Overview
Time: Thursday 9:20am-12:20pm
Location: DARC 206
Contact: suruiz@ucsc.edu / 831.502.7564
Office Hours: Friday 10am-12pm in Communications Building, Room 149C. Please Make and Office Hours Appointment Using This Link
Over the last 40 years we have seen a blossoming of new models of play. From the rise of the New Games movement and the emergence of the role-playing game (in the 1970s) to the current moment’s rise of independent games, art games, documentary games, political games, and more — we are changing who plays, how we play, and what play can mean. At DANM, we are interested in play-oriented approaches to storytelling, ideology, sociality, performance, and other rich areas of human life.Truth and Power Belong to Those Who Tell a Better Story
~ Stephen Duncombe
Game Design, Documentary Storytelling, and Social Action is a hybrid studio/seminar course where participants engage in creative production as well as critical discussion. Participants investigate the potentials and frictions that arise when combining activism, non-fiction storytelling, and the design of interactive media and playful systems. Key theoretical and practical questions this course will pose include: How can we elevate and establish the genres of documentary games and activist games, and why should (or shouldn’t) we? Do these games require a re-evaluation or expansion of traditional game design and development workflows? How might we communicate to a broad public why games matter in contemporary culture and how they may play a crucial role in social justice and political resistance? What can gameful thinking contribute to the documentary filmmaking and activist communities (and vice versa)? How can games authentically and ethically document subjective realities as well as intervene in society and help shape a better future? Participants will approach the topic from a variety of perspectives, drawing on a range of art practices, cultural studies, game studies, cinema studies, and more. Participants will maintain creative + critical online spaces, develop digital and non-digital designs, and explore the iterative game design process. Class guests may end up being an important part of the course experience and help shape the direction of the topics and projects.
Special thank you to Jeff Watson and Soraya Murray for their support and ideas in the process of developing this syllabus.
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- Course Information Susana Ruiz