative design-delivery-support network. Feminist practices of care and mentoring were at play, where we worked together to create relationships that allowed ‘power to be shared, roles blurred, and opportunities created’ (Adams-Hutcheon & Johnston 2019). While Bozdog was module leader, Love took a facilitation role within the larp session, and the designed larp sought to blur roles further to share power amongst the academic team and the students.

Critical Studies and Feminist Pedagogies

Critical Studies modules on digital media courses have never been more important, as social media platforms have become sites for discussing and platforming work, as generative AI challenges our definitions of creativity, originality and ownership, as far-right political movements are on the rise, and fundamental rights are threatened in some of the largest democratic powers in the world. Empowering students to challenge existing power structures in and around digital technologies and games and to question the status quo of digital culture is essential to ensure that we shape a new generation of creative makers and thinkers, whose practices platform, promote, and actively support and embrace feminist principles of diversity, inclusion and intersectionality (Humphreys 2019; Rouse & Carron 2020). As Shaw beautifully concludes, ‘Feminist new media scholars are not here to ruin everyone’s fun in digital spaces. Rather, they offer us the chance to reimagine how we use these spaces and by whom these spaces are used’ (Shaw 2014:273). Through Critical Studies we can ensure that, paraphrasing Shaw, the world and the internet will no longer be full of ‘jerks’ (2014:273).

Working in the digital space provides new-media students with new, far-reaching platforms whilst at the same time exposing them to pervasive, insidious, and subtle forms of monetisation and surveillance (Shaw 2014). In this context, preparing students to recognise their potential and empowering them to expose and challenge their exclusionary, biased and neo-liberalist tendencies become two of our primary goals as educators. In choosing to ‘teach toward liberation and social justice’ we embrace ‘the work of education as always already a political project’ (Rouse & Corron 2020).

Sadly, the importance of modules which promote critical thinking and discussion of digital media does not grant them immunity from institutional resistance (Corron & Rouse 2022) and student opposition (Bradbury-Rance 2020), particularly on game-centric courses which tend to focus increasingly on developing technical skills (Zagal & Bruckman 2007; 2008). Modules which challenge the skill-focused, apolitical, and instrumentalist status quo of games pedagogy (Rouse & Corron 2020) are met at best with indifference and non-engagement and at worst with toxicity (Ruberg 2019). The fact that many of our students identify as ‘gamers’ (Shaw 2010; 2012; 2021) who often possess a ‘naïve understanding of games’ (Zagal & Bruckman 2008) further complicates the delivery of modules predicated on critical analysis and discussion of games. Having prior experiences and strong affinities with particular titles and genres of games makes achieving critical distance from the object of study difficult. Criticism of well-loved titles, and of the industry they aspire to belong to, is often met with strong emotional responses (Zagal & Bruckman 2008; Ruberg 2019) which are counterproductive to the learning experience and disruptive of the learning environment. We would argue that this makes incorporating critical discussion and debate in the curriculum even more pressing, particularly considering the games industry’s ongoing struggles with diversity and inclusion at the levels of production (Ukie 2022) and representation (Geena Davies Institute on Gender in Media 2023).

As many have noted (Consalvo 2019; Chess and Shaw 2015; Cross 2016; Jenson and De Castell 2016; Mortensen 2018; Shaw and Chess 2016) GG is not the first, and sadly will most likely not be the last episode that makes apparent the sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, toxic, silencing, and aggressive behaviours associated with games culture; it is, however, a teachable one, as Elvira Torill Mortensen notes:

GG offers a unique lesson for the future in a society where the limits between private and public are shifting, time and place are close to irrelevant for communication, and we all have the power to publish at the tip of our fingers. It is a teaching moment for how ideals of freedom can facilitate harassment and silencing strategies, and a clear lesson in how certain online structures support tight, self-reinforcing echo chambers (2018:790-791).

As an important, albeit shameful, part of game history and culture, GG should be critically discussed in the games curricula as it raises important questions in relation to power, cultural hegemony and subcultures, social identity and communities, inclusions and exclusions, tolerance, and freedom of speech. It is these factors that prompted us to explore how we can approach this polarising and complex phenomenon in the classroom to facilitate meaningful, thoughtful, and productive critical discussion.

Our approach here was creative as much as it was functional. As three women who perform at the intersection of academic and creative practice, we were drawn to the principles of feminist pedagogy and their promise to create a collaborative learning experience through ‘reforming 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). These principles emboldened us to think beyond traditional teaching activities and creatively explore different methods for stimulating discussion and empowering students to confidently voice their opinions and perspectives without fear of silencing from us as lecturers or their peers. Furthermore, we all had experience with role-playing games and knew first-hand their power to facilitate embodied understanding of complex systems and ethical issues (Bogost 2007; Brathwaite & Sharp 2010). This led us to explore the potential of larp as a curricular activity. Larp is a ‘meeting between people who, through their roles, relate to each other in a fictional world’ (Eirik Fatland and Lars Wingård quoted in Stenros and Montola 2010:10), bringing an embodied dimension to gameplay as players physically perform their character’s actions in physical space (Stenros & Montola 2010; Harviainen et al. 2018). In addition to encouraging perspective-taking, larps are ideal facilitators of critical play, as they bring into question reality as a construct, its contexts and its boundaries (Stenros & Montola 2010: 25). A GG larp would enable students to understand the social systems, power hierarchies and systems of oppression surrounding GG, whilst allowing their own experiences, preconceptions, and biases to emerge and be analysed through and after play.

Larps in Education

We selected larp as a mode of engaging with GG due in part to our position as game designers and practitioners, but also due to the nature of play to provide safety within a possibility space for experimentation with different perspectives (Warren Spector quoted in Squire & Jenkins 2002) and to test out ideas around a subject (Baird 2022; Gordon & Esbjörn-Hargens 2007; Rodriguez 2006). Playing as someone ‘other’ can help participants feel less on display or vulnerable whilst exploring the topic, enabling participation. Furthermore, the ‘social contract of a game acts as a kind of psychological buffer against uncertainty, protecting players from the risk inherent in game play’ (Salen and Zimmerman 2003: 473). Salen and Zimmerman (2003: 473) propose safety and trust are central to this social contract to facilitate play. Such play can empower students by flattening real-world hierarchies (Hyltoft 2012) and can offer transformative experiences by permitting experimentation with different roles and ways of thinking (Lacanienta 2022; Bowman 2014; Salen & Zimmerman 2003). Trust within play is key to unlocking transformation (Benedetto no date). We recognised that we could leverage this transformative space to create engagement with a complex subject matter in a safe yet revealing way.

Larp has been recognised as having educational benefits for learner engagement, information retention, emotional connection, and learner wellbeing (Lacanienta 2022). Larp has been used extensively to explore subjects that may challenge students’ values and belief systems (Baird 2022; Bowman 2014) and have implications for exploration of self-identity (Baird 2022). Its dialogical approach helps students to form their own relationship to the subject matter through embodied and experiential learning, collective discussion, interaction and reaction (Lacanienta 2022; Bowman 2014). The resulting creation of personal connections to the subject matter provided within larp can enhance ownership of learning and greater synthesis of student learning into practice (Bowman 2014).

All forms of play are risky, and larp is no different. Game design is a second-order design problem, meaning that play experiences can emerge that were not initially intended by the designer (Zimmerman 2013). Facilitators seeking to utilise larp in the classroom must appreciate that difficult situations may naturally emerge through play or that participants might utilise subversive or dark play approaches that challenge the social contract of safety and trust that is negotiated within the group through play. As a result, it is imperative that larp, especially those in an educational setting, uphold the duty of care with scaffolding to support and safeguard students physically and emotionally (Brown 2016; 2018). This starts with creating an environment of safety, trust and care by negotiating playstyle as a group, providing signals that can be used to nonverbally withdraw from play, and on-going negotiation of permissible behaviours and a collective understanding of boundaries throughout play (Koljonen 2020). Safeguarding is also enhanced through the inclusion of a debrief discussion to unpack the experience and provide closure (Brown 2016).

Students’ own perspectives of their subject matter and the most appropriate forms of development towards a vocational career can limit their interaction with new or unusual educational approaches such as larp. Anecdotally, students use stereotypical connotations of video gamers to justify their unwillingness to participate in social activity, e.g. ‘we study video games, so we do not need to interact socially.’ Video games can be highly social endeavours (Pearce 2011; Flanagan 2010), but socially held interpretations of solo play video games as antisocial activity can be used as a convenient shield by students when presented with experiences that may be socially challenging such as performance or improvisation. Mochocki (2013) acknowledges the difficulty of engaging with larp for those unfamiliar with improvisation and performance and proposes a simplification of game design and the provision of specific goals and tasks to help enable participation and a focus on social interaction over complex game mechanics. We considered these recommendations in our approach to designing a larp for students studying games.

Methods

In the following section, we outline the design of the GG larp. The larp was designed iteratively, over several meetings between the team in short windows of time that could be spared around workload commitments. We use design notes from these meetings and personal reflections on practice (Gray and Mallins 2004) to provide an account of the design process of the GG larp, showcasing design decisions and their rationale in relation to our subject matter, student body, and aims to engage students with GG in a safe way whilst allowing students’ own experiences, preconceptions and biases to emerge. The project utilises practice as research methodologies, particularly Nelson’s (2022 p46) onto-epistemological model for practice as research that examines know-how, know-what and know-that, connected by reading, making and reflecting. The design process thus provides an account of making and reflection for analysis.

Analysis of the larp is underpinned by practitioner reflections on larp design, our observations of the students as players from the perspective of the facilitator and the lecturer-participant, debrief discussion with students directly after the larp, and the general comments provided by students in the module feedback.

Unfortunately, we could not collect student feedback on the larp due to workload capacity. This larp was run as a stand-alone two-hour session within a larger 12-week program of content being developed by Bozdog each week. Love and Griffiths’ lack of workload allocation and limited capacity meant that the team were unable to carry out data collection. We, therefore, cannot make claims about the larp’s impact upon the student body, but can instead reflect upon the design, its successes and areas of development from our observations and practitioner reflections.

Larp Design Process

The GG larp aimed to prompt students to uncover the power structures at play that allowed and propagated GG, and to examine toxic and silencing behaviours and social dynamics whilst exploring the potential perspectives and motivations of those involved. As a result, our design began with understanding the different actors within GG, specifically those who influenced or played an active or passive role. These actors were generalised into seven thematic groups including: ‘The People,’ being those who were targeted or negatively affected by GG; ‘The Inciters,’ who were a generalisation of the people who were responsible for instigating the incident; and ‘The Press,’ who sought to report and perhaps sensationalise the issue. Some actors could not be generalised, such as Twitter, which was a key platform through which GG was enabled. In this case, Twitter’s policies and approaches became a character group used within the larp. The seven thematic groups became character groups that students would play in the larp (Figure 1). This relation-building approach focussed on goals and needs at a group level is a typical larp design approach (Pettersson 2019).

 

Figure 1: Design documentation showcasing initial exploration of power dynamics and ‘wants’ from a team design meeting that showcases exploration and iteration of interrelations between character groups.

 

We were very clear that the purpose of the situation was not to perfectly reenact GG nor to facilitate identity tourism, where players play out stereotypical interpretations of actors in GG as a form of appropriation, with little critical or empathetic understanding of their experience and perspectives (Leonard et al. 2021; Nakamura 1995). Instead, the goal was to provide guidelines that created an abstracted lived experience that would provide space for the students to create their own relationship to and, thus, perspective on the incident. This drove the design decision to generalise key actors into more generic character groups; we aimed to provide a possibility-space for the students to make the roles their own and for their own preconceptions and biases to emerge as a result.

We determined that grouping students together and assigning the group one of the seven-character roles to play would enhance student comfort and participation by minimising individual exposure and vulnerability, especially for those who had no previous experience with larp. We also wanted to avoid singling out specific individuals involved in GG and maintain the focus on group behaviours, relationships and power hierarchies. As discussed by Bowman (2014) regarding the challenges to edu-larp as an educational tool, we recognised that the group had a mix of learning styles, personality types and limited experience of larp in an educational context as edu-larp had not previously been utilised at Abertay, and thus designed the larp around groups to enhance the creation of safety, trust, respect, inclusivity, and community.

Play was designed to be dialogical rather than physical: Focussing on dialogue and interactions aligned perfectly with the goal of revealing power structures and the interpersonal dynamics within GG as these were expressed through written and verbal communication within GG itself: the mode of play became mimetic of the incident. Dialogical approaches also help to uncover students’ own perspectives and biases through improvisation. The larp required students to draw from their own experiences, history, knowledge and perceptions of the world and socially negotiate this within their group to present their character. This process may provide fresh perspectives on their own biases through inter- and intra-group interaction. The dialogical approach also aimed to cater to the novice quality of our participants as larp that requires physical embodiment of a character through performance presents a higher barrier to participation and we felt this was an unnecessary step for the topic and goals of the session inspired by Mochocki (2013).

Once the characters were determined, the potential for interaction between each character group was analysed as a character network. We defined some high-level ‘wants’ for each character group to understand where collaboration and friction might occur between character groups based upon their given goals (Figure 2). This helped us to understand how the different character groups of students might interact with one another, and also how the system represented power structures within the design of each character’s ‘wants.’ We focussed on ensuring that each character group had reasons to interact with multiple character groups and that there were no outliers or characters who would have minimal reason to interact. We drew from the resources provided to the students for the session and, in particular, a timeline of GG provided to the students in advance by Bozdog in order to inform the creation of character ‘wants,’ and analysis of character network design as a result.

 

Figure 2: The key character groups and the ‘wants’ that aimed to design a character network and that were provided to the students to inform their actions and interactions in the larp.

 

Actors such as the game development community were explored as a potential independent character group for the larp, but the ‘wants’ of the community did not have enough unique features to allow interaction across multiple groups without replicating the ‘wants’ of other character groups in the larp, particularly ‘The Allies.’ As a result, the game developers were included in the larp not as their own character group, but as members of ‘the Allies’ and of other character groups. It was core to the design philosophy that each of the seven groups should have reason to interact with at least five of the other groups, and to be able to do so based upon motivations that were unique within the larp dynamic. This aimed to promote the possibility of dialogue and interaction among the participants whilst limiting repetition, overlap, and potential outliers. It also aimed to require the students to consider their character actions and responses through the lenses of multiple other actors, creating greater potential for their preconceptions and biases to be challenged either by other players or by their own deliberations on how to act/react.

Iterative practice was involved in the definition of character ‘wants’ and we regularly assessed the possibility space of play generated through potential interrelations and hierarchies of the ‘wants.’ Each set of character ‘wants’ was informed by GG and through consideration of socially held generalised or stereotypical understandings of types of behaviours and interests of that character group. Stereotypes were leveraged in the design process to help make each character group more accessible to the students and to provide a hook on which they could build, whether they had engaged with the lecture content or not. Our early attempts at defining ‘wants’ had been too specific, focussing on particular behaviours or actions, and we found that this limited cross-group interaction, whereas generalisations helped to promote interactions between more groups and also created more space for players to develop their own sense of that character.

The ‘wants’ aimed to encourage collaboration by producing synergies between some groups as they aligned in some of their motivations. For example, ‘The Angry Jacks’ sought a reason to be heard, and were interested in video games; these ‘wants’ were designed to promote collaboration with ‘The Inciters’ who have a cause to stand for, specifically, the challenging of their world view about video games. Similarly, friction and even direct conflict was promoted through some of the ‘wants’ to simulate the power structures at play within GG. ‘The People” and ‘The Inciters’ were in direct conflict, the latter seeking to silence the former. The ‘wants’ aimed to examine how those in perceived positions of power— ‘Twitter,’ ‘The Press,’ ‘The Authorities’—might be unable or unwilling to enact that power or may depend on the other groups for survival. For example, ‘Twitter’ needs users, so it is limited in how it can manage the behaviour of ‘The Inciters,’ ‘The Angry Jacks,’ and ‘The People,’ while ‘The Press’ needs a story that relies on action and friction between the others for success.

The larp was designed temporally, with a facilitator acting as a timekeeper. The facilitator introduced time-based events to move time forward in the larp, to motivate play, and to build friction and interaction. The facilitator had a number of pre-prepared ‘tweets’ that acted as key story points to motivate action from different groups. These included messages that set the tone for the kinds of abusive language that might be typical of people identifying with ‘The Inciter’ character group and specific threats to ‘The People’ that aimed to raise the narrative stakes.

These tweets served different purposes over the course of the larp. At first, they were a way for the facilitator to set a tone for play and provide permission for types of behaviour and interactions atypical to a normal classroom debate. As the larp continued, the tweets were designed to escalate the situation and to invite participation from specific groups at key points. For example, one message created a bomb scare targeted at ‘The People.’ This aimed to invite participation from ‘The Authorities,’ ‘The Press,’ and ‘Twitter.’

Larp Classroom Implementation

The students were provided with a timeline of GG to engage with prior to the delivery of the larp compiled by Bozdog. The session altered typical timetabling, bringing the whole year group together in one class, as opposed to attending in two separate groups. The larp was delivered in one two-hour session, and no student setup was provided. We actively chose not to notify the students that the session was a larp prior to the session due to nervousness around the atypical delivery mode, students’ undervaluing of critical studies as a subject, and the lack of institutional support. We also felt that students could benefit from the larp whether participating or observing, so we ensured that students were able to self-select within the session whether to observe, participate or leave should they feel uncomfortable. We felt that offering these different modes of participation once the students were in the room might help to bypass any negative preconceptions or nerves around a larp setting and to allow them to learn through observation if not active participation.

At the beginning of the session, students were briefed that the subject would be explored via a larp. They were randomly split into groups and were given a card that outlined their character group and ‘wants.’ The groups were positioned in a circle in a standard teaching room with chairs. They were able to sit or stand. The group that represented ‘The People’ were positioned in the centre of the circle and were not given chairs. Each group was given time to discuss the task and their character group. Love, who facilitated the larp, outlined the purpose of the activity, taught the group safeguarding measures, and started play by reading out a tweet to set the tone and incite reactions.

Bozdog and Griffiths participated in the larp as lecturer-participants within ‘The Inciters’ and ‘The People’ groups respectively. Bozdog and Griffiths’ role was to model behaviour and provide prompts, support, and/or motivation as needed, in line with Westborg (2019), who promoted modelling as a mode to support new larp players in engaging in the experience. Positioning them in the groups that were central to the instigation of GG— ‘The People’ and ‘The Inciters’—meant that they were able to act early in the larp to help set the tone, provide permissions and build students’ confidence.

Play progressed slowly from being heavily facilitated through prompts from the facilitator and modelling from the lecturer-participants, to being more student-led as they responded to and began to lead action and interaction. The play session lasted 50 minutes and was followed by a 30 minute debrief discussion.

The debrief provided a space for the students to express their experiences of the larp, to share whether the experience uncovered realisations around biases or preconceptions, and to connect the larp experience to their understanding of GG. Love and Bozdog asked follow-up questions to students who shared their experiences in order to deepen discussion and uncover more about participants’ perspectives, and aimed to flatten the hierarchy by allowing the conversation to flow as freely as possible.

The session ended with thanks for the group for their participation and some guidance for resources and support should they have been negatively affected by the subject matter.

Student Reception of the Larp

When we announced the larp activity, two participants who presented as male left the class. This might be a result of an unwillingness to engage with either the activity itself or the topic. Debrief discussions were lively, and almost all participants shared their experiences of the larp, their reflections on the difficulties of taking a particular role or perspective different from their own, and their observations about the subject matter based upon their experience. The discussion was student-led, flowed freely, and the majority of the class made contributions, which was very different from typical discussions with this cohort where Bozdog was required to significantly lead and prompt discussion.

Discussions around the role of ‘The Authorities’ were particularly interesting to the group, with many reflecting on their surprise at the lack of influence this group could have and that where they did play an active role, it led to ‘The People’ being subject to disruption to protect them rather than ‘The Inciters’ being held accountable. One participant who played in ‘The People’ character group felt helpless throughout play; they felt that the experience happened to them and that they were limited in how they could change the flow of the game. This was not a criticism of the design of the larp but rather the limited power they had in the system to make change. The students reflected that they had not considered the subject in depth before but now had a new appreciation for the lived experience of the people who were subject to abuse during GG.

We did not gather feedback from the students on the larp due to limited time and capacity. While the module feedback did not directly reference the larp, it did highlight some continued toxic backlash. Three students raised significant discomfort in regard to engaging with difficult subject matter at a university level, and questioned whether exploring historical issues and their implications on media was relevant to their studies. More positively, one student shared that:

I have spoken to some students from this class who find it hard to engage with this class and I feel that it’s because Mona [Bozdog] does a great job of getting you to challenge existing notions and schools of thought especially surrounding the often times controversial topics of gender, sexuality and politics.

Analysis

Analysis of the design and delivery of the GG larp draws from thinking in feminist pedagogy, practice-based research, and edu-larp. It is structured around our aims for the project which were:

1) to engage students in issues of power, hierarchy, social systems and lived experience around video game culture whilst drawing their attention to the impact of their personal experiences, preconceptions and biases as they emerge through play.

2) to explore how a larp might help us to examine complex questions in an educational setting whilst navigating the potential for toxic backlash.

3) to reflect on the institutional challenges and professional implications of engaging with edu-larp in a modern university.

Engaging students with the Subject and their own experiences, preconceptions, and biases

Approximately 40 students participated in the larp. Most students contributed to play by speaking out and giving responses. Despite their limited experience of improvisation, modeling of interactions via the facilitator and lecturer-participants was observed to provide players with the confidence to contribute and perform. At times, responses were overly simplified or exaggerated, bordering on pantomime. Whilst students had been given material about GG with which to engage prior to class, they had not been informed of their character groups and the perspectives they would need to adopt. As a result, they had to draw from stereotypical generalisations about their roles. For example, ‘The Authorities’ group struggled to respond to what was happening in the larp, as they were not aware of their powers or how they could influence the process. Ironically, this mirrors the actual events of GG and limited the group’s participation in the larp until they were prompted. ‘The Press’ character group, on the other hand, actively engaged, poked fun, and were playful in their actions within the larp, having more freedom to play with the conventions of news such as tabloid sensationalisation, clickbait techniques, and the need to create the best story possible.

Students were not notified of the larp prior to arriving at class. This design choice, driven by our own nervousness around our use of an unconventional educational approach, worked against our feminist pedagogical approach somewhat, as we did not empower students (Webb et al. 2002) to be able to choose whether to attend from an informed position, and did not provide larp preparatory materials. Whilst the larp itself embraced feminist pedagogy in reforming traditional power structures between lecturers and students, and challenged traditional views of theory and instruction, the onboarding of the larp could have embraced feminist pedagogy further. We believe the addition of dedicated time to research and prepare for their role within the larp setting would have enhanced the students’ ability to act as their given role, empowered them, and helped them to form links as character group communities in line with feminist pedagogical approaches (Webb et al. 2002: 68). Such preparatory workshops are typical within larp practice (Koljonen 2020; Stenros & MacDonald 2020).

We envisage future iterations of the GG larp would incorporate workshops but believe that they require consideration to ensure students do not try to prepare to act out the GG timeline accurately, thus straying into identity tourism (Leonard et al. 2021). Rather, they should help the students focus on the simulation of power structures and social dynamics. We propose that students require clear workshop briefs that focus on developing character group profiles, allowing them to avoid superficial appropriative readings of the character groups, and deepening engagement with character abilities, power, and roles. We propose this as an antidote to the generalised approach to improvisation whilst also minimising the potential for the larp to become a direct reenactment. Such preparatory workshops would also provide space for participants to undertake playstyle calibration where they can negotiate group consent around narrative and physical play and play intensity (Koljonen 2020). Such preparation would help to ensure that players feel comfortable and prepared for role play.

Within GG larp, we observed student-led negotiation of consent during play. A bomb threat was introduced as a time-based event by the facilitator, which led to ‘The Authorities’ determining that ‘The People’ group should be physically moved from the centre of the circle to the outskirts. During the debrief discussion, participants from ‘The People’ character group, and from others, commented on how this physical action within a dialogue-focused larp stood out and prompted them to reconsider GG and its impact on the targeted individuals. One participant from ‘The People’ group also noted physical discomfort due to being positioned at the centre and following the re-positioning of the group offered them a new perspective on the impact and scale of GG.

The physical positioning of ‘The People’ group at the centre of the circle was purposeful to the design of the larp as this group were central to the systems of power at play. The choice to move the groups around emerged from the students with some limited encouragement from the facilitator, providing permission to introduce physical action as no prior contract had been made regarding physical consent (Koljonen 2020). This student-led action made the abstract events and their ramifications real for the group and led to new perspective formation. This outcome showcases feminist pedagogy in action (Webb et al. 2002) in that the students felt empowered as a community to negotiate a contract for physical consent during live play to heighten the stakes and achieve their ideal play outcomes within GG larp. Similar accounts are evident within edu-larp and Nordic larp settings and can go as far as players leaving facilitators behind, taking complete control of the experience (MacDonald 2012).

One strength of the design was that it provided safety in numbers for first-time larp participants by allowing students to perform as a group rather than as individuals. This shifted the focus away from the individual and aimed to diminish anxiousness around participation. However, group play does not privilege the individual voice and can make it difficult for personal experience to be respected within the group and class as a whole, two key attributes to Webb et al.’s (2002) definition of feminist pedagogy. The group focussed approach utilised in GG larp aims to build community within each character group and to promote cross group communication in line with feminist pedagogical approaches (Webb et al. 2002: 68). As the group were novice larp participants, we chose to provide safety in numbers to build participation and confidence which in turn compromised the role and voice of the individual. Whilst this was less prevalent within the larp, it became a focus of post-larp discussion where individual voice and personal experience were integral to motivating discourse around the larp and GG.

Larp, complex questions and toxic backlash

We utilised larp, an unconventional approach, in the hopes of challenging students’ thinking around complex questions whilst minimising the potential for toxic backlash. Our experiences and observations of GG larp suggest that modelling behaviour is helpful in early stages of a larp with first-time participants by providing playstyle calibration for all involved. The Lecturer-participants embraced feminist pedagogical approaches in reforming relationships between students and lecturers; in game, they positioned themselves as peers and equals with everyone in their group. While the lecturer-participants can bring factual knowledge to the group, this is true of all members and, in our experience, where the lecturer-participant behaves more informally or in line with their given character group rather than as a lecturer, they become accepted as one of the group as play develops.

Within the GG larp, character groups who had a lecturer-participant were more active and critical than groups who did not have a lecturer-participant. We reflect that this is perhaps because these groups had closer interactions with lecturer-participants who were modelling appropriate behaviours. We propose that the addition of informed participants into all groups would better support first-time larpers and create a more consistent experience. We feel it would have been beneficial to have sought volunteers (students or staff) prior to the session, to act as informed-participants to support and bolster the activity in line with the approach of the lecturer-participants. It is typical in larp for participants to take on a range of different roles within a larp (Westborg et al. 2024), with some having a supportive or modelling role as we suggest here.

The freedom presented by larp can yield positive and negative outcomes. This GG Larp group was able to calibrate playstyle throughout the session and was respectful of individuals’ views, but we acknowledge that another group of students may have responded to the larp differently. Whilst we did not experience toxic backlash in this first run of GG larp, the improvisational freedom offered by larp can be manipulated via dark play or dark tourism, leading to undesired outcomes (Leonard et al. 2021). Preparatory workshops can help to tackle dark play as they enhance transparency: workshops can allow rule sets and educational goals to be made explicit to students and provide spaces to negotiate play style. As a result, hierarchies can be flattened because students are given an opportunity to shape their educational experience in a direct challenge to traditional views of theory and instruction. For first-time players, workshops can provide opportunities to prepare their performances, empowering them to further influence their educational play experience through their in- and out-of-game behaviours (Stenros & MacDonald, 2020).

We found that larp acted as an excellent primer for discussion. Within the debrief discussion, we observed that play provided students with a lived experience of the subject, and, in our case, a wealth of opinions and enthusiasm emerged within the student group, far beyond that encountered previously. The debrief discussions suggested that students reformed their perspectives on GG, moving beyond the inflammatory nature of the subject into a deeper analysis of lived experience, actors and power structures through actions they could and could not perform during play. Some students shared the emergence of their own biases or superficial readings of the subject prior to the larp and reflected on how their perspectives of the subject had shifted. Our observations of the influence of the GG larp on student behaviours when engaging with challenging content are consistent with those of others within the edu-larp sphere (Baird 2022; Lacanienta 2022; Bowman 2014) and suggest that larp could be a useful tool for students to channel and examine their emotional responses to challenging subjects. This may be particularly true when working with video game students who can struggle with critical distance and can react negatively to challenges to their views on their favourite games (Zagal & Bruckman 2008; Ruberg 2019).

Institutional challenges and professional implications of edu-larp delivery

GG larp challenged traditional approaches to theory and instruction in our institution and was driven by collegiate feminist practices within the delivery team. Facilitating a larp around a gender-based topic as three female academics was both challenging and a source of stress and anxiety. Throughout planning and delivery, we relied on one another to provide support and guidance, whether we were a senior or junior academic, and as a result, developed our ability to shift roles through feminist practices of care.

Our design of GG larp as a one-week activity with no preparatory workshops and reliance on generalisations may have slowed player participation as the students took time to test out the interactions, actions and narrative development. Timed events were integral to moving the narrative forward or triggering reactions when players were uncertain about how to proceed. As a result, the intellectual and emotional workload for the facilitator within play is very high as they must be aware of and respond to each group’s inter and intra dynamics whilst also being able to respond to, motivate and improvise play. We employed feminist practices of care throughout delivery, being sure to observe individual participants and their interactions, using, where necessary, gentle interventions to manage the emotional climate of the room to ensure a safe space for play. Within the team, friendship and camaraderie enhanced our ability to communicate both verbally and non-verbally within larp delivery, providing intra-team support and the ability to check in on the emotional climate of the room.

GG larp was delivered as a one-week activity as part of a larger module, and the lack of workload allocation or institutional support at the time has limited the academic study of the larp. We were unable to document and collect data about the student experience. We are not alone in this challenge around documentation, as Stenros and Montola (2010) acknowledge the ephemerality of larp in that ‘They cease to exist the moment they become complete … Documenting these events is not easy. Each player in a larp undergoes a unique, personal journey. Larp provides no shared core experience.’ As a result, we have reflected as designers and drawn from our observations of student behaviours to form a contribution to edu-larp literature.

We reflect that initiatives such as GG larp that seek to transform educational approach through feminist pedagogy can fail due to institutional systems (Corron & Rouse 2022) in this case, being under-resourced, relying upon circumstantial kindness, support and in terms of workload, individual self-sacrifice.

Conclusion

The larp was developed because Bozdog felt uncomfortable with tackling the complexities of Gamergate and potential toxic responses to the subject in a traditional instructional format. We believe the GG larp led to more in-depth and meaningful discussions for the student group. The feminist collegiate approach to design, development, and delivery provided a safety net and confidence, and it challenged traditional views of theory and instruction at our institution. Still, it is time-consuming, risky and emotionally draining. It relied entirely on good will and exploited emotional labour for female academics driven by a desire to support colleagues and to create positive learning experiences.

Our observations of the affordances of larp are echoed across previously cited studies in edu-larp, including the ability of larp to enhance student engagement with a subject, facilitate deeper debate, and support flattening of the hierarchy in the classroom, developing students’ autonomy and ownership of their learning. Our contribution is the design and delivery of a GG-themed edu-larp built on feminist pedagogical approaches. We contribute to widening the academic study of edu-larp through our reflection upon the use of edu-larp to engage students in issues of power, hierarchy, social systems, and lived experiences around video game culture whilst drawing their attention to the impact of their personal experiences, preconceptions and biases. In particular, we propose that larp demonstrates potential as a vehicle for tackling provocative subjects whilst minimising the potential for toxic backlash. We also comment upon the institutional and personal implications of innovating the curriculum through feminist pedagogical approaches to edu-larp.

We have not facilitated another larp in a classroom environment to test our hypothesis regarding its suitability to tackle provocative subjects whilst minimising toxic backlash. Shifts in teaching allocation, additional time- and lifestyle-pressures, and remote and hybrid modes of teaching brought on by the global pandemic limited further examination of the system. The delivery of the larp relied on feminist practices of care, mentoring (Adams-Hutcheon and Johnston 2019), goodwill and emotional labour (Tunguz 2016), which makes us question whether our approach was successful in challenging the status quo or whether, on the contrary, it just further contributed to maintaining it. We believe that the GG larp was a valuable undertaking that modelled the principles of feminist pedagogy, whilst at the same time bringing into focus some of the challenges that alternative pedagogical approaches face in institutional academic settings.


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