From Consumers to Creators: Bridging Game Play and Playful Game Design for Impactful Civic Education

From Consumers to Creators: Bridging Game Play and Playful Game Design for Impactful Civic Education

From Consumers to Creators: Bridging Game Play and Playful Game Design for Impactful Civic Education

Joseph Dumit, Sabina Belc

Abstract

"Game-based learning has an important role in youth work, as games offer immense variety in form and subject matter and can vary from simple to very complex, enabling us to build different learning outcomes from cognitive skills and affective changes (feelings and emotions) to interpersonal social skills. By using off-the-shelf games, however, we lose enormous learning potential hidden in the game design process. In much game-based learning, young people are mostly consumers. What we can change with game design-based learning is letting young people take the role of creators. Moving from just using games to designing games, we can let them choose specific social topics that they care about. Through designing, participants can deepen their knowledge and gain a bigger picture of the issues by researching the topic and transforming it into a game where different actors, relations between them and power dynamics are captured. That was the idea behind the project “Board Games Design as a Tool in Civic Education.” First, let us introduce ourselves. Sabina Belc is a civic youth worker and an experienced designer of educational escape rooms, these are important but limited to the educational content that can be integrated into the design. She found inspiration to go beyond this in the practice of Dr. Joseph Dumit, who presented at Playing with Method: Game Design as Ethnographic Research hosted by Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology, Institut für Europäishe Ethnologie, HU Berlin. Ever since critical game designer Paolo Pedercini1 shared his work at MolleIndustria at the University of California, Davis in 2014, Joe has been captivated by playful board game design as a way of thinking about dynamic systems from specific points of view. He has been running classes and giving small workshops about game design as a form of social research. Combining our passions and experience, we prepared a project idea supported by the US Embassy in Ljubljana. “Project Board Games Design as a Tool in Civic Education” covers game design and civic education aspects. We responded to the theme of the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the EU 2021, “Europe for YOUth – YOUth for Europe: Space for Democracy and Participation.”2 A key goal of which was strengthening young people’s democratic participation. The fact that young people’s conventional involvement in politics and civic participation is decreasing is quite worrying. Through participation in civil society activities, youth build up their competence and interest in citizen and political participation. Educational game design offered a way to get involved in the design process through exploring social topics, becoming ambassadors of change, and learning civic participation by experiencing it. Our project’s goal was to train the trainers: introduce our approach to youth workers and educators who work with young people in various settings to give them first-hand group experience with a playful-critical game design workshop and empower them to introduce this kind of game design in their work. The main outcomes are the developed method of the workshop and the preparation of a board game design kit that can serve educators in the process of facilitating the creation of social board games and dissemination activities."

Reference

Dumit, J., & Belc, S. (2024, June). From consumers to creators: Bridging game play and playful game design for impactful civic education. Analog Game Studies. https://analoggamestudies.org/2024/06/from-consumers-to-creators-bridging-game-play-and-playful-game-design-for-impactful-civic-education/

Keywords

Board Game, Designboard, Gamescivic Education