Understanding Intersectionality through Critical Game Design

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Game design encourages people to think in terms of systems. This workshop, presented at the 2016 HASTAC Conference, takes advantage of the way games easily represent systems to help students (and their instructors!) work through intertwined oppressions. Theories of intersectionality attempt to describe how phenomena like racism and sexism, for example, mutually reinforce and alter each other. However, this can be difficult to capture in words. Instead, this workshop tasks participants with creating a set of rules that simulate how different oppressions interact with one another. This activity is useful for talking about the theoretical concept of intersectionality, and its emphasis on designing games will require students to think about power and identity in systematic terms rather than representational ones