week 8
This week’s readings/viewings reflected the power of play, and highlighted the ways in which gaming is a medium that can be brought into the classroom to help students build skills such as collaboration, problem-solving, and perspective-taking among others. Gaming (when scaffolded correctly) can also help push higher-level thinking, and encourage students to think on a systems level. With proper context and structured exploration, games provide very dynamic and engaging entry points into core topics and themes, and can also encourage students to think from a place of (simulated) experience.
While reading, I was reminded of “The Waiting Game”, which is a journalistic project produced by ProPublica that simulates the experience of attempting to seek asylum in the United States. It’s an incredibly powerful game that uses storytelling in a really unique way to explore asylum, and the form of the game itself reflects aspects of asylum-seekers' experiences - it starts with the warning “Have patience. You’ll need lots of it to play the game”. In order to progress through the game, you need to spend a very long time clicking through it and attempting to endure every day through the process of trying to seek asylum. You’re only given two options the whole game - to Give Up, or Keep Going. I imagine that this could become a very powerful tool to use in the classroom as one way to explore asylum with students. This lesson plan from Re-Imagining Migration offers suggestions for how to engage with the game.
Another game that focuses on migration is called Borders, described as “a political art game created to not only to exhibit video games as an art form but to portray the dangers Mexican immigrants face crossing the border. Players attempt to cross the border while avoiding La Migra (border patrol) and staying hydrated. The place where every player dies is permanently recorded into the video game’s world, represented by a skeleton. Players can see the skeletons of past players which communicates the large death toll of the Mexican Desert.” The aesthetic experience of this game alone offers a really impactful way to reflect on border crossing, and could again be used as an interesting entrypoint to use with students if they’re learning about immigration & migration.
Lastly, I was also reminded of a project in Chicago called The Plug-in Studio: “The Plug-In Studio is a socially engaged new media artist collective. We collaborate with youth and families in diverse Chicago communities to make video games, interactive kinetic sculpture, augmented reality graffiti, soft circuits and other art with technology. Our projects incorporate programming, engineering, and design in a critical context.” One of their projects, The Street Arcade, invited teens to develop video games that focused on issues impacting their communities. These games were then featured in an outdoor arcade in Hyde Park where people could come and play them, as well as talk to the youth artists who developed the games. By creating these games, students had to think creatively about their topics and find new perspectives to explore and ways to approach complex ideas. They then also had the opportunity to explain these games and their thinking to other people, creating space for rich dialogue about their issues.
