This event offers an introduction to the ideas and activities that we explore in our fuller DHSI Course: “Using Digital Games as critical methods of intervention, advocacy, and activism in humanities scholarship." We encourage participation from women and non-binary people, visible minorities, Indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ persons.

Our premise is that game-based inquiry can be used as a method of humanities research, communication, and pedagogy, and can also function as a political intervention into humanities theories and practices. Merging these two approaches, this smaller Jam event for 2021, (anticipating our fuller in-person DHSI course in 2022) explores how simple game environments and tools can be used to encourage builders, players, and publics to pursue broader social, cultural, and interpersonal understandings.

Participants (no previous experience required!) will be given access to an online repository of resources and open-source game design tools that are amateur friendly. Solo or in groups, they will design an interactive experience that features a values-based, self-conscious, and self-critical encounter with social identity formation and identity politics. What can designers--and by extension, players--learn about identity politics through processes of play? How can play encourage understanding through the representation of others while still avoiding misrepresentation and exploitation?