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Game recognize game: performative archives and alternate reality games

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Game recognize game: performative archives and alternate reality games

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GAME RECOGNIZE GAME:

PERFORMATIVE ARCHIVES AND ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES

by

Alexandrina Renee Agloro

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

August 2015

Copyright 2015 Alexandrina Renee Agloro
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DEDICATION
To those who seek to decolonize our future
Through imagination and play

iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It’s convention to thank your family and loved ones last, but this research would
not have happened and the words would have never made it to the page without my
family, biological and chosen. First, to my parents Romeo and Gerry: I stand on your
shoulders for everything I accomplish. My sister Anabel was never more than a text or
phone call away across all our moves over the years, and Angelique would let me vent
when I needed it. My nephew Malinteotl motivates me to keep my work relevant for
future generations. Sam Seidel was my partner in the fullest sense offering neverending
ideas, patience, and love. And the only one who was up early, up late, snowed in, and
always ready for a snack with me: my dog Beauregard.
Karena Heredia made sure I occasionally wore more than sweatpants and made
sure I knew that I could never be overdressed or overeducated. Adam Bush reminded me
what a big deal and how insignificant this work is in the scheme of what matters. Stefan
Smith: I touched your leg. Thank you to the adopted families who have taken me in and
shown me unwavering love: Chris Achacoso and Craig Bailey, Mira, Satu, and Cyrus
Mehta; the extended Seidels: Gramma May Ruth, Ashley Herring, Steve, Adria, Adam,
Lamont, Nancy Falk and Dicky Cluster, Stu, Bob and Zee; and the LA Bush family. To
my USC crew: Stephanie Sparling Williams, May Alhassen, Viola Lasmana, Janeane
Anderson, Dayna Chatman, Míchel Martinez; the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate
Education cohorts and Jummy Bullock (who taught us to never let anyone interrupt our
hustle!); and the friendly Annenberg faces, I will be forever grateful for your laughter,
tears, and ambition.
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At USC, I had an amazing committee who fully embraced my research/practice
model. My chair Josh Kun believed in my vision and kept everything running smoothly.
Thank you for letting me be the captain of my ship, as you say. Henry Jenkins was my
own personal Dumbledore, George Sanchez is the best model for engaged scholarship
inside and outside higher education I know, and Virginia Kuhn mentored and fostered my
feminist and technological imagination. Special thanks to the administrative folks at the
Annenberg School who supported me over the years: Billie Shotlow, Anne Marie
Campian, and Christine Lloreda. Richard Andalon’s support for the EDGE program was
critical to my USC experience.
Many sources of grants and fellowships kept me fed and funded for all these
years. First, thank you to the Annenberg Fellowship at USC. The original EDGE First
Year Fellowship provided an unshakeable scholarly foundation. EDGE taught me that
even though the university was not built to support us or sustain us, we are still here.!And
we will keep coming. The Andrew K. Mellon John W. Sawyer Seminars Dissertation
Fellowship through the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Cultures allowed
me untethered research time in the early phases of this project. Special thanks to Duncan
Williams and Kana Yoshida. The Voqal Fund and the Media Ideation Fellowship
believed in my exploratory process and funded the game design phase of this research.
Thank you to Erin Polgreen, Sabrina Hersi Issa, and Nikki Zeichner for listening and
collaborating through this process.
The Imagining America network were my scholarly comrades who dare to dream.
They’ve listened, laughed, loved, cried, and inspired me over the years. Tim Eatman was
a mentor, scholarly model, and above all, a friend. Thank you to the extended IA family:
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Carol Bebelle, Karen Boland, Scott Peters, Urmila Venkatesh, Jack Tchen, Jan Cohen
Cruz, Kevin Bott, Jamie Haft, and Holly Zahn. IA’s Publicly Active Graduate Education
(PAGE) Fellowship was critical to my development as a thinker and dreamer. Thank you
to my PAGE fam for your inspiration: Shan Mukhtar, Josh Franco, Alex Olson, Johanna
Taylor, Jen Shook, La Tanya Autry, Harishi Patel, Elyse Gordon, Janeke Thumbran,
Kimi Taira, Nick Sousanis, John Armstrong, Melissa Crum, and Enger Muteteke.
My Providence community was something very special during the period of this
work. At Brown University, a heartfelt thank you to Evelyn Hu-DeHart for inviting me in
and Matt Guterl and the American Studies/Ethnic Studies department for giving me an
intellectual home. Thanks to Joshua Segui, Mary Grace Almandrez, Shane Lloyd, and the
students at the Brown Center for Students of Color. For friends who could cross the
divide between the ivory tower and the interesting, you were my academic fairy
godmothers, dispensers of advice, writing partners, and compañerxs: Leticia Alvarado,
Julia Chang, Mona Damluji, Jia Ching Chen, Sa’ed Atshan, Ruth López, and Siri Colom.
To the arts organizations who make Providence special to me: New Urban Arts and
everyone who embraced whimsy and spectacle, especially Elia Gurna who showed me
how to be an expert at Muggle Relations, Ashley Paniagua, Emily Ustach, Jacques
Achille, Austin O’Goffa; Ricardo Pitts-Wiley and Mixed Magic Theater; and Shey
Rivera and AS220. The visitors to 799 Manton inspired my intellectual work and creative
practice. Heavy thinking was balanced by John Kenny and everyone else who let me dig
around the soil at Big Train Farm and a huge shout out to Angela Romans and her
Girlfriends First Friday for keeping it real when my reality needed a recalibration.
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Finally, this dissertation was made possible, encouraged, and inspired by the next
generation of brilliant thinkers. Felipe Ferreras’ genius is evident all over this work. Paul
Tran, Sydney Peak, Thuy-May Ngyuen, Nancy Truong, Joy Yamaguchi, Kendal Cockrel,
Jasmin Jones, Sarah Day Dayon, Keil Oberlander, Ryan Lee, Matt Wood, Izzy Greene,
Mariela Martinez, Sissy Rosso, Hawaii Holloway, Neisha McFadden, Maya Finoh,
Aanchal Saraf, and Cheyenne Morrin: The future will be rad because it’s in your hands.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ii
Acknowledgments iii
List of Tables x
List of Figures xi
Abstract xii
Chapter One: Introduction 1
The Dissertation Project 3
The Game 4
Dissertation Organization 6
Civic Engagement and Participatory Politics 8
Critical Education As Political 12
Interactive Media and Games 16
What Diversifying Participation Really Means 16
Why a Game? Games as a Medium 18
Portrayal of Race Online and in Games 21
Games Not Gamification 22
Design 23
Multiliteracies & Critical Composition 26
Remixing Historiography 30

Chapter Two: Mission Unlocked—Methodology 32
Experimental Ethnography 32
Designing in Detail 36
Experience and Experimentation 37
Critical Quiet 37
Uncertainty 39
Research Questions 41
My Field Site: Community Quilting 43
Youth Co-Designers 45
Who Are They in This Work? 45
Data Collection 52
Role of the Researcher 53
Who am I in This Work? 53
On Study Reliability: What Needs Replicating is Dedication and Compassion 55

Chapter Three: Performing Archives 57
Emotional Labor and the Archive 58
Archives? Data? Anecdote? Scrapbook? Ephemera? 62
Power to the People (Who Archive) 75
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Performing Archives 83

Chapter Four: Game Designing in Detail 94
Creating a Story 95
Design Diversity Matters 96
Participatory Design: More Than Just User-Centered Design 100
It’s Go Time! Moving Between Theory to Making 106
Disrupt Stereotypes 107
Consider Players 108
Attend to Multiple and Hidden Perspectives 109
Marginalized Groups Guide Design and Development 110
My Addition: Stealth Mode 110
Setting Boundaries for Success 112
Building The Resisters’ Narrative and Game World 115
Creating the Characters 117
Gloria and Multiraciality 118
Inclusion of Asian Americans 122
Considering Game Players 126
Designing the Game Experience 130
Considering Physical Space 131
Avoiding Technofetishism 135

Chapter Five: Play and Post-Play 141
Game Advertising and Recruiting 141
The Cookie Drop 141
Initial Contact and Player Registration 145
Environmental Factors in the Real Worldà Shifts in the Game World 147
Social Media Saturation 147
Pembroke Plague 148
When Weather is Not on Your Side 151
Lessons Learned as a Game Director 155
Game Design is an Underutilized Space for Learning 156
Without Credit It’s Not a Priority 160
Student Time is Crunched and Timing During the Semester
Matters 162
But Learning Happened! 165
Culturally Relevant is Key 167
Is Learning Enough? 169
Future Design Suggestions 175
1. Turn The Resisters Into a Credit-Bearing Activity 176
2. Incorporate Better Team Bonding 178
3. Enhance the Experience of the Game 181

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Chapter Six: Participatory Politics and the Color of Civic Engagement 187
Researcher/Participant/Community Relationships 187
Game Play Sessions as a Conduit for Discussing Larger
Societal Issues 189
Conversations About Race 194
My Relationship to Community as a Researcher 200
Civic Engagement in Universities 202
Whiteness in the University 202
Researchers of Color in Civic Engagement 206
Conclusions 210
Tools for the Toolbox 210
Conclusion 220

Bibliography 223

Appendices
Appendix A: List of Characters’ Names 246
Appendix B: Game Packets 247
Appendix C: Archives Utilized in The Resisters 272
x
LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Players Who Use Twitter and Instagram 139

Table 2: Distribution of Student Player Time 162

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: The Missing Decoded Game on Bing 73

Figure 2: RIAMCO Search Results 77

Figure 3: Instagram Selfie at the Old Brick Schoolhouse 87

Figure 4: Knowles Street 88

Figure 5: Scavenger Hunt Selfies 90

Figure 6: Newsclip That Inspired Selfies 92

Figure 7: Whiteboard Brainstorming 112

Figure 8: Narrative Building Blocks in Popplet 116

Figure 9: Outline of Daily Story with Accompanying Archival
Materials in Popplet 116

Figure 10: Character Development 118

Figure 11: Screenshot of Gloria Flores from Narrative Video 121

Figure 12: Gloria and Nat 126

Figure 13: Teams with Their Colored Square Differentiation 135

Figure 14: Mysterious Play Recruiting Cookies 142

Figure 15: Website Analytics From the First Week After the Cookie Drop 143
Figure 16: Team Green Rage Tries to Find Other Teams 150
Figure 17: Puzzle for Final Challenge 153
Figure 18: Carved Out Book For Final Challenge 153
Figure 19: Book Drop Location With the Book Wrapped in Plastic 154

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ABSTRACT
This dissertation is a combination of a transmedia alternate reality game, called
The Resisters, and a written monograph. I developed The Resisters through participatory
design with local youth in Providence, Rhode Island, about local people of color’s
activism and social movement history. The Resisters’ game-based learning utilized
intrinsic motivations and the desire to play in order to develop research and game design
skills while increasing culturally relevant information about local history of activism for
the game designers and the game players. Alternate reality games (ARGs) are unique
from the isolationist tendencies of other interactive games as an ARG is an interactive
drama played online and in real world places where people come together both online and
in the real world to form collaborative social networks in order to solve a challenge that
would be impossible to solve alone.
The Resisters game was designed from physical and digital archival research and
was played through an online interface, social media, and in real world locations. This
dissertation addresses issues of contemporary archives by identifying The Resisters as a
prototype for how to make use of physical archives and transform documents into a
publicly accessible and interactive online format. The written monograph investigates (1)
the limits and possibilities of archives, (2) exploratory game design and game play with
youth designers and college student game players, and (3) pedagogical opportunities for
civic engagement in higher education using a culturally relevant game. Using
ethnographic methods, I determine factors for an alternate reality game to bring together
college students and community members in equal collaboration.

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The theoretical frameworks of this dissertation position community-based
research as an exercise in collective intelligence and reimagining the past in order to
collectively determine the future. Furthermore, this dissertation examines young people’s
intersecting and emergent race, gender, sexuality, and class identities as well as how
interactive game play translates into real world engagement in social issues.
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CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

“The revolution begins at home.”
- Gloria Anzaldúa + Cherrie Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By
Radical Women of Color

Day 1. A young woman with caramel colored skin, green and white extensions
woven into her dark braids, and bright brown eyes appears in front of the screen. She
fiddles with the camera for a few moments, smoothes out her hair, then closes her eyes
and takes a deep breath. She opens her eyes and addresses the camera. Hey friends. I’m
Gloria, as in Anzaldúa? My mom named me after her favorite writer. Where do I begin? I
guess I’ll start with now. My mom disappeared yesterday, and if that’s not upsetting
enough, my dad was taken by ICE last week. Gloria continues her story, describing how
she learned just a few days before that her parents were undocumented immigrants living
in the United States under assumed names.
Gloria is the main character of The Resisters, an alternate reality game about
social movement history in Providence, Rhode Island, which unfolded during Fall 2014.
Gloria left a new video each day filling in her audience as to the new events in her story
during the three weeks The Resisters was live. Her daily videos were one section of the
website for The Resisters, which was the communication hub where game players could
connect to the story, view archival materials and clues, and connect to the game’s other
social media outlets (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook). Over the three weeks of game play,
the game’s players shared in Gloria’s fictitious story interwoven with history about local
activism of people of color. The game involved the online dissemination of clues to
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teams of players where they met in real world locations for team challenges that involved
the real world historical sites of activism of people of color.
What is an alternate reality game? An alternate reality game (ARG) is a
combination of online and offline interactions, a mix of digital technologies with
challenges rooted in the real world. Frank Rose (2011) defines alternate reality games as
A hybrid of game and story. The story is told in fragments; the game comes in
piecing the fragments together. The task is too complicated for any one person.
But through the connective power of the Web, a group intelligence emerges to
assemble the pieces, solve the mysteries, and in the process, tell and retell the
story online. Ultimately, the audience comes to own the story (p.14).
ARGs can be about any topic and the challenges can take place in any form, but in its
most essential structure, an ARG involves
An interactive drama played out online and in real world spaces, taking place over
several weeks or months, in which dozens, hundreds, or thousands of players
come together online, form collaborative social networks, and work together to
solves a mystery or problem that would be absolutely impossible to solve alone
(McGonigal, 2005).
An ARG cares about the story first. The game uses various platforms and resources to
spread pieces of the story for the audience to discover and assemble. An ARG will use
available and experimental resources such as music, costume, graphics, puzzles, or social
media to deliver the story (J. Kim, Lee, Thomas, & Dombrowski, 2009; Stacy, 2006).
This document is an experimental ethnography about researching, designing,
building, and playing an alternate reality game. The research concerns itself with an
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ARG, but this project can’t be simplified to just watching young people play a game. The
ARG is the tool, but the real focus is on the community quilting that weaves the threads
of civic engagement and participatory design with young people of color in the
community where they live and at the university they attend. This dissertation is a
community-based collaborative digital research project, an exercise in knowledge
building and reimaging the past to collectively determine our future.
The Dissertation Project
In order to understand interactive media and games’ potential for engaging young
people of color in their communities, I embarked on a community-based research and
design project to create a game about Providence’s history of activism specific to people
of color. This project spanned seventeen months of fieldwork beginning with relationship
building with people and organizations across the various neighborhoods in Providence.
The amount of time it takes to develop relationships cannot be underestimated and the
foundation of community-based projects must begin in community. To anchor this
project in community, I recruited five co-designers, all young people of color who were
local to Providence and consider the city their home. Together, we conducted six months
of archival research in public and private archives across the state of Rhode Island,
gathering stories and ephemera that became the backbone of the game’s story. We then
spent three months culling our archival materials to craft the game’s narrative and game’s
mechanic to flow together. Finally, the game was played over three weeks in Fall 2014
with a group of Brown University undergraduate students.
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The Game
The Resisters was named after the game’s imagined secret society of social justice
activists who have existed throughout time and who surface at crucial moments in history
to make the world a more just and equitable place. Within the narrative of the game, the
current leader of The Resisters group was Grace Lee Boggs and Gloria’s mother
disappears to Detroit to join a team of activists fighting for immigration justice.
The game was played across multiple platforms and in real world spaces to maximize
each team’s collaborative online and offline skills. The Resisters game incorporated the
following components:
• Website: The center of all the game action was the game’s website. Gloria’s daily
vlog was released here. As the game progressed, sections of the website were
unlocked, including pages for displaying the archival materials thematically.
Woven the storyline, players could visit Graciela’s Closet (Gloria’s mom), Tío
P’s Office (the neighborhood businessman), and Lucinda’s Library (the
immigration bondswoman) and see news clippings, letters, flyers, and maps.
Other sections of the website included maps where the challenge locations were
tagged as well as the social media feeds. After the game ended, an epilogue was
added to the website to include real world resources for the players to be involved
with current local organizations and the background on the research process.
• Social Media: The game utilized pervasive communication with its players across
Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. While the game’s original design was to
release text clues on Twitter, visual clues on Instagram, and utilize the game’s
Facebook page as a backchannel communication zone for players, the players’
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social media saturation was less than expected and we revised the design to
triplicate all clues across the three platforms.
• Selfie Scavenger Hunts: The first two game challenges were selfie scavenger
hunts played in teams. The teams had clues and information sheets about each
location and earned points for group selfies taken and uploaded to Instagram with
the hashtag #TheResisters. The rules of the game dictated that one point was
awarded per player in each team photo. Capturing members from other teams in a
selfie earned two points. Teams identified themselves by holding colored squares
of paper in their selfies. The challenge required players to strategize how to
maximize the most points within the limited window of time allotted for play.
There were more locations on the map than possible to visit during the scavenger
hunt—it was up to the teams to decide whether or not to stay together or split up
for maximum points efficiency. The first scavenger hunt was on foot around the
East Side of Providence, with most locations close to the Brown campus. The
second challenge utilized students’ free bus passes with their student ID cards that
took the players throughout downtown and the South Side of Providence.
• Final Induction Challenge: The final challenge lasted a series of days and
involved an all-team collaborative puzzle revealing the location of an induction
ceremony where the game players themselves became Resisters. The final
induction ceremony was staged as a public history art installation where players
could walk through and explore altars dedicated to the historical figures covered
in the game and other pieces of local history.
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Dissertation Organization
This dissertation is organized around a series of interlocking and interwoven
stories, and for this reason the chapters unfold in the chronological order in which the
project took place. The remainder of this chapter outlines the central theoretical
frameworks of civic engagement and interactive media and games. As this dissertation
project was an experimental process, one chapter is dedicated to outlining the various
methods I utilized to frame this project. Chapters Three, Four, and Five detail the process
of archival research that led to game design and ultimately, game play. Chapter Six
discusses the larger implications of relationships between communities and universities
using examples from the project. In each of these chapters, I use ethnographic fieldwork
to bolster my claims about archives, game play, and learning through design.
In Chapter Two, I present my ethnographic approach utilizing two
complementary methods: experimental ethnography (Wilson, 1988) and designing in
detail. The second method of designing in detail takes into account the exploratory
process of community-based research, and based on my ethnographic fieldwork I present
three tenants of designing in detail—experience and experimentation, critical quiet, and
uncertainty. The remainder of the chapter outlines my research questions, field site,
participants, data collection methods, and my role as a researcher.
Chapter Three explores how interactive media can repurpose information for a
wider public. This chapter investigates the nature of contemporary archives and positions
The Resisters as a new archive built from physical and digital material. In this chapter, I
address the following questions: What does a physical archive offer that a digital one
can’t? What does a digital archive offer that a physical one can’t? Who maintains the
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archive? What happens when the archive can no longer be maintained? The final section
of this chapter puts Diana Taylor’s (2003) theories around the archive and the repertoire
in conversation with the performative elements of The Resisters as a shifting archive.
Chapter Four reveals the practice of game designing as a community process.
This chapter describes the development of the game’s narrative and the variables that
influenced character and story building. In this chapter, I describe why design diversity
matters, the elements of participatory design, and why community-engaged design is
more than just user-centered design. The Resisters’ game design process followed the
spirit of “learning to do it by doing it” (Freire, 1982) and our guiding question through
the game building process was: What would make this game fun? I describe my
explorations as the principal designer leading a youth co-design team and outline
culturally relevant considerations for young people of color when designing a locative
game experience.
In Chapter Five I explain the divergences of play during The Resisters and how
actual game events drastically varied from our play estimations. Building an alternate
reality game is eighty percent preparation and twenty percent improvisation. With
locative games involving real world players, it was impossible to be fully prepared for
every circumstance that will pop up during game play. This chapter also presents game
design as an underutilized space for learning. Through playtesting The Resisters, I found
that informal learning on a college campus was secondary to credit bearing activities and
game play cannot replace classroom time. The chapter concludes with iterative design
revisions to modify The Resisters for future play.
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My concluding chapter departs from the chronological order of archival research,
game design, and game play to address my reflections on community as a participatory
researcher. In Chapter Six, I discuss broader themes of researcher/participant
relationships and the challenges and opportunities of doing community-engaged work.
This chapter delves into relationships between universities and their surrounding
communities and the implicit whiteness of the field of civic engagement. Finally, this
dissertation concludes with a toolbox for scholars of color containing my strategies for
continuing to thrive in community-based work.
Finally, this written dissertation is half of my larger dissertation project, which
includes the production and play of the alternate reality game. The complete archive of
The Resisters can be found at http://TheResisters.org. The research produced through this
larger dissertation project is a combination of practice and theory: the exploratory design
and playing of a game, and the theorizing to understand what the findings from game
design and play contribute to larger trends in serious games, digital media and learning,
and community-based methods. This written analysis is meant bridge the gaps between
what can be seen on the game website and the occurrences that left little trace during
archival research, game design, and game play. This document is an explanation of the
experimental methodology and what can be theoretically gleaned from the process of
creating and playing an independent game.
Civic Engagement and Participatory Politics
Rogers et al. (2007) define civic engagement as the following activities: (1)
learning about political systems and political issues; (2) addressing community problems
through voluntary service, action, and group decision making; (3) mobilizing through
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political means such as lobbying, letter writing, public meetings, or protest; and (4)
voting. Rogers et al.’s definition of civic engagement categorizes real world actions,
while the definition of participatory politics includes online political actions.
Participatory politics are defined as:
Interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert
both voice and influence on issues of public concern. Importantly, these acts are
not guided by deference to elites or formal institutions. Examples of participatory
political acts include starting a new political group online, writing and
disseminating a blog post about a political issue, forwarding a funny political
video to one’s social network, or participating in a poetry slam (Cohen, 2012, p.
xi).
Participatory politics are youth-focused and aim to understand youth civic action as its
own category, rather than youth political behaviors compared to how adults engage in
civic actions. The Youth Participatory Politics study found that forty-three percent of
white, forty-one percent of Black, thirty-eight percent of Latina/o, and thirty-six percent
of Asian American youth engaged in at least one act of participatory politics in the twelve
months prior to the study (Cohen, 2012). Participatory politics are a more inclusive
measure than voting, as they account more broadly for the ways that young people to
engage in civic and political actions.
This dissertation utilizes the framework of young people of color as civic actors,
focusing on their current and future capacities. The field of youth development has
traditionally addressed young people of color through ideologies of deficiency. For
example For example, Ginwright and Cammarota (2002) document that “in the decade
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between 1985 and 1995, nearly seventy percent of all the articles in the leading youth and
adolescent research journals focused on youth problems, pathology, or prevention
primarily for African American and Latino youth” (p. 84). Civic outcomes of youth of
color have been shaped by the conditions of historical and contemporary oppression
(Gloria Ladson-Billings, 2006; Sánchez-Jankowski, 2002). This research presents a study
of young people of color who demonstrate political agency and resistance in spite of
these historical and contemporary barriers to full participation.
Many youth development organizations are apolitical in purpose, and those
organizations that aim to promote youth civic participation rarely addresses the critical
issues pertinent to communities of color (J. Moya, 2012). These youth organizations aim
to develop individualized growth for youth without addressing the structural oppressions
that lead to achievement gaps for people of color (S. Ginwright & Cammarota, 2002). In
a study about the Harry Potter Alliance and Invisible Children, one of the components of
experience central to the organizations’ recruitment and action is the “wish to help”
(Kligler-Vilenchik, McVeigh-Schultz, Weitbrecht, & Tokuhama, 2011). “Wishing to
help” constructs a patronizing lens of aid, and places the youth organization participants
outside of the community, since the privilege to “help” maintains a degree of distance.
Lonnie R. Sherrod (2006) found that much of the research on youth civic participation
has been conducted on white youth. The white youth-centered models have focused on
how youth civic engagement is positively correlated to future civic engagement, defined
as voting or community service. Opportunities for youth civic participation tend to
involve higher-income, high achieving white students and are typically less accessible
and available to low-income students of color (Kahne & Middaugh, 2008). Cathy Cohen
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(2010) warns that there is a “danger of representing the experience of white Americans as
the normative experience for all groups” (p. 163). If organizations geared toward youth
civic participation are less accessible to young people of color, the expanded definition of
participatory politics to include activities other than voting and community service ensure
that the ways that young people of color participate in democracy can be counted.
In order to combat the decline in civic vitality and social capital that Robert
Putnam (2000) traced in Bowling Alone, educators and activists inside and outside the
university have attempted to revitalize community life through educational programs.
Service learning ranks among one of the more popular implementations at universities,
but is fraught with difficulties. For example, in their analysis of service learning
programs and community organizations, Stoeker and Tryon (2009) ask the question,
“who is being served in service learning?” Their research draws attention to community
organizations that feel exploited by university partnerships as well as professors and
undergraduates with savior mentalities who use a charity model that reinforces negative
stereotypes about the helplessness of poor communities. Many engaged learning models
at universities follow the example of Jane Addams’ Hull House where outsiders come in
with ideas to best revitalize these communities (Longo, 2007). In its current incarnation,
engaged learning at universities mostly reflects white professors and students going into
communities of color.
Race, education, and socio-economic difference have always existed in the
engaged learning model. George Sanchez (2004) draws attention to the service learning
model inspired by John Dewey as always having existed within a sphere of racialization,
with Dewey and his followers being unaware of their own privilege and positionality as
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they entered the Chicago neighborhoods where they worked. Henry Yu (2002) described
Robert Ezra Park, who studied under John Dewey, and the formation of the University of
Chicago Sociology Department as white men from small rural towns in the Midwest
coming to urban Chicago to research the “Oriental Problem” and other forms of exotic
knowledge. Yu theorizes that the process of researching otherness in a university setting
was an entwined practice of constructing how to be an elite white through defining the
exotic. Engaged research requires openness with positionality during the research
process. In her article “The Natives and Gazing and Talking Back,” Lanita
Jacobs (2002) discusses the difficulties of researchers “native” to their ethnographic
research sites in terms of legitimacy in their field as well as critical reflexivity in their
research.
Critical Education as Political
What is the purpose of education? Paulo Freire and bell hooks discuss engaged
learning as the practice of freedom, where education is the pathway to not only being full
participants in society, but also the link to reimagining the parameters of an equitable and
just society where all people can be full contributors. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
Freire (1970) states, “Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as
the practice of domination—denies that man is isolated, abstract, independent, and
unattached to world” (p. 81). Building upon Freire, hooks (1994) adds that “education
can only be liberatory when everyone claims knowledge as a field in which we all labor”
(p. 14). Both Freire and hooks emphasize the interconnectedness of education as a
process that involves intentional shared knowledge and overlapping networks of people.
The New London Group (1996) also finds that education is key to future civic
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involvement, that the purpose of education is “to ensure that all students benefit from
learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic
life” (p. 60). Broadly, these writers support the idea that education should support civic
learning, defined by Ruiz, Stokes, and Watson (2012) as “learning that develops the
skills, knowledge and dispositions for contributing to civic life.” Engaged learning rooted
in lessons relevant to local community life is a direct way to draw links between
education and enacting social change.
Young people’s roles in civic learning are of particular importance to this
dissertation. “Youth” are not a monolithic entity with one similar experience, and this
dissertation follows the Freirian principle of engaging marginalized populations. Young
people of color from low-income communities are often pathologized as aimless
problems that will only amount to the future ills of society in the United States (Dyson,
2005; Ginwright & Cammarota, 2006; Hosang, 2006). Steven Goodman (2003) refutes
this claim, proposing that urban young people of color are capable rather than deficient,
identifying how urban youth possess particular analytical skills that provide thoughtful
analyses of the conditions of their communities and relationships to larger society. When
young people of color critically engage with the conditions of their communities, they
hold the capacity to be agents of change, not solely subjects in need of change (Ginwright
& Cammarota, 2006). Civic learning needs shift the role of young people from “future
citizens” to “present civic actors,” empowering youth to see themselves as agents of
change in the present instead of presently powerless (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2006;
Middaugh, 2012).
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Much of the traditional educational system functions on what Freire (1970) calls
the “banking model” that treats young people as empty containers into which knowledge
is deposited. Freire’s problem with the banking model is that it presents knowledge in a
hierarchical manner with teachers as the only experts, and never empowering students to
consider their lived realities as opportunities for learning and change. The banking model
“anesthetizes and inhibits creative power” (p. 81) while a problem-posing learning
system lets learners re-consider the conditions of their realities. Freire also recommends
that education must respect the cultural values of the particular community—denying
these worldviews will not have positive results and should be considered a cultural
invasion, no matter how well intended. Finally, Freire argues that knowledge is created
through invention and re-invention. This dissertation views and values the capacity of
young people as knowledge-makers and full participants in the research process.
One aspect of engaged learning that this dissertation utilizes is critical research
through a participatory process. Participatory methods acknowledge young people as
“experts in their own lives” (Clark, 2010, p. 116) so that their expertise is used to ground
the research. Ernest Morrell (2004) describes critical research as defined by
differentiating the who and the how that has become associated with traditional research.
The who in critical research challenges constructions of which persons have the right to
participate in legitimate research. This proposition supports engaged learning’s
conceptual shift to position young people as presently engaged as civic actors rather than
future citizens. The how in critical research challenges assumptions of distance and
objectivity in traditional research. According to Morrell (2006), “where traditional
research is individualistic, critical research is collaborative; where traditional research is
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often defined by objectivity or distance from research subjects, critical research is defined
by proximity, even intimacy between researchers and populations researched” (p. 112–
113). Critical research is not a variation on traditional research, it is a different way of
creating knowledge that follows the tenants of education as the practice of freedom.
Within the framework of this dissertation, I approach informal learning as a form
of activism. Engaged learning is a method of political activism ( b hooks, 1994) because
no form of knowledge production is neutral. Similarly, Freire (1970) states,
No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by
treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from
among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle
for their redemption” (p. 54).
Ginwright and Cammarota (2002) propose a social justice youth development model that
moves young people from awareness and action against their own oppression to an
awareness of and action against the oppression of others. The social justice youth
development model is a process that progresses through self-awareness, social awareness,
and finally global awareness to understand how oppression is manifested locally and
globally. The progression from understanding to action links education to activism;
through the learning process young people are empowered to position their agency as
catalysts for personal then social transformation (Anyon, 2005; Duncan-Andrade &
Morrell, 2008; King, 2005). Much of Henry Giroux’s work in critical pedagogy aims to
draw connections between knowledge, structures of power, and action to create change.
In Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling (1984), Giroux highlights how the
classroom setting reproduces social inequalities and how textbooks, teachers’ trainings,
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and interactions between students reiterate hegemonic culture. Giroux proposes that
radical teachers actively work to not reproduce these social hierarchies in their
classrooms, and this form of disruption is activism. A way to disrupt structures of power
in the classroom is through culturally relevant pedagogy, described by Gloria Ladson-
Billings. Ladson-Billings (1992, 1995) defines culturally relevant pedagogy as collective
empowerment where students achieve academic success, retain cultural competence, and
develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge oppressive social orders.
Pedro Noguera’s (1995) research on disciplinary action in schools also supports
disrupting educational settings that reproduce structures of inequality. He finds that
disciplinary methods oriented toward social control create unsafe school cultures and
instead advocates for methods that humanize students and create collective responsibility.
Interactive Media and Games
What Diversifying Participation Really Means
The importance of this dissertation for digital studies is who is doing the learning
and what we learned, as youth of color are often paraded around as tokens or entirely
missing from the conversation. Cathy Cohen’s (2012) study on youth participatory
politics was unique because unlike any prior study of youth and new media, Cohen’s
study included large numbers of Black, Latina/o, and Asian American respondents.
Diversity is a buzzword in the current landscape of digital media and education, usually
perfunctorily remarked upon or hovered over for a few a moments before returning to
catering to qualities of the standard cybercitizen: white, male and adult (Harewood &
Valdivia, 2005). The white male adult is the invisible standard who reigns over the
production and consumption of digital media, what George Lipsitz (1998) identifies as
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whiteness: the unmarked category that measures difference, where it never has to identify
itself and is the benchmark for social and cultural relations.
In Dimitri Williams’ (2006) outlining of the social history of video games, he
classified age and gender as the areas of conflict within game play. Race as a contributing
factor was absent, but implicitly, young (white) maleness was the standard upon which
comparisons were made. In the influential volume Hanging Out, Messing Around, and
Geeking Out (Ito et al., 2010), the participants are non-raced unless non-white cultural
factors are mentioned, indicating a non-white difference. For example, in a chapter titled
“Families,” race goes unmentioned unless the participants are people of color (i.e. “Ana-
Garcia, a half-Indian, half-Guatemalan fifteen-year-old” (p. 157) versus “Andrew, a ten-
year-old elementary-school student” (p. 163)). Diversity used within these models seems
to be noted as the “otherness” upon which whiteness is upheld.
This research intentionally focuses on young people of color, a population caught
at the juxtaposition of two popular media literacy tropes: the Digital Native and the
Digital Divide. Digital Natives have been presented as young people who have spent their
lives with digital technology and are born fluent in its processes (Prensky, 2001). This
point of view is problematic because it assumes a level of access to technological
resources that is not universal across this age demographic. Across the demographic of
young people of color in urban and rural settings, it can’t be assumed that everyone has a
computer at home, internet, or a cell phone of individual use. But contrary to traditional
conceptions to who does or does not have access, Cathy Cohen’s (2012) Youth
Participatory Politics study found that young people across racial and ethnic lines are
connected online in some way. Cohen’s study found that ninety-six percent of white
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youth, ninety-four percent of Black youth, ninety-eight percent of Asian American youth,
and forty-nine percent of Latina/o youth report having access to a computer that connects
to the internet. Nearly half of all youth surveyed connect across social media; fifty-one
percent of white youth, fifty-seven percent of black youth, fifty-two percent of Asian
American youth, and forty-nine percent of Latina/o youth send messages, share status
updates and links, or chat online daily.
Despite increased connectivity, factors around the Digital Divide have deepened.
Merely accessing a computer in a classroom or a computer lab no longer sufficiently
deters the divide. Instead, constant hardware and software upgrades along with the human
networks of skill building are necessary to build a bridge across the Divide (Seiter, 2005).
In much of the literature, the focus has been on a rhetoric of including outsiders, rather
than one of belonging. In order for young people of color to have a real stake in
participation, they must feel like they can belong and be part of the digital world.
Why a Game? Games as a Medium
Current polarizing debates around games position them as the media of capital
and empire (Dyer-Witheford & Peuter, 2009) or a key to saving the crisis in education
(Tierney, Corwin, Fullerton, & Ragusa, 2014). After the design and play process with
The Resisters, my evidence concludes that games are neither. In their most basic
condition, a game contains the following guidelines:
• A game is an artificial system
• It has players
• It has conflict
• It has rules
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• It has a win mechanism (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003)
Said in a different way, a game must have a goal, there must be limitations on how
players achieve this goal, there must be a feedback system for players’ progress in
achieving their goal, and participation must be voluntary (McGonigal, 2011). These
processes alone do not contain cultural rhetorics with embedded value systems. But when
cultural values are combined with the procedural rhetoric of games—how games’
processes effectively persuade its players (Bogost, 2007)—games contain an influential
possibility.
Are games any more influential than previous methods of technology and
communication? Probably not. Continuing the line of thought from Dennis Baron (2000),
who positioned computers as one technology in a historical trajectory of communication
technologies including the pencil and the telephone, digital games are the next point on a
communication continuum. Taking another step back, games existed in many forms
before they looked like their current digital incarnation. Games predate computers by
hundreds of years, and broadening the field of vision to incorporate digital and non-
digital games avoids what Eric Zimmerman (2004) calls “technological myopia” (p. 154).
So while games have long been part of human life as a way to form community and sense
of belonging (Flanagan, 2009), the most recent turn to digital games, and in the case of
The Resisters, pervasive games, is just another point on a longer term historical trajectory
of understanding communication and the intricacies of community relationships.
We know that games have existed almost as long as humankind (Flanagan, 2009;
Salen & Zimmerman, 2003), and there are reasons for their widespread popularity. The
fantasy elements of games allow players the thrill of fear, but knowing games are
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artificial systems save players from the real pain of fear (Laurel, 1993). Games’ fictional
constructs allow players to immerse themselves and experience relationships connected
to place and community more deeply because of the fantasy elements (Squire et al.,
2007). As an art form, artists can manipulate games as a medium of expression in ways
that resemble change for social good as well as in ways that reiterate problematic social
tropes. The content produced within games is like many art forms, it is not the root of any
problem, but is a reflection of state of civil society. Games, like most learning
experiences, are not neutral in their content and in their reception (Gee, 2008; b hooks,
1994).
As it is impossible for education to be neutral, spending time debating whether or
not games are educational is more productive if the question is not if games are
educational, but rather how players understand a game to be educational (Bogost, 2007).
In a study of Grand Theft Auto, Anna Everett and Craig Watkins find that video games
can teach ideologies of race and racism through the game’s content, but also through the
game mechanics of how a player collects points and masters the game. Everett and
Watkins (2008) call games like Grand Theft Auto “racialized pedagogical zones” for how
messages about race and racism are intensified through interactive game play (p.412).
Identifying racialized pedagogical zones where learning about race and racism takes
place through game play is part of a process that Michael Mateas calls procedural
literary. Mateas’ definition of procedural literacy is “the ability to read and write
processes, to engage in procedural representation and aesthetics, to understand the
interplay between the culturally-embedded process of human meaning making and
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technically-mediated processes” (Bogost, 2007, p. 245). Even non-educational games
teach players something (Fortugno & Zimmerman, 2005, Gee 2003, Squire et al., 2007).
Portrayal of Race Online and in Game
Researchers need to pay closer attention to obstacles beyond getting online. Once
young people of color get online, there is a dearth of culturally relevant content,
particularly in the realm of gaming. In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)
stated, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” In the
twenty-first century, the problem of the color line has not been resolved, it has been what
Lawrence D. Bobo calls “merely reconfigured” (Marable, 2002, p. 55). The color line has
been reconfigured into the digital sphere where inequalities still exist, just repackaged
with new technology. Craig Watkins (2009) compared the parallels of late-stage
MySpace and the early phases of Facebook to suburban gated communities meant to keep
the undesirables out. Another example of this reconfiguration is Ernest Wilson’s (2012)
inquiries through his website Digital Du Bois. Wilson posed the question, “If W.E.B. Du
Bois were with us today, what would he say about the impact of the ‘Information
Revolution’ on communities of color in the United States?” These studies and others
identify what Lisa Nakamura (2008) considers “digital racial formation,” the ways that
digital technologies influence the production and reception of race, building upon Omi
and Winant’s (1994) foundational racial formation theory. Kenneth Clark (1965), co-
designer of the doll studies that were foundational to desegregating schools in Brown v.
Board of Education, wrote, “It is still a white man’s society that governs the Negro’s
image of himself?” As studies by Watkins, Wilson, and others have shown, and as people
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of color still struggle to represent themselves online, it is still largely the blanket of
whiteness that governs the image of people of color online and in games.
According to the International Game Developers Association, game designers and
developers are overwhelmingly white, male, young (median age 31 years old), and
college educated (Everett & Watkins, 2008). The lack of diversity in the game design
industry leaves wide gaps of lived experience that translate into a small, predictable
selection of game plots and storytelling. Young people of color rarely have the
opportunity to represent themselves or the way they see the world. Interactive games
exist that are not intended to reproduce people of color as gangbangers, prostitutes, drug
dealers, or athletes. Despite this effort, social awareness games like FreeRice (the game
donates ten grains of rice toward ending world hunger for correct answers) or Evoke
(players strategize the best way to improve health and social issues in Africa) still operate
from an imperialist, colonial mentality (Ruiz et al., 2012). These games instill a White
Savior Complex and propose that these game players know best how to fix the world for
others, or at best, “save” the less fortunate with no critical explaining of how the state of
the less fortunate came to be that way.
Games Not Gamification
In 2014, game-based learning was a $4.7 billion industry and is expected to reach
$7.1 billion in by 2017 (Greer, 2014). Corporations are trying to figure out how to
monetize this games trend. Gamification refers to a form of behavioral economics that
uses game mechanics in non-game activities (Jagoda, 2013). Gameplay is fun because
they provide experiences of self-efficacy and a mastery of a skill set (Koster, 2005). But
no one wants to play a game just because it’s a game—games are fun when they are well
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thought out and well designed (Deterding, 2010). Where gamification misses the mark is
how the players are interacted with as consumers; bestowing points and badges does not
constitute a game. Ian Bogost (2011) suggests the term “exploitationware” is more
accurate than gamification, because gamifiers are intending to “capitalize on a cultural
moment, through services about which they have questionable expertise, to bring about
results meant to last only long enough to pad their bank accounts before the next bullshit
trend comes along.” The problem with gamification is that it takes the things least
essential to game experiences (i.e. points and badges) and makes them the central part of
the experience (M. Robertson, 2010). Gamifying learning—giving glorified gold stars for
skills achieved—is not the solution to our current crisis in education. However, paying
attention to students’ individual interests as a way to engage them in their learning
experience may be an answer to the outmoded industrial revolution-style education
system. Games are not synonymous with gamification.
Design
If the majority of game designers are male, white, and young, what can the
perspectives of the silenced offer us in terms of the design and use of technologies? Sue
V. Rosser (2006) provides different categories of feminism and how these perspectives
could influence technological use and design. For example, socialist feminism
understands that middle- and upper-class men create and design most new technology,
along with serving as the sources of money for design and creation, explains much about
whose needs are met by current technology and its design. Imagining women as
designers, as well as users, of technology suggests that more technologies might meet the
needs of women and be adapted for the spaces where women spend time (Rosser, 2006).
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Rosser finds that a feminist perspective would ask designers not only “how and
under what conditions the technology will be used” (p. 20), but also allow potential
consumers to influence the design and function of a product. These kinds of design
choices represent Mark Campbell’s (2009) notion of inclusivity, meaning the intentional
choices and actions to overcome the barriers that prevent the oppressed from sharing
power in decision making processes. The decisions to be inclusive within design would
incorporate marginalized groups, like women of color, into the design process. Rosser
(2006) suggests that women of color in a racist, sexist society have different experiences
than white men and their lived experiences “might in turn lead them to have different
priorities and to propose different technologies” (p. 21). Audre Lorde (1983) asks, “What
does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of the
same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible
and allowable” (p. 98). Translated to technology and design, technologies are created,
utilized, and funded by white men, and trying to create liberating design using current
available resources allows for only the smallest margin of change.
According to Lorde (1983), the master’s (contemporary technological) tools will
not dismantle the master’s house. She says, “They allow us to temporarily beat him at his
own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (p. 89). While
Lorde feels that we must detangle ourselves entirely from these oppressive systems, other
women of color techno-thinkers theorize about how to cope in the present with the
current master’s tools. Chela Sandoval (2000) proposes a methodology of the oppressed,
and these techniques can be utilized to intervene in technological design. She argues that
colonized peoples of the Americas have already developed the skills for “survival under
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the techno-human conditions as a requisite for survival under domination over the last
300 years” (p. 375). These survival skills, which she calls a part of oppositional
consciousness, are processes and techniques that can be incorporated by individuals in
order to re-imagine technological systems. Sandoval’s methodology of the oppressed
deconstructs and repurposes dominant ideologies in order to transform them into
empowering, liberating concepts. Sandoval believes that repurposing the master’s tools
can shift the oppressed away from solely surviving and move them toward imagining
their world anchored in equality and justice.
An example of critical design is anti-oppressive game development. Popular
media, including digital games, tend to reproduce power imbalances, privileging
dominant ideologies and the perspectives of those in power (Gunraj, Ruiz, & York,
2011). To design anti-oppressive games, game makers use their understanding of the
world to identify and re-imagine assumptions of privilege and oppression. An anti-
oppressive game would invite players to think about the power dynamics in their real
world and act in opposition to dominant ideologies. According to Ruiz, Stokes, and
Watson (2012), if a game can change the way a player experiences the real world, game
designers impact “the range of possible worlds that we can image, opening and elevating
our perception and capacity for action.” The authors find that an ARG is on some level an
act of resistance by re-envisioning reality, but it is still open to appropriation by
paradigms of privilege. In order to counteract reiterations of oppression, the possibilities
of what can happen in a given place must be identified and problematized. Anti-
oppressive game design adds a critical angle of engaged learning to the usual iterations of
gaming. Susana Ruiz (2012), in the “Civic Tripod” writes,
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The kinds of questions that arise in regard to ethics, power and the subjectivity of
others – of either oppressed or oppressors – may be relatively new for the game
community because the typical game doesn’t take on such difficult or complex
perspectives; that is, games more often than not deploy familiar fantasies of
control and progress.
However, other practitioner communities have longer trajectories wrestling with these
issues in their own unique ways, some of which are theater (including Theatre of the
Oppressed techniques), documentary filmmaking, and social work. Much like engaged
learning, anti-oppressive gaming seeks to dissolve the divide between experts and non-
experts (Gunraj et al., 2011). Those who are considered non-expert game makers can add
their perspectives to the design process, flattening the hierarchy of expertise and allowing
for a richer narrative and learning experience.
Multiliteracies & Critical Composition
In today’s world, being able to understand words on a page is no longer the only
literacy needed to be a fully participating citizen. John Willinsky (1990) considers
literacy a source of experience and meaning, actions through which students make
meaning of their world. The meaning of literacy is shifting; educators can no longer
consider literacy an isolated skill that receives a fifty-minute lesson during the school
day. Instead, literacy must be considered “a social process in the daily landscape”
(Robbins & Dyer, 2004, p. 11). The New London Group (1996) was one of the first to
theorize what multiliteracies meant nearly two decades ago. In their article, “A Pedagogy
of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures,” they consider multiliteracies as a necessary
perspective because:
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The multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and
linguistic diversity in the world today call for a much broader view of literacy
than portrayed by traditional language-based approaches… Multiliteracies
overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how
negotiating the multiple linguistic and cultural differences in our society is central
to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students (p. 60).
The New London Group calls for a broader consideration of what is considered a text
with the abundance of multimedia technologies. Additionally, they stress the necessity of
multiliteracies in culturally and linguistically diverse communities and in relationship to
an increasingly global world.
While the New London Group doesn’t explicitly state multiliteracies are
necessary in urban communities, their description of culturally and linguistically diverse
societies is an argument for the validity of various forms of colloquial communication—
including Bilingualisms, Spanglish, and African American Vernacular English—that
young people living in urban neighborhoods often encounter. Scholars have argued that
literacy for these multimodal language speakers should be considered closer to bilingual
than English language deficient (Morgan, 1999; Smitherman, 1977). The literacy training
for these students is to learn when to speak and relate in language that relates to their
communities, and when to “code-switch” into standard English. Knowing the appropriate
moments for these linguistic varieties is what Beverly Moss (2002) considers community
building and literacy building through shared knowledge. Understanding cultural
differences is key to understanding how teachers and learners of multiliteracies engage in
community building.
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The term multiliteracies is almost exclusively used in reference to the New
London Group, however other scholars engage theories similar to multiliteracies without
labeling them as such. Both Paulo Freire and Walter Mignolo discuss the potential of
multiple literacies to access decolonial possibilities in educational settings. In Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, Freire (1970) uses the term dialogical thinking to express the liberatory
potential of literacy. Recalling Willinsky’s proposition that literacy allows students to
make sense of the world, Freire’s dialogical thinking moves from reading the word/world
(Freire & Macedo, 1987) to action in a decolonial process. Walter Mignolo (2000) uses
the term bilanguaging to describe multiple sources of literacy. Bilanguaging
“transform[s] human sciences into forms of knowing that outdo the humanitarian
generosity of hegemonic power, and that recast[s] cultures of scholarship by the
recognition of diversity and knowledge which outshines monothinking and
monolanguaging” (Mignolo, 2000, p. 266). Mignolo positions bilanguaging as action that
attempts to alter structures of power and oppression. Utilizing dialogical thinking and
bilanguaging as other forms of multiliteracies identifies how literacy is not a neutral
activity—it’s a form of activism.
A more focused look at multiliteracies as it relates to urban youth of color is
essential to the framework of this dissertation. Writing about communities of learning in
a general sense erases the complexity of lived experience, and ignores that all learning
experiences are not equal, particularly in the realm of multimedia education. Jeff Duncan-
Andrade (2006) describes how a critical media literacy pedagogy focused on urban youth
holds potential to “deconstruct dominant narratives, develop much needed academic and
critical literacies, and creative counternarratives of those in the media, which largely are
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negative depictions of urban youth and their communities” (p. 150). Young people of
color complicate a simple digital divide narrative that Blacks and Latinas/os don’t use
digital media. Duncan Andrade (2006) states that poor students of color spend more time
with electronic media (including television, movies, video games) than their white
counterparts—more than six and one-half hours per day (p. 149). According to
Craig Watkins (2009), young Blacks and Latinas/os are significantly more likely to
participate in the online world than their elders. In the first study of teens’ use of social
network sites in 2006, Black and Latina/o youth were slightly more likely to have
personal profiles and create internet content than their white counterparts (Lenhart &
Madden, 2007). A study conducted by Pew Internet Project found that seventy-two
percent of Black teens and sixty-three percent of Latina/o teens own cell phones,
compared to the national average of seventy-seven percent (Lenhart, 2012). Knowing that
young people of color engage with digital technology on a daily basis means that
multiliteracies educators have an immense opportunity to scaffold young people’s
understanding of their world with media.
As scholars re-think the practice of literacy, it’s also important to re-frame how
we think about composition. Much writing on civic engagement in the classroom stems
from research around composition classes. Texts such as Tactics of Hope: The Public
Turn in English Composition (Mathieu, 2005), Writing America: Classroom Literacy and
Public Engagement (Robbins & Dyer, 2004), and Intergroup Dialogue: Deliberative
Democracy in School, College, Community, and Workplace (Schoem & Hurtado, 2001)
highlight engaged scholarship’s focus on composition. Learning composition is primarily
concerned with the act of writing, but in our increasingly multimedia society,
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composition should also include inventing, designing, and building. As music is piece of
composition, so is a website, a digital film, or an interactive game.
Remixing Historiography
The Resisters as both a game and an archive repurposed archival documents for a
wider public. Efforts to create alternative historiographies, like Emma Pérez’s Chicana
history in The Decolonial Imaginary and Jeff Chang’s dub history of the hip-hop
generation in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, remix texts, archives, and stories to create new,
more inclusive histories. Emma Pérez (1999) does not use the technological term
“remix,” but as she says it, “Chicana history has been an effort to retool, to shift
meanings and read against the grain, to negotiate Eurocentricity” (p. xvii). Retooling and
shifting meanings are key components to a remix in order to create something new. Jeff
Chang calls Can’t Stop Won’t Stop “ a nonfiction history of a fiction—a history, some
mystery, and certainly no prophecy. It’s but one version, this dub history” (2005, p. 3).
What Pérez and Chang both invoke is the relative nature of history, depending on what
stories are reported to become real. Mixing different stories to create new histories
“organizes collective memories” and invokes “notions of difference and social boundary”
(Maira, 2000, as cited by Campbell, 2009, p. 363). The ability to combine stories, “facts,”
and artifacts produces new interpretations of the past and offers tools for teaching in the
present.
Beyond remixing histories, Mark Campbell supports remixing as a pedagogical
tool for music educators who teach about social justice. Using remixes in the classroom
destabilizes “natural” orders of society, particularly around issues of inclusion, race, and
culture, and questions how and why certain things are put together through media-
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making. Campbell (2009) states, “The act of remixing… fosters critical engagement
skills that question the order and structural boundaries of genres, sound, or society in
general” (p. 362). Taking Campbell’s pedagogical structure of the remix beyond his
intended use as a musical practice opens up further opportunity to think about media
creation and use, societal structures, and history.
The remix is just one of many DJ practices that Adam Banks references as a way
to think about composition, including design, in his book Digital Griots. Banks (2011)
discusses the remix as a “critical interpretation of a text” and identifies strategies for
remixing – revisit, rethink, revise, and renew (p. 26). He discusses shoutouts as a way to
think about references, as well as crate-digging as ongoing research because it builds
upon a lifetime of learning, knowing, and interpreting. In terms of the practice of remix
using technology and history, Banks (2011) looks to examine storytelling traditions as
presenting an alternative historiography that builds from the truths, tropes, and
experiences of Black people in the United States—an underrepresented group in higher
education and other mainstream American institutions. Storytelling as an alternative
historiography offers important perspectives on what it means to be human in relationship
with technologies and technological systems (Banks, 2011, p. 79). To uncover previously
ignored histories, Banks states that we need to envision ourselves as reinterpreters or
remixers of traditions.

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CHAPTER TWO: MISSION UNLOCKED—METHODOLOGY

I approached this project as an ethnographic study because it allowed me to
collect a broad range of information in order to make sense of the process of building and
playing The Resisters. I wanted to look for ways to collect tangible detail and production,
but I also wanted to take into account what was not said or written yet still hung deeply
with us as we worked. How could I collect silence? How could I document my youth co-
designers’ thinking and processing? How could I collect my own observations about
community engagement, obstacles, successes, and decisions? I struggled with how to
direct a participatory project that was designed for all participants to have an equal voice.
Leading this project, I realized that much of my thinking about how to execute The
Resisters was based on what I chose not to do, rather than what I actively chose to do.
Experimental ethnography and designing in detail as a methodologies offered a holding
space for rich description and detail, without needing to generalize or replicate the
information I found.
Experimental Ethnography

Contemporary ethnography embraces interdisciplinary thinking. Ethnography’s
roots are in anthropology (Clifford, 1997; Geertz, 1977), with the premise that the
objective outsider observer went into the field to watch and deduce about the trends of
culture and people within that area. Ethnography embraces the interdisciplinary nature of
this research. This project uses historical archives, critical education theory, cultural
studies, participatory design and community collaboration, civic engagement, game
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design, and media production. I used ethnography to weave together these different
fields.
I needed to find a model of ethnography that spoke to the constructedness of
research. Lynn Wilson’s (1988) model of experimental ethnography took into account the
roles of the researcher and the construction of the written text that fit most comfortably
for how I was trying to establish my research. An uninvolved, objective participant
observer was an impossible stance for this work. The histories of my co-designers and
their varying privileges and experiences were a major feature of The Resisters, and as an
educator, there was an obligation to teach when situations arise. Listening to an oral
history together, or disputing a “fact” found in an online archive was an influencing
experience. Learning how to reason against facts presented as truth is a process that can
change the way a young person thinks and sees themselves in the world. I know that I
was not an impartial observer participating in the activity because the reason why I
conduct research with young people and not on them (Clark, 2010; Luttrell & Chalfen,
2010; Luttrell, 2010; Thomson, 2008) is to act as an agent of change in the lives of young
people of color in a world that often pre-judges their lives as disposable (Ginwright &
Cammarota, 2006).
I knew I was not invisible and objective in the research because real events in my
co-designers’ real lives came with them to our research and play sessions. Sometimes
pressing deadlines in their real lives took precedence over The Resisters’ planned work
for the day. Can you help me with these financial aid forms? Can you tell me the
difference between a subsidized and an unsubsidized student loan? Can you help me with
this application? Can you help me write a resume and a cover letter? Should I get a debit
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card? All of these questions had real implications in my co-designers’ lives, and I
struggled with rationalizing the importance of staying on schedule with how badly my
co-designer needed a job so that he had enough money to live.
Wilson’s (1988) experimental ethnography explicitly describes the visibility and
influence of the researcher. She positions the researcher, her informants, and the research
produced as all interwoven, and it is necessary to make these encounters explicit. Wilson
states, “Ethnographers become acknowledged as ‘actors’ in a historic, disciplinary
encounter; informants become full participants; and ethnography becomes a written text
that represents specific relationships between specific individuals and cultures” (p. 50).
Kevin Dwyer (1982) proposed that the researcher does not solely record what is going on
during the research process. The ethnographer is an active participant that influences the
“informants’” actions, and there is an environment where the researcher’s questions
encourage certain types of responses. Within this framework, as a researcher I influenced
the project’s outcome as well as my co-designer’s lives, and this ethnography is an
intentional series of decisions about framing what happened over the fourteen months this
project took place.
Other aspects of experimental ethnography that resonated with the structure of
this project are this method’s intentionality to be transparent with disruptions and
constructions in the research. Wilson describes differences between how written
ethnographic research can give the appearance of a smooth execution of events when the
process was far bumpier. She says,
The written text reveals the actual process of field research by including the
specific sequence of events and the interruptions, accommodations, and
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oppositions that occur within negotiated field encounters. Ethnographies many
times imply that every aspect of the research process was carried out according to
plan, that nothing significant occurred spontaneously or unexpectedly (1988, p.
54).
It was clear to me that I needed to include the disruptions to my anticipated activity
because in many ways it was the disruptions themselves that shaped the next plan of
action I concocted. Finally, experimental ethnography acknowledges that the written text
is not a full account; rather it’s a series of decisions about how the researcher synthesizes
thoughts, feelings, events, and ideas. Wilson differentiates between the participants’
actual perceptions, words, and ideas and the mediation of the ethnographer’s choices
about those perceptions, words, and ideas. A reflexive perspective can aid the
ethnographer through the socially constructed nature of knowledge production.
Researcher reflexivity means being aware of the power differential between the
ethnographer and the participants, having clarity that the written account is only a “partial
truth” within the framework of everything that took place in the field. In order to balance
researcher’s bias, I have involved my co-designers as equal stakeholders as much as
possible in archival research, game design, and the creation of this written dissertation. I
asked my co-designers what was important to write about and honored the space where
silence was requested. The value of The Resisters in their lives and my research questions
shape the following chapters. In the end, these written words are mine; therefore any
inaccuracies and oversight are my own.
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Designing in Detail
Alongside experimental ethnography, I needed an additional method that
accounted for the uncertainty of participatory research, and a way to make sense of the
thick descriptions (Geertz, 1977) I collected. These descriptive moments I experienced
and documented were full of detail—both in full expression and in silence. These
interactions with my co-designers and game players were performances in themselves,
and a question asked by performance studies is: How do you document a live
performance? How could I capture a performance of developing identity? Or a
performance of community engagement or educated student?
Alexandra Vazquez (2013) proposes listening in detail as a method for listening
and writing about music “that is not invested in possession or clarification” (p. 25).
Within this method, Vazquez explains that music plays on and on and affects you,
although the influence of the musical detail “is often as inscrutable as the details
themselves” (2013, p. 25). Within this project, the time and energy invested in and
received from my co-designers and collaborating community organizations affected all of
our lives and our work. It’s unclear where the full expansion of The Resisters’ influence
reached—midway through designing the scavenger hunt challenges, I began to feel the
extent of ARGs’ popular phrase “this is not a game.” While our interactions were first
anchored in game research and design, hearing successful reports of co-designers getting
jobs that I had coached with resume/cover letter help and going grocery shopping
together showed me that this had developed into much more than a game. There was so
much importance in the details that we didn’t talk about. In the spirit of the unexplained, I
propose designing in detail as the next iteration in detail-focused methodology, following
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in Vazquez’s musical conception and that of Naomi Schor’s (1987) mode of reading in
detail.
Designing in detail has three components: experience and experimentation,
critical quiet, and uncertainty.
Experience and experimentation
Like playing a musical instrument, community-based work takes practice and
constant tuning. Interactions and relationships can stumble, like hitting a wrong note, but
often it just takes energy and attention to find that right groove. And like the tenants of
improvisation, a deep knowledge of the material allows for taking risks and trying
something unscripted, but with structure. Experimentation happens when we’ve mastered
the process of relationship building and project making, but need to know if there’s
something else. So we try a new technique or approach, attending to all the details we
know and feel. Alexandra Vazquez (2013) describes her work with detail as “an effort to
legitimate my own instinctive critical practice” (p. 29)—borrowing the phrase from
Naomi Schor. Instinctive critical practices are constructed by the cycle of experience and
experimentation. To design in detail means paying attention to instinctive critical
practices that will help make decisions about environmental factors, player participation,
game mechanics, or other details of creating a game with a community.
Critical Quiet
In order to design in detail, you have to pay attention to more than just what is
said, collected, or tangible. Details exist in what is not said, what is not done, and what
does not happen. Emptiness is a detail that is just as important a measure as productivity.
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Vazquez (2013) challenges the need for details to be productive, instead proposing details
to be able to
retreat back into whatever productive bunker they’ve been hiding. They effect in
flashes and refuse analytical capture. The fugitivity of details allows us to honor
their effects in the here-and-now and to imagine how they will perform in some
future assembly” (p. 21).
Within this project, critical quiet is observed in the questions asked that hang in the air
and remain unanswered.
Secrets and forgetfulness are part of critical quiet, as they are details that evade
capture and there are reasons for withholding information or letting information go. Fred
Moten (2010) discusses the need for certain groups of people—particularly those who are
constricted in some way—to keep secrets. There are stories about the flow of these untold
stories, and important to this flow are the ways these pieces of information are told,
miscommunicated, overheard, or left behind. The movement may be intentional or
unintentional, yet these details affect the web of people associated with the story.
Forgetting holds power similar to a secret, and forgetfulness is a space of critical quiet
where there used to be something that is no longer there. Jack Halberstam (2011) finds
that forgetfulness “allows for a release from the weight of the past and the menace of the
future” (p. 83) as well as being useful as “a tool for jamming the smooth operations of the
normal and ordinary” (p. 70). Critical quiet creates a space to deposit secrets and the
newly available space forgetting has cleared because these spaces of holding aren’t
empty—they are full of detail that can affect the process of design.
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Critical quiet is also self-reflexive. The attention to detail is not only what I
observed (or noted not observing) from others. Critical quiet can also be found in
decisions I didn’t make, and when inactivity was chosen as the option instead of
following up or proceeding with an action. To design in detail means observing the way I
am affected by the process, which may be in ways that are not immediately obvious.
Uncertainty
Designing in detail is method that takes into account the uncertainty of
participatory research and embraces the unknown. To design in detail means
acknowledging that there are many unknown variables in your project, and the details of
the unknown as they surface are part of the process. Documenting uncertainty is an
integral part of this method. This means making mistakes, obstacles, and points where
you pivot from the original plan known. Entering a project with a mindset on detail
means we don’t know what we’re going to find, or how it’s going to turn out, or what’s
going to happen. But paying attention to details of uncertainty means absorbing the
process and the fullness of the experience. Details have been deployed to prove “the false
order of modernity” (Vazquez, 2013, p. 27), but within this method, details recorded in
order to have a robust collection of information that may resist being filed into order.
An example of uncertainty throughout this research was my shifting perception of
what full participation looked like. At the conception of the project, I envisioned all of
my co-designers participating in every archival visit, each activity, and every meeting.
This intention turned out to be overly ambitious as I could not gather more than two co-
designers at time. I needed to recalibrate my expectations to be more in alignment with
the lives of high school and college students with class schedules, jobs, extracurricular
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activities, and family obligations. I quickly realized that if I continued to delay
scheduling archival visits and game play sessions because I could not get all of my co-
designers there, progress would be so slow and I would probably lose the interest of the
co-designers who were available. I learned that certain co-designers were interested in
different parts of production; some liked the archival research (some had no interest at
all), and others were most interested in game play and sharing their observations of game
mechanics. Observing the ways that my co-designers wanted to engage with the design
process made my understanding of full participation uncertain. Is full participation one
co-designer working with me on The Resisters at different moments?
How is it possible to take into account this much detail? Borrowing from Vazquez
(2013), designing in detail is “an experience with rather than an account of” (p. 38)
creating a game about social movement history with young people of color. Focusing on
the detail to recount my experience with game design in this dissertation is, in the
sentiment of Naomi Schor, telling a different story from one of explaining process,
completion, and plans for the next iteration. This dissertation unpacks the latter. The
techniques for designing in detail are inspired by Alexandra Vazquez and Renato
Rosaldo, which help make sense of how it is possible to gather detail. Vazquez says to
“proceed poco a poco” (p. 29). That sentiment of taking in a little at a time lets the
designer reflect on experimentation, critical quiet, and uncertainty. Rosaldo offers “deep
hanging out” (Clifford, 1997, p. 56) as a way to collect the immensity of detail in the
absence of the extended time in the field that in-depth ethnography requires. Within this
project, the concept of “deep hanging out” helps to embrace the uncertainty of when the
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boundaries of research and real life blur and letting those boundaries shift and lack
definition at times.
Research Questions
This dissertation is guided by the following research questions around young
people, identity, interactivity, engagement, and education:
RQ1: How do young people navigate intersecting and emergent identities of race,
class, gender, and sexuality during online/offline game play?
RQ2: How does interactive game play translate into real world engagement in social
issues?
RQ3: What pedagogical opportunities are made possible by including culturally
relevant ARGs into learning experiences?
RQ4: What are the limits and possibilities of physical archives and digital archives
in how digital knowledge is constructed and maintained?
The first research question addresses identity development in young people and
the effect of external influences, in this case engagement with The Resisters. Young
people are not a monolithic entity and will enact and experience game design and game
play in different ways. Stuart Hall (1996) defines identity as not “who we are,” but a
constant process of change where an identities are “the points of temporary attachment to
the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us” (p. 6). What are the
possibilities of identity development during game design and game play based on social
justice and social change? Additionally, as an ARG has online and offline components,
the game players engage online and face-to-face during real world location-based game
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challenges. I observed identity development in both the co-designers and the game
players.
The second question examines the possibility for interactive games to incite
action to create real world social change. Does consciousness-raising within the pre-
established framework of a gaming environment encourage or inspire young people to
take action in their real world lives? A gaming environment allows for risk-taking
because of its controlled structure. This research question has two parts: (1) in what ways
does designing and executing a game inspire action, and (2) in what ways do college
students become more involved in local social issues because of game play.
The third question focuses more on pedagogical practice given this dissertation’s
theoretical frameworks of multiliteracies and engaged learning. Higher education is faced
with issues of engagement with their local communities, most popularly plugged through
service learning in classes or with school organizations. What are models of
university/community engagement that do not involve a “charity model” and have
community members as active participants in the project? Understanding cultural
relevance involves seeing different overlapping networks where these young people
participate, from youth culture to racial/ethnic culture, to neighborhood culture. By
tapping into my youth participants’ conceptions of their cultures, I’m interested in
examining the potential for teaching multiliteracies that focuses on community building
using digital media tools. Additionally, The Resisters follows an informal learning
structure because the game takes place outside of a classroom setting during game
players’ free time. How does the informal nature of The Resisters affect learning?
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The fourth research question examines the archives themselves and how they are
utilized within the context of creating a new digital archive. As more and more
information is digitized and available online, what is the value of physical archives and
the process of archival research in the present moment? What does a physical archive
offer that a digital one cannot? What are the advantages and disadvantages of a physical
archive? Who maintains the archive? What happens when the archive can longer be
maintained?
My Field Site: Community Quilting
The field site for this research is the city of Providence, Rhode Island. I selected
this city for two main reasons: the smallness of the city and my long-term rooted
connections to the overlapping networks of people, organizations, and resources. In a
large spread out city like Los Angeles (503 square miles), it would be impossible to
utilize the entire city in a gaming environment, whereas the smallness of a city like
Providence (20.5 square miles) allowed for access to different neighborhoods across the
entire city while game planning. The city’s demographics were also attractive for this
research project that focused on young people of color; the city’s residents are 39.7
percent Latina/o, 13.1 percent Black, 6.5 percent Asian, 2.3 percent multiracial, and less
than 1 percent Native American/ Native Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander.
1

Although Providence is small, it is densely populated with youth organizations—
many of which were founded by young people or college students. These organizations
work alongside each other and are networked by the leadership, the overlapping young
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!The most recent demographic information is from 2012 from City-Data.com
(http://www.city-data.com/city/Providence-Rhode-Island.html)
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people in the programs, and shared resources. For planning The Resisters, I had
conversations with the following organizations: AS220, New Urban Arts, Youth in
Action, College Visions, Billy Taylor House, The Broad St. Synagogue Revitalization
Project, Girls Rock! Rhode Island, and College Unbound. During the fourteen months of
fieldwork, I was able to observe and be a part of the weaving together of people,
organizations, and resources that made the Providence feel like a community quilt.
Another way of categorizing my field site as a community quilt is thinking about
the city as an overlapping series of networks, and the movements between the networks
of people, spaces, and practices. It was a common occurrence within the youth
organizations I was in touch with to pool information and resources for high school
students like college and financial aid information, or scholarship and art contest
opportunities so that their teen program attendees could have access to the most
information. Within my field site, I was interested in watching the movement between
people in relationship to organizations, organizations’ relationships to community,
universities’ relationships to community, and my co-designers’ and game players’
relationships to the city.
Providence is also unique because there are five college campuses within the
boundaries of the small city, which leads to certain levels of town and gown dynamics in
the various neighborhoods surrounding some of the universities. The Resisters was
played by incoming college students of color who were part of a pre-orientation program
that was part of the Center for Students of Color (formerly the Third World Center—the
center changed its name halfway through this project) at Brown University, which is
located in the wealthy College Hill neighborhood on the East Side of Providence. The
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game mechanics of The Resisters utilized students’ free bus passes to transport them into
other neighborhoods across the city. While Brown University has university-supported
centers like the Swearer Center for Public Service and the Tri-Lab, the students who
frequent these centers are predominantly white students participating in service learning
projects in neighborhoods of color.
Youth Co-Designers
Who are they in this work?
Young people of color are absent or invisible in much of the literature about
young people and their uses of digital media (Ito et al., 2010; Watkins, 2009). When they
are mentioned, it’s in comparison to their white peers, or identifying the disadvantages or
lack of resources under which these young people suffer (Dyson, 2005; Ginwright &
Cammarota, 2006; Hosang, 2006). I developed this study in order to diverge from a
narrative based on what young people of color are missing; this study is about the
fullness and complexities of young people of color who build a transmedia game and the
college students of color who are playing this game. I structured this dissertation in
alignment with Eve Tuck’s (2009) call to suspend damage-based research on
communities of color because of the long-term costs and consequences of thinking of
communities of color as broken. Instead of writing about communities of color as
depleted and damaged, Tuck asserts that we conduct research on our communities to
capture the specifics of our desires. I examine young people of color as designers,
makers, game players, and community builders. This foundation is not meant to erase the
difficulties and disappointments I faced during the research, instead this research offers a
multidimensional view of makers, game players, and their lived experiences.
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I constructed this study to examine two distinct groups of young people living
within the same city. The first group was my youth co-designers: locals to Providence
who would help me research, design, and puppetmaster The Resisters. My parameters for
recruitment were that they were young people living in Providence who did not move to
the city for college. They would be of Black, Latina/o, and Asian heritage who were
between high school and college age (initially 14-23 years old). The recruitment process
emerged through multiple steps of outreach. I had formal and informal conversations
with teens and college students at various youth organizations throughout Providence. I
sent flyers to executive directors of youth organizations to post on their announcement
boards, and exchanged emails with several interested young people. If students were
interested after the initial email exchange, we would meet face-to-face somewhere
publicly (like a coffee shop) and talk through the students’ interests, the research process,
and the anticipated timeline. Several of the young people I met with were participants at
several youth organizations. It wasn’t unusual for a student to describe how they were
part of College Visions and Youth in Action, or how they jumped between New Urban
Arts and Youth Pride, Inc. after school each week. The local Providence youth
organizations have different purposes (college access resources, queer youth safe space,
social justice projects that provided youth stipends) and young people accessed these
organizations for their various offerings. The smallness of the city of Providence and
close-knit networks of nonprofits also meant that staff often recommended and referred
various young people to various organizations across the city.
From this initial series of face-to-face meetings, I retained a group of five co-
designers. The initial group had the following characteristics: two female-identified, three
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male-identified, two identified as African, one identified as Haitian, one identified as
Dominican, and one identified as Puerto Rican. One of the young men identified as
queer, and one of the women identified as queer and/or questioning. Two identified as
straight, and one said that they hadn’t really thought about the kind of person they’re
interested in. One participant was sixteen and in high school, one was nineteen was
entering their second year out of high school with plans to apply to college, one was
eighteen and a first year college student, another was twenty and a third year college
student, and one was twenty-five, in college with enough college credits to be a third year
student.
I met Anthony at New Urban Arts in October of 2014. I had originally thought he
was a student in the arts program, but several weeks later I learned that he was nineteen,
entering his second year out of high school, and volunteering as a studio assistant at New
Urban Arts. He had been part of the youth arts program throughout high school, and
continued to return each afternoon. New Urban Arts encourages former students to return
and visit the art studio during programming hours, but after the first year of Anthony
retuning daily to the studio, the staff created a role for him as “studio assistant” in order
to offer responsibility and create differentiation between Anthony and the high school
students. Anthony would arrive to the art studio about an hour before high school let out
and would fill in the daily whiteboard of which artists mentors would be in the space that
afternoon. He would arrange tables and the supplies and enthusiastically participate in the
afternoon’s art activities.
Anthony was interested in building The Resisters because of the chance to play
video games with other people, as video game playing had been an escape for Anthony
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and his best friend in high school. Video games were the start of Anthony’s relationship
with his best friend, however their friendly competitive gaming nature carried over to
competing and encouraging each other to go to the gym, jog, and cook better meals than
one another. Anthony was always available to play video games or talk about gaming, but
he frequently had reasons to not be able to make it for archival research sessions, ranging
from taking care of his younger siblings to volunteering for a union. Anthony and I talked
constantly throughout the fall about applying to college and looking for a job. We spent
the fall creating a multimedia application to his one early admission dream college, and
brainstorming ways for him to find work. About four months into archival research
during the spring, Anthony landed a job as an afterschool aide for an elementary school,
which restricted his time working on The Resisters and I rarely saw him around New
Urban Arts. Anthony picked up a second job at Burger King part-time in early June, and
his appearances at The Resisters game design sessions became even more infrequent.
Anthony was saving money to leave to for college in late summer, and contributed some
of his income to his household, so I gave him a lot of understanding and affirmation to
get to work. Anthony left for college in mid-August, just two weeks before we launched
the first events related to The Resisters. Anthony and I were in touch by text and
Facebook throughout the fall, but I did not see Anthony again until December after his
first semester of college.
Jay was a third year college student volunteering for the first time as an artist
mentor at New Urban Arts. He had been involved with the New Urban Arts programs as
a high school student and credited dedication of the staff to his acceptance and success at
the Rhode Island School of Design. Jay emigrated from Haiti at fifteen, lived in
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Providence as a teen, and continued to reside in Providence as a college student. Jay and
Anthony were friends from high school, and Anthony encouraged Jay to join The
Resisters project because Jay enjoyed online gaming as well as LARP-ing (live action
role playing) with fully constructed cardboard armor and cardboard weapons. Jay and I
would often strategize how he could handle difficult high school students during artist
mentoring hours at New Urban Arts. Within the artist mentoring space I was Jay’s peer,
but he also came to me outside of New Urban Arts to request help with creating a resume
and looking for jobs. Once he found a job as a summer program manager at a housing
project, we would talk constantly about how he could handle difficult child and family
situations. Jay would send me Facebook messages several times a week to ask me
questions ranging from relationship advice to job-hunting tips. I eventually added the
Facebook Messenger app to my phone because Jay’s Facebook messages were a more
static identity than his constantly changing cell phone numbers, and I wanted to be able to
receive his Facebook messages like texts and reply accordingly.
Jamilah was Puerto Rican, sixteen years old, and a high school student who
frequented New Urban Arts and Youth in Action. Jamilah was interested in The Resisters
but always hesitant to fully immerse herself in the project. I first met Jamilah during
November 2014 in the computer lab at New Urban Arts, where she was looking to learn
Photoshop to enhance her digital photography internship—part of her project-based
learning high school curriculum. Jamilah disclosed in our first conversation that she was
queer and questioning and seemed to be looking for an accepting community to explore
this identity. When I invited to Jamilah to bring along other friends of hers to a games
research session, she said to me, “I don’t have any other friends who are, uh, gay.” This
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interaction took place during Jamilah’s first week at New Urban Arts and I suspect she
had confused the queer-friendly atmosphere of New Urban Arts as a queer-only space.
Her queer identity never came up in conversation one-on-one or in the co-designer group
again. Jamilah was always included in our group meeting planning texts, but she rarely
followed through to show up. The few times she came to co-designer meetings when the
meetings were held at New Urban Arts, she would bring along another friend and sit
slightly off to the side with her friend and they would show each other things on their
phones. During these interactions, I could tell Jamilah was paying attention, but did not
want to appear too interested.
In the spirit of designing in detail, Jamilah tested the limits of what participation
could look like. Was Jamilah participating because she showed up? Should she be
excluded because she was more of an observer than a content driver? I was also
particularly aware that Jamilah was the only high school student in the co-designer group,
and I allowed her to be on the outer edges of activity without any pressure to be a vocal
contributor. During the following winter and spring, Jamilah became interested in the
Providence Youth Slam Poetry team, and was accepted on the team traveling to Brave
New Voices (a national youth poetry slam competition). By June 2014, Jamilah had
stopped responding to group meeting text messages. I heard from her slam poetry coach
that her family had moved to Georgia at the end of summer.
Yenzi was the oldest member of the co-designer group at twenty-five. By age
alone, she was too old to be included in the co-designer group, but as a college student
trying to complete her credits in order to graduate, she was at the same stage of college as
Jay. I first met Yenzi during summer 2012 where she was working at a local coffee shop.
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We became friends on Facebook and periodically checked in by Facebook message over
the next year. Yenzi identified as a daughter of Nigerian immigrants, and when I formally
recruited her for The Resisters, she was living at home after withdrawing from Rhode
Island College in order to combat her ongoing struggle with depression. Yenzi was
enthusiastic by text message and Facebook message, but sporadic with her follow-
through to attend meetings. She would cancel one-on-one meetings because of her
depression, or wait until an hour before a group meeting to announce that she couldn’t
find a ride, and often couldn’t make meetings because she was needed at home to help
with her mother’s business.
Yenzi’s presence as a co-designer required radical patience from my own position
as the project’s principal designer. Yenzi was sometimes distracting and destructive to
herself and the other co-designers, but I kept inviting her to stay part of the group because
she was lacking networks of other young people to connect with, and she was feeling
alienated from her family while living at home.
Felipe was the most consistent co-designer in his attendance and participation.
Felipe identified as Dominican, queer, and nineteen years old. He was a first year college
student at Brown University when we first met, had grown up in South Providence, and
had graduated from a private high school on the East Side of Providence, just blocks
away from Brown. Felipe had a strong awareness of the differences between the East
Side and the South Side, where his high school friends were hesitant to take him the ten-
minute drive home, asking questions like, “Will I get shot there?” Felipe was also aware
of his mother’s intentional decision to place the bulk of his pre-college activities on the
East Side, and limit his exposure and free time to South Providence. In Felipe’s words, he
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would say about his mother’s focus on the lives of her children, “My mom doesn’t play—
it was piano lessons, math camps, reading programs. There was no room for trouble.”
While Felipe was from South Providence, he was not of South Providence. His status and
availability to participate in this research project illustrated how my selection criteria of
“young person of color from Providence” were not an equal identity. Felipe had more
relative privilege (Mulvey et al., 2000) in relation to the other designers. Felipe, despite
where he grew up and where his mother and siblings still lived, had the most privilege of
the co-designer group.
Felipe received a summer undergraduate grant from his university that allowed
him to work full time on The Resisters without needing an extra summer job. Felipe was
a co-designer in the fullest sense of shared responsibility. He enjoyed going to the various
physical archives, and would occasionally text me photos when he would end up at the
physical locations of historical sites of activism we had read about from the archives.
Felipe and I met almost every weekday during the summer to complete production of The
Resisters game. Felipe’s involvement was an outlier of what young people’s participation
looked like in this community-engaged project. While other co-designers gave the limited
time they had available, or were hesitant about their involvement, Felipe was punctual,
dedicated, and had a family life that was conducive to his participation.
Data Collection
In order to embrace the methodologies of experimental ethnography and
designing in detail, I used multiple data collection techniques. Data was collected from
documents, co-designers, the game players, interviews, and self-reflections. The
documents included the archival research and the website and social media pieces of The
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Resisters game. The co-designers kept design journals that were hard copy notebooks and
an online Evernote notebook that was shared with me. The co-designers wrote down their
game ideas as well as their reflections on questions that I asked based on my research
questions. On The Resisters game website, players would see occasional online forms
with open-ended questions about their experience playing The Resisters. As I realized
The Resisters was a prototype in playtest mode instead of a finished product, I
interviewed five game players in-depth about their experience playing the game and their
insight about ways to make the game a better experience. The last data collection method
was through my own self-reflections that took place throughout the fourteen months of
fieldwork. These reflections were ways of keeping track of the detail of this project—I
collected my observations, outcomes, obstacles, and successes through each stage of
recruiting participants, archival research, game design, and game play.
Role of the Researcher
Who am I in this work?
If my field site and participants were pieces of the community quilt, what was my
relationship to the quilt? I knew I wasn’t the quilter of the entire quilt, as these
organizations and networks were in place before me, and would continue to exist when
my project was over. At its most basic explanation, a quilt is a series of panels that have
different focal points that are then fused together and linked. Borrowing from Marshall
Ganz’s (2011) concept, my Story of Now for this research would place me in different
quilt panels as different parts of each one. I was the designer and quilter of the The
Resisters quilt panel, and in this panel I wove the thread that kept all the different parts of
this project together. But I would be part of other panels too, including a New Urban Arts
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panel, a West End neighborhood panel, and a Center for Students of Color panel. Within
these panels, I see myself as accent embroidery—still thread that holds pieces together,
but not an integral part of the panel. Instead, I saw myself as artistic flair that added to the
overall dimension of that panel.
Taking it out of the metaphor, I am an early thirty-something cis-female of
Mexican/Filipina heritage that is living and working in the communities where I am
conducting my research. My research is about young people of color in the Providence
and Brown University communities, and in many ways, I am of these communities but
not in these communities. I was not a high school or college student, although I spent
much of my time interacting with high school and college students in youth arts programs
and at the Center for Students of Color. My communicative competence and
understandings of these young people of color’s cultures and lives facilitated my access
to them throughout the research. With my co-designers and game players, I was
“ ‘skinfolk’ but not ‘kinfolk’” (Williams, 1996 as cited by Jacobs, 2002, p. 793), which
meant there were many cultural nuances I understood, but I was not conducting research
with my peers.
Kamala Visweswaran (1994) discusses disrupting the home/field dichotomy of
ethnographic work and conceptualizes “homework.” Clifford (1997) gleans from
Visweswaran’s theory that “homework” is not the opposite of fieldwork nor is it staying
at one’s natural home to study one’s home community. Instead, “home” is a person’s
location dependent on a constantly changing variety of factors: age, race, gender, class,
sexuality and/or culture. “Homework” is an apt description of my research because
moving across networks of people, institutions, organizations, and locations my
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understanding of home was relative. My co-designers and game players were samples of
intention and not randomly sampled from my local networks—they were volunteer
participants who knew me because of my involvement in places where they spent their
time (I was both an artist mentor at New Urban Arts and a visiting scholar at the Center
for Students of Color during the period of research). To this end, does it matter if my
participants knew me before the research began or is this dynamic part of what it means
to be a community-engaged researcher?
On Study Reliability: What Needs Replicating is Dedication & Compassion
In certain strains of communication research, there is an emphasis on replicating
studies for ecological validity and reliability (Merrigan & Huston, 2009). It has been
proposed that qualitative studies cannot generate findings with universal applicability and
are not well suited in producing generalizable results (Lincoln & Gudba, 1985), and the
lack of generalization is considered a shortcoming of the research. This dissertation
rejects the need to generalize findings or conclude results with universal applicability on
account that totalizing knowledge is an imperialist project. Certain types of Western
research act as a gatekeeper to the validity of knowledge-making and sets politics of
acceptability around methodological choice. While I understand that this research was
conducted under structures of higher education, which have legacies of colonial
institutions, this research complicates traditional boundaries between the researcher and
subject(s) and the ways knowledge is produced. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) says,
Decolonization, however, does not mean and has not meant a total rejection of all
theory or research or Western knowledge. Rather it is about cent[er]ing our
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concerns and world views and then coming to know and understand theory and
research from our own perspectives and for our own purposes (p. 39).
Following the advice of Tuhiwai-Smith, this research aims to know, understand, and
produce theory that “decolonize[s] our minds, to recover ourselves, to claim a space in
which to develop a sense of authentic humanity” (1999, p. 23).
This dissertation is the result of a community-based participatory design project
and it is not feasible for this project to be replicated in the exact same fashion. To try to
replicate it would flatten the complexities of the community where this work was
produced, and the agency and experience of the youth co-designers and game players.
Instead of focusing on replicability (and in innovation circles—scalability), I encourage
focusing on the intricacy of detail and the outlines of what happened, what did not
happen, what claims we can make on the basis of this assembly. The specificity of this
account should be revised and re-structured with and for other communities who are
working toward similar goals.

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CHAPTER THREE: PERFORMING ARCHIVES

The archival and performative elements of The Resisters and this written
dissertation exist on many levels, and this chapter seeks to unpack the relationships
between The Resisters, the archives, and their performances. This research has worked to
produce a new archive as much as analyze established ones. The process of researching
in archives and creating a new archive was a physical experience, a digital experience,
and an emotional one. Archives tell stories about power, what is valued or not valued,
and the ways that their data performs. My guiding question for this section of research
was: What are the limits and possibilities of physical archives and digital archives in
how digital knowledge is constructed and maintained?
When I imagined spending time in various archives, my romanticized vision
included Harry Potter-like hallways where we would search through rows and rows of
boxes to find our appropriate collection, blow the dust off the box, and take it to an
examination table well-stocked with lamps and magnifying glasses. The experience
would be somewhere between a mystery novel and an adventure movie. One thing is
certain: my archival experience was most definitely not like an action adventure movie.
Instead, the archives we visited were in libraries, in state offices, and digitized online.
The majority of time spent researching in the archives was predominantly sifting through
non-relevant information, which made the small moments we came across something
relevant to The Resisters project feel like a small victory. In the words of dance archivist
Amanda Card (2011), “Spending time in archives is stimulating; but it is also often
tedious, even boring” (p. 135). I asked my co-designers to acknowledge their feelings
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about the current state of the archival research and I allowed myself to do the same.
About the archival experience, a co-designer wrote, “Sometimes archives (either digital
or physical) can be ‘too much’. And sometimes, they can be ‘just right’. During my first
digital archive experience, I had to pick through so much material. I had to be sure to stay
focused on what I was trying to learn about” (Co-designer Design Journal, 3/17/14). We
all felt moments of tedium, exhaustion, boredom, as well as enthusiasm, interest, and
intrigue.
Emotional Labor and the Archive
I initially inquired about information related to our topic with special collections
librarians at Brown University, who referred us to digitized oral histories. I was
disappointed that the librarians suggested digital archives. In my reflections, I wrote,
When I was imagining this project I imagined that my participants and I would be
in physical archives-- in the actual library space-- together. Instead, it seems like
we might be listening to and reading transcripts of digitized histories in our own
space. It's a different reality than the one I imagined” (Agloro, Fieldnotes
1/15/14).
We began archival research with the digitized oral histories, which was perfect timing to
cope with the excessive snow Providence had received during January when the archival
research phase began. The online oral histories were available even when snow cancelled
school and kept everyone off the streets and inside. We worked independently and split
up the various oral histories to listen to and read the accompanying transcripts. When we
checked in as a group to compare notes, the co-designers shared their concern that online
work alone was not the experience of archival research they were expecting. The teens
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talked about how it was hard to stay focused, and wished they had someone to talk to
when they didn’t understand something or wanted to verify whether or not the
information was relevant to our project. We concluded as a group that working together
was better than working alone.
The emotional labor of archival research was an ephemeral notion that took
several months to find a name that fit it. Anne Cvetkovich (2003) named her work in the
informal archives of lesbian history as an “archive of feelings,” which rings incredibly
close to my experience researching with teenagers in archives about people of color.
Cvetkovich discusses the feelings and emotions that are embedded into archival texts and
urges readers to take into account the practices that go into producing archival materials.
She says, “Lesbian and gay history demands a radical history of emotion in order to
document intimacy, sexuality, love, and activism-- all areas of experience that are
difficult to chronicle through materials of a traditional archive” (Cvetkovich, 2003, p.
241). It’s worth remembering the archive did not create itself; people put emotion and
thought into its creation. Archive-making is an intentional process, and it’s to be
remembered that
As you study archival documents, you are almost leaning over the shoulder of the
civil servant who wrote the memorandum, the clergyman who filled in the
register, the great-aunt who wrote the letter, or the cartographer who made the
map (Australian Society of Archivists, 2007, as cited by Card, 2011, p.130)
Cvetkovich also reminds us of the emotions that surface from the reception of the archive
materials—looking through archives is not a neutral experience. Particularly within our
research, we were reading documents on institutional racism and violence from decades
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ago, but they still felt relevant, if not depressing because of the lack of social progress.
The co-designers and I would talk about how the information affected us, and how
certain documents could have been written in the present.
2

Our “archive of feelings” ranged from excited, to exhausted, to confused. During
one archival visit to the Life Story Theater collection, Felipe kept exclaiming about the
proximity of the oral history participants’ addresses to where his family currently lived.
The locations had real world significance to him, which I believe made him more
invested in the research. The documents of the Life Story Theater collection were a
combination of English and Spanish transcripts, and I could sense that Felipe felt proud
and useful that he had the skills to conduct this particular set of research bilingually.
3
In
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2
!!!!!We completed game building during protests stemming from the shooting of Mike
Brown in Ferguson, MO, the strangling of Eric Garner, and the murders of other Black
people. The protests surrounding these murders led to conversations with the co-
designers about police brutality, whether there is a need for counter-violence, and how
current events mirrored things we encountered in the archives. Two examples that kept
surfacing were the police shooting of an off-duty Black police officer, Cornel Young, in
Providence in 2000 and the Soul Patrol, mostly Black volunteers who walked up and
down Prairie Ave. in South Providence after the killings of Malcolm X and Martin Luther
King, Jr. to keep people from rioting and damaging the neighborhood.
3
Felipe prided himself on his knowledge of French (which he learned at private high
school), but seemed less proud of speaking Spanish. Felipe was fluent in Spanish, and
mostly communicated with his mom in Spanish.
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the few instances I went to the archives alone, it felt noticeably more arduous and tiring. I
reflected on this difference, noting,
Archival research when done alone is exhausting. The weeks Felipe was in
finals… I went to the Providence College archives alone. Even just sifting
through the material for [three] hours at a time felt like a lot of joyless searching. I
realized that when taking Felipe to the archives, there was an excitement that we
could share when either of us found something useful. Archival research became
a communal experience. I definitely like sharing the experience better in
community than alone. (Agloro, Fieldnotes, 6/2/14)
Reflecting on these emotions was an intentional part of my methods, and reiterated that I
was part of the research process and not an impartial observer to this work. Within our
“archive of feelings,” we also felt confused and had to draw conclusions about gaps in the
information. Other archivists have documented this same confusion. Card (2011)
admitted that as she “sifted through the ninety-six boxes of text, audio-tapes, and
ephemera… [she] never felt that this material provided a clear, accurate, and objective
view of, well, anything” (p. 135). Our experience of trying to make sense of the gaps in
the documents we read was most present while reading the archives of the special
commission relating to the murder of police officer Cornel Young. We read years of
transcripts of special convenings, and meetings about meetings, but could not make sense
of the outcome of this special commission. We could not find if the special commission
achieved anything or put any new requirements into practice as an outcome of their
inquiry. We left the archive wondering, “What’s the point?” and feeling defeated.
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Archival research is emotional labor because it’s not only feelings-invoking—the
act of research is also work. I brought a co-designer with me to almost every archive trip,
which increased my level of work. Not only was the act of research taking place, I also
had to make sure that I was adequately explaining the process of archiving to the co-
designer so that critical information was not being overlooked. The co-designer (usually
Felipe, who enjoyed going to the archives) would independently sift through the
documents, and I would try not to watch over his shoulder or micromanage his work.
This technique meant that two sets of eyes on documents could review materials more
swiftly than me alone, but also I experienced anxiety that my co-designer would miss
something crucial.
Archives? Data? Anecdote? Scrapbook? Ephemera?
Documents are significant, whether they are housed in verified institutions or
living rooms. The process of archiving brought up issues of trying to understand what is
valued and what is not valued in preservation. For the sake of time, we only conducted
research in “traditional” archives, but on more than one occasion we were invited to the
homes of people who had boxes of materials from Black Studies and Civil Rights protests
in the 1960s that they wanted us to figure out what to do with. I suspected that if we
tumbled into the rabbit hole of home collections, we’d find many gems but would lose
precious production time. To stay within the confines of “traditional” archives is the
choice I made.
4
What is the value attached to a “traditional” archive?
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!!!!!This decision was made partially because of the already unusual research format of
building an ARG, and needing the “scholarly” backing of accepted archives. José Muñoz
(1996) lamented about the difficulty of extending archival research beyond the traditional
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The value of the “traditional” archive is steeped in what the preservation process
decides is “normal.” Derrida defines an archive as “not a living memory”, but a
“location” (2002, p. 42). This delineation of what consists of regularity may account for
the difficultly we had in finding exact materials in institutional archives. We were
looking for documents related to activism and people of color in Providence, but found
archives on people of color, and archives on activism, but rarely the two things together.
The difficulty of finding what we were looking for points to how archives are constructed
as accumulations of the regularity of life as it is meant to be presented, and nothing
extraordinary (Australian Society of Archivists, 2007, as cited by Card, 2011). We began
our physical archival research in the collections of Jay Saunders Redding, the first Black
person to teach at an Ivy League institution, and Rudolph Fisher, a Harlem Renaissance
writer and physician. These two men signified more of the extraordinary in their
achievements rather than the ordinary experience of people of color in the United States
in the twentieth century. The material in their archives painted a picture of the ideal
“American Dream” that could be achieved by perseverance and hard work. Jay Saunders
Redding had a few letters urging him to be cautious about being too outspoken about
civil rights issues in order to not jeopardize his employment at universities. The
documented events in these collections were meant to demonstrate normalcy, and provide
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saying, “Work and thinking that does not employ and subscribe to traditionalist scholarly
archives and methodologies are increasingly viewed as being utterly without merit. Work
that attempts to index the anecdotal, the performative, or what I am calling the ephemeral
as proof is often undermined by the academy's officiating structures” (p. 7). I decided to
not take a risk with the research materials.
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a curated experience of what belonged in an Ivy League archive. Cvetkovich (2003) goes
as far as to call these gaps in the archives we experienced “institutional neglect” (p. 8).
We were elated when we opened boxes in the Urban League of Rhode Island collection,
expecting to find guides of sanitized civic leadership, but instead found flyers for the
Rhode Island Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners and warning
papers from the Black Panther party to the local mafia to cease their exploitation of Black
families in the Federal Hill area.
We found established collections from which we could build The Resisters’ story
and game, but the difficulty we had finding the material supports the need for
memorabilia, scrapbooks, and living room collections to exist. José Muñoz discusses
ephemera as a category less revered than traditional archives. Ephemera is associated
with “alternate modes of textuality and narrativity like memory and performance” and
“does not rest on epistemological foundations but is instead interested in following traces,
glimmers, residues, and specks of things” (Muñoz, 1996, p. 10). Scholars of minoritarian
archives push for the legitimacy of documents that are not housed in institutions and for
the collection of non-tangible moments that are almost impossible to capture. Returning
to Cvetkovich’s archive of feelings, the value of marginal materials also includes
nostalgia, memory, fantasy, and trauma—all feelings that are difficult to tag into a folder
and place in a box. In the absence of tangible documents left in boxes for future
generations to sift through, memory becomes an important facet of recording what Jeff
Chang (2005) calls “B-Side” histories.
In order to account for the ephemeral, we adapted portions of Performance as
Research epistemologies to collect and make sense of what my co-designers and I were
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doing. Performance as Research emphasizes creative practice as a research and
methodological approach, and combines a cycle of “doing and knowing” as part of the
research process (Borggreen & Gade, 2013). Building The Resisters, our creative practice
consisted of creating bridges between the gaps in our archival research, as well as
developing a storyline that linked historical narrative with salient current events.
Borggreen and Gade also discuss creative material collection when conducting research
on performance, and needing to include the scripts, scores, notations, photos, video
recordings, maps, and other accumulated pieces related to the performance. To help the
co-designers and I make sense of the research we were conducting, we added many
things into our project repository including the expected: scripts, the videos we filmed,
our website, the maps from the challenges we created, game packets, and included the
unexpected: personalized fortune cookies from The Resisters’ advertising, text messages,
pictures taken on our phones of each other and treasures from our shopping trips.
Performance scholars remind us that although performances are fleeting and ephemeral,
they can leave a lot of “stuff” (McGillivray, 2011). Our informal collection of pictures
from our cell phones and other ephemera was in its own way building a new archive
while doing research about archives.
The concept of preserving memory gets even more complicated when working
with digital material in addition to the ephemeral and physical ones. As Wendy Chun
(2011) states, “A major—if not the major—category of new media is memory” (p. 97).
This type of memory includes the hardware and software of computing equipment, things
involved in digital preservation. Currently, as we move toward cloud-based storage, our
memory is becoming less dependent on portable hard drives we can see and hold and
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instead exists invisibly around us, with its only physical trace thousands of miles away at
a server farm we’ll probably never see. Memory (of both the human and technological
kind) is a substantial chunk of knowledge production and transmission. Diana Taylor
(2011) proposes that technological memory offers a new future for our past, while
reminding us “the embodied, the archival, and the digital overlap and work together and
mutually construct each other” (p. 3). Taylor says that this weaving together of the
various kinds of memory is a way of living in a “mixed reality” (p. 3).
5

Moving toward the digital archive is a way to (re)member information and make
it more widely accessible and publicly available. As Diana Taylor says, “Technologies
offer new futures for our pasts” (2011, p. 2). But as information moves from boxes and
VHS tapes to websites, there are issues about what is selected to be remembered and
transmitted. New knowledges are produced and buried during the construction of a digital
archive. Much like the creation of the physical archive, people are agents in the decisions
to save or ignore the data that moves into the digital. Decisions about archival materials
are ideological, either explicitly or implicitly (McGillivray, 2011). A co-designer
remarked about how digital knowledge was constructed based on how we were taking
physical materials from the archives and curating them on The Resisters’ website, saying
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“Mixed reality” is a more appropriate description of the genre of game we designed,
instead of “alternate reality.” Our game is a mixture of historical truth and historical
fiction, but is still someone’s lived experience and reality. “Alternate” implies that it’s a
different version or a different option, which in the lives of many people of color in the
US, there are few other options.
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Some limits of physical archives in how digital knowledge is constructed is that
sometimes, one cannot include all the information from pages of physical archives
into a digital repository/game/website. Digital knowledge construction should be
clear and concise and to the point - it can include loads of information…the end
product being a clean and clear digital space (Co-designer Design Journal,
6/24/14).
In this instance, the co-designer was aware that aesthetic and content choices were action
decisions that affected the final product.
Our final materials were presented on The Resisters’ game website in several
ways including photo gallery pages, website written text, maps, Instagram posts, tweets, a
link to our Facebook page, and links to PDFs that contained the game challenges. The
co-designers and I decided which pieces of information went where, according to theme
and relevance to The Resisters’ story. The three major collections we separated our
archival research into were the insider looks at three of the game characters’ personal
belongings. Gloria, the main character, shared with her viewers how she found a box in
her mom’s (Graciela’s) closet, visiting her Tío P’s office, and meeting with Lucinda, an
immigration bondswoman. We gave the players the opportunities to explore an extra box
in Graciela’s closet that Gloria didn’t show them, to examine paperwork from Tío P’s
office, and to look through Lucinda’s library. For each of these collections, we grouped
archival materials according to where we thought we would find these materials.
Graciela’s closet contained letters, maps, a few newspaper articles, and a handout about
the rules for community organizing. Tío P’s office contained the radical social justice
materials we found during archival research. For example, his collection contained a
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newspaper article confirming that Malcolm X would debate members from the NAACP
at Brown University in 1963. In the last collection, Lucinda’s library, we grouped legal
documents including papers about fair labor practices and housing rights. We also
decided that certain pieces of information were not pertinent to the game and website we
were creating, and left it out of the final website and social media communication. The
creation of The Resisters and its website was a hands-on experience with the
intentionality of creating a new archive.
A goal in creating the game’s website was making the material publicly
accessible. As more local people in Providence learned of the game we were creating,
many asked how they could play as well. In August, about six weeks before the game
launched, an instructor at an all-girls middle school in Providence asked how her students
could play, and as game designers we realized this game was already reaching beyond the
college students we were creating this game for. We needed to make not just the archival
materials publicly accessible, but also the ability to play the game. We decided we would
create hyperlinks to the game packets on the website, and create our own maps where we
pinned the locations each game challenge that we released the morning of each challenge.
It wasn’t necessary for people who wanted to play to participate in the challenges at the
exact moments the college student game players were on their scavenger hunts, so having
the materials available online meant that community members could play on their own
schedule.
With increased community interest in The Resisters, we decided we needed to add
an epilogue section to the game website where we described how we created this game
from research materials and who took part in the creation of the game. We shared the
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significance of our characters’ names, created from the names of notable people who
inspired us (see Appendix A for the list of characters’ names). For example, our main
character was named Gloria Flores, created after Gloria Anzaldúa and Ricardo Flores
Magón. Gloria’s cousin Cornel was named to remember Sergeant Cornel Young, an off-
duty Black police officer in Providence who offered to help other police officers at the
scene of crime, was mistaken as a suspect, and was shot and killed.
Digital archives move into another dimension of accessibility and power, on
different levels. On one front, having the resources to get online including having access
to a computer and an internet connection can be the obstacle. Information online does not
always flow freely and can be blocked by internet providers or government decree. The
idea that information online flows freely is a fallacy. In other ways, physical disabilities
can limit website access and accessibility to digital archives. Some documents are not
accessible to anyone with visual impairments without the use of website readers, if the
text was appropriately coded into the HTML. The construction of a digital archive is a
reminder that everything that happened within it was intentional—without decisions to do
something, the archive would not exist.
The archival materials at Brown University and Providence College were open for
researchers’ use, which limited their availability to the general public. Someone would
have to justify themselves as a researcher in order to access the materials. The co-
designers and I would talk about being able to get in to see the materials, and who did not
have the same ease to access these materials. One co-designer wrote,
I’ve learned that some archives are very difficult to access or easily accessible.
The awesome thing about this project is that we are taking archives from boxes
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and folders of materials from different sites and making them easily accessible
online. And, because it is online, anyone can learn from the valuable information
in these archives from their home, or wherever they might have an Internet
connection. Now, you don’t have to be an endorsed researcher in order to access
these materials. (Co-designer Design Journal, 7/24/14)
The co-designers reflected about who in their lives they wanted to be able to see and play
The Resisters. They thought of their family members and siblings who didn’t fit the
profile of a traditional “researcher.” Allowing this material to be available publicly to
anyone who wanted to play and learn was an important distinction that kept coming up in
our design process.
Our ability to make previously closed off information publicly available through
the creation of a game website speaks to the new ways that knowledge is transmitted.
Diana Taylor (2011) remarks that digital technologies “complicat[e] westernized systems
of knowledge, rais[e] new issues around presence, temporality, space, embodiment,
sociability, and memory” (p. 3). Remixing traditional archival materials into the storyline
of an online/offline game pushed the limits of bodies in real world spaces moving
between history and the present. The Resisters website’s sections of Graciela’s Closet,
Tío P’s Office, and Lucinda’s Library and how these sites function as digital pictoral
archives embody N. Katherine Hayles’ (1999) concept of a skeuomorph—“a design
function that is no longer functional in itself but that refers back to a feature that was
functional at an earlier time” (p. 17). A grouped collection of various photos of
newspapers articles, maps, and pamphlets online makes sense when put into the context
of an archive; alone, a viewer might wonder why the pictures were not labeled,
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explained, or embedded into website text that would describe what the viewer is looking
at.
The creation of our own digital archive brought up questions of how the
information will be maintained, and who will continue to maintain our data. These
questions stemmed from my original research question about how digital knowledge is
constructed and maintained, especially as we searched the internet to find documents that
no longer existed online. The speed of circulation of online materials asks practitioners of
archiving how we will deal with documentation and transmission in the present (Shultz,
2013), but we must also think ahead to the preservation of materials in the future. If an
archive is a place, an object, and a practice (Taylor, 2011), we must think about the
practice component, especially as it relates to continuity. A practice is something that is
done constantly, and archiving materials is an action that needs consistent attention.
What happens when materials are not tended to? Jay-Z’s collaboration with Bing
is an example of the loss of data and archive when digital spaces are not maintained. In
the month leading up to the release of Jay-Z’s autobiography Decoded, Jay-Z worked
with advertising agency Droga5 to release every page of the book in real world locations
as a contest that players would have to search and find in real world location and in the
Bing maps function for the month leading up to the November 16, 2010 release of the
book. The pages were released in thirteen major cities in the United States and
internationally (Droga5, n.d.). The online/ real world scavenger hunt search component
of the Decoded game was an inspiration to the design of The Resisters, particularly the
ways in which game players wanted to take photos of themselves with the clue pages.
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The way the Decoded game worked was that each page of the 320 page book was
reproduced in New York, London and various cities across the world. The pages were
blown-up and plastered in creative ways: on a rooftop in New Orleans, at the bottom of a
pool in Miami, on the inside of a custom Gucci jacket, on cheeseburger wrappers in New
York City, and other interesting locations (Gray, 2010). Players could answer clues to
find the Decoded pages in the online game and map interface on the Bing website, and
anyone who located a book page in the real world or on the online map would text a
unique game code found on the page to be entered in a raffle for the specific page they
discovered signed by Jay-Z. Anyone who played was entered in the raffle for the grand
prize—tickets to a Jay-Z concert in Las Vegas (Hadley, 2010). According to the
advertising agency, Droga5, by the end of the campaign, the average player spent over
eleven minutes in the game/ map interface, Jay-Z’s Facebook page followers grew by one
million, Decoded was on the best seller list for nineteen weeks, and the Bing campaign
earned 1.1 billion global media impressions (Droga5, n.d.). As an advertising tool, the
Decoded game was incredibly successful.
Game advertisements said that “fans could log on to bing.com/jay-z between
October 18 and November 20” to view all the book pages that players had collectively
discovered (Gray, 2010). It’s unclear how long the game/map interface stayed online, but
as of September 2014, when I tried to access bing.com/jay-z the website is not found.
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Figure 1: The Missing Decoded Game on Bing

The website no longer hosts the archive of found Decoded pages. Anyone who wants to
see the documentation of the game can find it in other online locations, but the original
source of the Decoded game archiving no longer exists.
The Decoded game has not disappeared without a trace. The game has left
traceable imprints in online articles, the Bing blogs announcing the launch of the game, in
Flickr accounts, on YouTube, and in a photo album on Jay-Z’s Facebook page called
“DECODED Fan Shout Outs” from 2010.
6
The Facebook photo album shows hundreds
of fans taking pictures of themselves alongside bus shelters, with pizza boxes, near pool
tables, with ceramic piggy banks, and with other game materials. These photos function
of as memory, both in the space they take up on a Facebook server, but also the place
they hold for collective remembrance of the month-long event. Without an official Bing
location for the remains of the game, memory, as Ann Cvetkovich (2003) says, “becomes
a valuable historical resource, and ephemeral and personal collections of objects [that]
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The Twitter account used to promote the game appears to have disappeared as well.
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offer alternative modes of knowledge” (p. 8). The informal collection of photos online
and the articles about the Decoded game are not the official Bing-sanctioned history.
The disappearance of the Decoded game/ map interface from the internet asks
questions about whose responsibility it is to maintain information, and what happens
when officially sanctioned archives disappear? Heike Roms (2013) positions a similar
question in about the nature of performance, asking, “[I]nstead of focusing on a single
performance event and the problems or possibilities of its audio-visual reproduction in
documentation, the archive compels us to consider for an extended artistic oeuvre the
manner in which its remains are cared for?” (p. 36). In terms of the Decoded game, there
was much effort and energy put into documenting the month-long spectacle. The book
pages were visible in the real world, and needed to be navigate-able within the Bing maps
interface. All Bing’s and Droga5’s focus went into the execution of the event and the
beautiful, glossy photos that represent all that work. In the present, in order to find the
results of all the labor, I had to dig around through various interfaces and find the
information myself.
The remains of the major commercial production have shifted from capital-
earning product into memorabilia. Benjamin Hutchens (2007) defines memorabilia as the
memories and practices that seem to escape archivization. The permanence of the
spectacle, even when the event itself moves into the ephemeral stage, lives on beyond the
briefness of the month-long game. Bing and Droga5 decided that one person who
decoded all two hundred clues using the Bing maps feature would receive a Willy
Wonka-esque golden ticket called “The Jay-Z Lifetime Pass,” which is good for
admission for two people to any Jay-Z concert anywhere in the world for the rest of their
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lifetime (Gray, 2010). At least for this winner, the game continues to reap tangible
positive consequences.
The disappearance of official Decoded game materials are an example of what
happens when digital materials are not maintained, either by choice or by circumstance.
A co-designer mentioned how sad he would feel if all of our work to create an online
experience with The Resisters disappeared and was glad that we controlled our game
website (as long as I keep paying our domain and server fees). Maintaining the digital
archive of the game is a priority to the co-designers and me, as without the online game
website there will only be ephemeral clues to point to what took place on social media
and participant cameras. The power to preserve The Resisters’ digital archive is feeling I
kept returning to when thinking about the longevity of this project.
Power to the People (Who Archive)
As we navigated the various institutionalized structures of the archives, I began to
notice how design was crucial to each archive. It’s fair to say that most archives are not
created based on user-centered design, but thinking methodologically through why each
collection was created and how it came to exist in its current state brought me back to this
research’s method of designing in detail. Each artifact, series, and collection are details
and processes. There are details in what we found, but also details in what was unknown
that we did not find. In Archive Stories, Antionette Burton (2005) writes,
Archives do not simply arrive or emerge fully formed; nor are they innocent of
struggles for power in either their creation or their interpretive applications.
Though their own origins are often occluded and the exclusions on which they are
premised often dimly understood, all archives come into being in and as history as
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a result of specific political, cultural, and socio-economic pressures-- pressures
which leave traces and which render archives themselves artifacts of history (p.
6).
Archives are productions of power, and the data we find or do not find are the results of
this power.
To begin our research, the co-designers and I broadly looked for instances of
activism and social movements as they related to people of color, and initially found the
search to be difficult. My initial exchange with a university librarian whose collection
expertise was in “American Studies” turned up no results, even though I had been
through the collections online and located several sets of papers that seemed like useful
for our project. In my early fieldnotes I wrote,
I've…flagged at least 5 different collections that I wanted to see. None of them
were specific to activism exactly, but I was thinking that activism happens not
necessarily just by protesting and doing direct actions. I had flagged papers from
Black [and] brown professors and the first Black doctor in Providence knowing
that professionals of color don't always leave their communities behind and the
work they do for the betterment of their neighborhoods I'd consider activism
(Agloro, Fieldnotes 1/15/14).
The librarian referred us to RIAMCO (Rhode Island Archival and Manuscript Collections
Online), an online database that categorized all institutionalized special collections in
Rhode Island. RIAMCO’s database has a browse-by-subject option, and the closest
category for what we were looking for was “Race, Ethnicity and Gender.”
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Figure 2: RIAMCO Search Results

The category returned forty-two collections and over half of the entries were about white
women and feminism. The result was disappointing, and echoed McGillivray’s (2011)
sentiment about what is not found in archives, stating, “Archives are not and have never
been impartial repositories and these ‘struggles for power’ are fundamentally about who
or what will be included in a particular archive and how” (p. 13). The three collections
found through RIAMCO proved to be valuable resources, but I knew that collections
existed on this topic and we would have to decide how much time and energy we could
spend chasing down elusive archives.
Community members in Providence ended up having more fruitful resources for
finding archival information than that first university librarian. People involved with
AS220 and the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society referred me to the collections of the
NCAAP, the Urban League of Rhode Island, and the Life Story Theater oral histories of
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Latina/os. The parameter set for our archival research was that the documents needed to
reside in established institutional archives for The Resisters’ game narrative, but as I
talked to people in the places where I volunteered, went to art exhibits, and purchased
groceries, many people in the community wanted to refer me to aging activists whose
histories should be collected. These moments left me feeling stressed about important
histories that would disappear if they were not collected, and also dismayed that these
histories were not prioritized. It was first-hand insight into the power involved in
archiving, and the positioning of data that are worth maintaining. Borggreen and Gade
(2013) ask the question “Whose memories, traditions, and claims to history disappear if
performance practices lack the staying power to transmit vital knowledge?” (p. 15).
Although their work examines archiving performances, the question has relevance to
histories of people of color.
Michel Foucault (1994) and Jacques Derrida (1995) have interrogated the
relationships between archives and power, illustrating that regular people appear in
archives when they clash with power, but it is the clashes with powerful people or
institutions that mark them as inappropriate, thus marking them as beyond ordinary
(McGillivray, 2011). The special commission on Cornel Young’s murder illustrates this
point. Cornel Young was a fairly ordinary citizen, and would probably never have ended
up with an archive collection with his name on it if he hadn’t been murdered by other on-
duty police officers. The extraordinary stories from our archival research emerged more
often from the ordinary people in the archive—we knew Rudolph Fisher, doctor and
Harlem Renaissance writer, would be spectacular, but the accessibility of the story of
Sarah Collins, the Providence community organizer for the Urban League in the 1970s,
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was inspirational material. The Life Story Theater oral histories were an intimate
experience for Felipe because his family had emigrated from the Dominican Republic in
a similar manner to many of the oral histories. Felipe felt pride that his heritage and his
neighborhood were mentioned in the Life Story Theater archives. On this trip, Felipe
would occasionally exclaim, “This guy lived like two blocks from me!” (Agloro,
Fieldnotes 3/14/14). I noticed the power of young people of color seeing themselves in
historical documents, and the positive effect that it had on them.
Documentation and memory are other instances where the archive wields power.
Wendy Chun (2011) describes the power held by the archive because its visitors perform
these actions of “memory and repetition, repetition and forgetting, repetition and
transmission” (p. 98). Those who are absent in the archive do not get to participate in
memory and repetition, and they are more easily forgotten. Therefore those who produce
the conditions of the archive get to determine what is cycled into the system of repetition.
What gets remembered from the past has implications for how we as a society think
about facets of culture in the present and in the future (Schultz, 2013). Derrida (1995)
positions archives as a tool for the future, as we cannot know how the historical
documents in the archive will matter beyond our present moment. As Wendy Chun
(2011) says, “Archives, like source code, can only be determined after the fact” (p. 99).
The materials contain power—as do the humans who do the archiving—because
these materials live on separated from the cultural memory of the person, event, or place.
The knowledge contained in the archive is perpetually being translated and mediated by
circumstance, and the archive must evolve with its materials (Dana Williams & López,
2012). In The Decolonial Imaginary, Emma Pérez (1999) asks a question about the
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difference between fiction and history. As we designed and created The Resisters, we
moved back and forth between history (the archival materials) and fiction (the game’s
storyline), and the difference between history and fiction was that the historical
information that existed in an archive. Our storyline was a composite of contemporary
current events and real places that exist in Providence. Gloria’s (the main character)
father has been taken into custody by ICE (Immigration, & Customs Enforcement), and
although it’s not a true story, it’s one that is similar to many families living in the United
States in the present. Our game storyline came from real world information, and has been
translated into digital videos and scavenger hunts, demonstrating Diana Taylor’s (2003)
point that time and space reinterpret how items in the archive get manipulated and
embodied.
Memory, creation of knowledge, and the meaning of the materials within the
archive shift across time. Rarely is the original owner of the materials in a collection able
to tell the viewers the significance of the artifact they view, what it is, or why it had
significance in their lives. For these reasons, the data left alone perform for the viewer of
the materials, as it is often presented without context. Using the framework of
performance in the archive opens up the possibility of examining the positionality of the
data and its surroundings. Viewing the archive process as performance opens the space of
“performance as critical discourse [which] allows for focusing our attention on data, not
only as accumulation of cultural material, but also as how a source of data lives and
operates within a culture” (Borggreen & Gade, 2013). The authors point to the
environment, physical or digital, surrounding the archival data and how the data’s
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positioning within this environment inform its presentation and the experience for the
human viewer.
Within the archival research I conducted with my co-designers, we felt the
difference between the formalities and processes of physical archives and the experiences
of the digital ones. We experienced a performance of a scholarly environment, where we
were ushered into a reading room with a big table and a few white-haired senior scholars
peering at big books. In within this performance, there were the accouterments of giant
cardboard bookmarks to hold the place of the folder we removed in each box, a one-
folder-out-of-the-box-at-a-time rule, and mandatory lockers for all of our belongings
except a pencil, our notebooks, and an iPad. If we removed our jackets, we would have to
hang them on a hook in the back of the room. At another archive, after we had been
conditioned to the performance of the serious scholar, we went into the basement of a
library where the special collections person wheeled out our boxes on a wooden cart and
set us up at a table in a hallway with two creaky desk chairs. We felt scandalous taking
multiple folders out at a time and talking in regular voices. But it was here, in the archive
where the file folders had water damage and the stickers identifying the box and folder
number had fallen off, that we found our richest data. We found papers about Puerto
Ricans and Malcolm X—materials that would eventually belong in Tío P’s office in The
Resisters’ story.
What we could not find in the “serious scholar” archive was a silent explanation
about what held enough power to be preserved. In the words of Dana Williams and
Marissa López,
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[T]he archive produces knowledge about the past for both the present and the
future. Spivak’s recognition that the archive’s audible silences implore us to
recognize linguistic repression and the gaps in our knowledge remains crucial to
any archival consideration. (2012, p. 357).
Archives contain the power to decide what will be known in the present and remembered
in the future. We felt these audible silences when we were searching through collections
looking for historical community activism. What do we do when we can’t find the
information that we need? Or what if the information that lives in anecdote form, but not
in a legitimate primary document? In my fieldnotes, I wrote,
It feels today that the lives and histories of people of color in Providence have not
always mattered, and the desire to archive their existence is still a niche thing that
the NAACP and the Urban League collect, but not elite intellectual institutions
(Agloro, Fieldnotes 1/15/14).
For these reasons, non-traditional archives will continue to exist as memorabilia and
ephemera.
The difference in scene between the two archives left me with these questions:
How does data live? Who is it meant to support? These questions bring up ideas again
about access and who can successfully match the archives’ performance. An issue
beyond the scope of this dissertation, but still of much importance, is should The
Resisters live after this dissertation is written? I am inclined to keep the artifact accessible
online so that it is an accessible digital performance space, a place where Gloria’s video
story lives, the archival materials we found can also be seen, and it can be a digital space
where those who would not perform serious scholar (like some of Felipe’s family and
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mine) could still take part. Emma Pérez (1999) asks the questions, “Why is literature
reduced to or expanded by the ‘imaginary’ while only history can be ‘real’? What are the
‘artistic’ elements of a ‘realistic’ historiography?” (p. xvii). The construction of The
Resisters asks if game-based narrative about communities of color can be part of the real.
Can its creative elements of story, design, and play be the artistic elements of the real?
The Resisters’ game website carries the sentiment of what Williams and López
call the “ethnic archive.” An exnomination takes place by creating a separate category of
“ethnic archive,” because by naming it as such, an invisible standard of whiteness within
traditional archives is established. However, having a term for archives that put the lives
and histories of people of color to the forefront is still useful. According to the authors,
the non-ethnic archive has historically established tradition, whereas the ethnic archive
“affords an opportunity to do the opposite: to challenge assumptions cultivated as
truths… and to invoke a multiethnic cacophony of voices that require reconsiderations of
established knowledge and knowledge production alike” (2012, p. 358). The Resisters’
game website carries the sentiment of Williams and Lopez’s definition of an ethnic
archive because it moves data in an interactive way—one that asks its audience to
respond back and comb through history using mechanics of play. The designers and
actors—the public faces of The Resisters—are part of the multiethnic cacophony of
voices that have created their own version of how knowledge and history is created and
engaged.
Performing Archives
Is The Resisters a performance or an archive? Performance Studies scholar Diana
Taylor grapples with the schism between performance and archiving in her book The
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Archive and The Repertoire and pinpoints where we as researchers and performers should
not be looking. She states, “The rift… does not lie between the archive of supposedly
enduring materials (i.e. texts documents buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral
repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e. spoken language, dance, sports, ritual)”
(2003, p. 19). If we allow Taylor to guide us away from believing there is an antagonistic
relationship between physical materials and non-tangible artistic practices, there is a
possibility to look beyond the archive/repertoire binary and find space for projects that
are performative and archival, contemporary and historical. This process of performing
archives is one in which “human beings create and handle the archives, but it also alludes
to how archives are formative in shaping history, and thus perform human beings”
(Borggreen & Gade, 2013, p. 10). The Resisters is both an archive and a performance; the
game’s website functions as a digital archive, while the action of game play was a one-
time performance that can never fully be repeated in the exact same way.
The archive is the performance of being human, since the archive’s goal is to
collect and document facets of a particular section of society. It becomes a performance
when we examine the process of how physical documents end up in the archive, how
materials are preserved, or even how a researcher performs the role of “scholar” in the
archive. Additionally, the archival material performs for the viewer, especially when the
material is separated from the context in which it was originally stored. Outside of its
original context, the object is open to the interpretation, experience, and history of the
viewer. In David Kim and Jacqueline Wernimont’s evaluation of their collaborative
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online Scalar book Performing Archive
7
that collected representations of North American
Native Americans from photographer Edward S. Curtis, they explained how performance
shifted their thinking from assuming variables acted on the data to an understanding that
the data were already acting on their own. In the case of these photographic
representations, the data were performing “at the moment of production to imagine
twentieth-century Native Americans in terms of absence or soon-to-be absence” (Kim &
Wernimont, 2014). Much like how Kim and Wernimont were thinking about the digital
presentation of Curtis’ photographs, as we collected and repurposed our archival material
for The Resisters, the co-designers and I had to think about what the archival materials
were telling us within and removed from the context of their boxes and their collection
groupings. We also needed to think about how we were (re)presenting the materials
within The Resisters website that augmented our narrative story, but also how the
documents took on a different look when photographed and placed in an online photo
gallery.
Diana Taylor urges us to look as the archive/repertoire as one of embodiment and
documentation, where the traditions of memory are enacted through performance.
Taylor’s definition of repertoire involves “performances, gestures, orality, movement,
dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, non-reproducible
knowledge” (2003, p. 20). According to Taylor’s definition, the three game challenges
are exactly what the repertoire contains. The trajectory of movement that took place
while each team configured itself for maximum points during their location-based selfies
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! The Scalar book Performing Archive: Curtis + “The Vanishing Race” can be found
here: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/performingarchive/index
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(as well as the gestures involved in selfie picture taking) were ephemeral, non-
reproducible movements. The same holds true for the final challenge—the Resisters
induction ceremony—and the intention this particular group of student game players who
brought sentimental tokens to place on an altar amongst other altars dedicated to the
historical figures they encountered during game play.
Another facet of Taylor’s repertoire is the presence of people within the
experience to produce and reproduce knowledge. An archive remains an archive with or
without the presence of people. Our game players had to physically locate their bodies as
parts of teams that were adventuring through the city of Providence to gather histories of
activism. The game players had the game-structured necessity to be in each location as
part of the transmission of knowledge. The game players recorded and transmitted
knowledge through their Instagram selfies—the selfies were a captured moment where
each team learned the significance of each site, and when the selfies were posted they
were transmitted to their friends who follow their photo feeds.
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Figure 3: Instagram Selfie at the Old Brick Schoolhouse

One game player posted her team selfie at The Old Brick Schoolhouse, the first public
school for Black children in 1769, and an Instagram follower replied, “I’m such a huge
fan of all these photos.” The game player responded that she was taking part in a game
and wrote The Resisters’ website within the photo’s comments encouraging her friend to
go and check the game out.
The game players participated in the repertoire by contributing their own
materials of significance to The Resisters’ Instagram feed, which was part of the game
website that contained the historical archival documents. A game player took a picture of
“Knowles” street and the commented, “Beyoncé has a street in Providence. Who woulda
thought?”
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Figure 4: Knowles Street

Collecting a street that reminded the player of Beyoncé echoes Taylor’s assertion that the
repertoire “allows for an alternative perspective on historical processes… and invites a
remapping of the Americas” (2003, p. 20). The act of including Knowles Street into an
archive of locations of Black and Latina/o activism demonstrates the significance of
Beyoncé in the temporal landscape, particularly for young Black women. In 2014,
Beyoncé was a fixture in popular pop culture and feminist conversations.
8
Including
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8
For example, on May 7, 2014, Beyoncé was a topic of discussion during a panel at
the New School featuring bell hooks, Janet Mock, Shola Lynch, and Marci Blackman.
bell hooks said parts of Beyoncé are anti-feminist and a terrorist. On August 24 at the
MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé performed in front of the word “FEMINIST.”
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Beyoncé into the archive of important historical figures is an action that draws relevance
from historical figures to contemporary ones. Including Knowles Street in the archive
validates young people’s values and opinions and added a new point of significance on
The Resisters’ map. Emma Willis (2013) also supports relevant performative additions to
a pre-constituted archive, finding that “performative responses to and renderings of the
archive demonstrate that it is not so much a repository of historical truth as it is a set of
materials from which new sensible aesthetic and social systems might be drawn” (p.
124). The game players added their own aesthetic and historical sensibilities to The
Resisters by playing with the boundaries of historical significance. They demonstrated
that the archive is not static and is open to scrutiny and amendment.
The Resisters game functioned as an archive but also as a performance, as each
challenge invited the players to embody and act the mission we as game designers had
structured. Each scavenger hunt and the induction ceremony were ephemeral in nature,
documented only by photos and video. While each challenge can be repeated, it will
never happen exactly the same way, which is a key element to how the challenges were
performances. Was the documentation performative? Or does the game’s performance
cease to be one because we documented it? Performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan
states,
Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded,
documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of
representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.
(1993, p. 146).
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Some performance studies scholars agree with the impossibility of “saving” a
performance, while others declare the necessity to document performance. Philip
Auslander (2006) argues that documentation itself is a performative gesture and the
documentation of a live performance is what establishes something as a work of art. For
The Resisters game players, I agree with Auslander that the act of taking selfies at each
location during the scavenger hunt was performative documentation. As evidenced by
their selfies, the way in which the players positioned themselves was intentional act.

Figure 5: Scavenger Hunt Selfies

In each picture, the players positioned themselves relative to each other, the location, and
their team color card. In Figure Five, the left photo shows the players’ selfie on a
playground structure in Billy Taylor Park, and the caption reads, “This is mayhaps my
favorite picture from the scavenger hunt yesterday.” Their challenge packet explained
how Billy Taylor Park was named after a Mount Hope activist who organized youth
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outings and sports events, who died of a congenital heart condition in 1986 at the age of
twenty-nine. The right photo in Figure Five shows Team Green Rage standing outside the
former Home for Aged Colored Women with their team color cards covering their faces.
Each positioning for their selfies was intentional and contributed to the performative
nature of documentation.
Another place of creating Diana Taylor’s conception of the repertoire in The
Resisters was taking historical events, people, and locations and weaving each of these
pieces into a coherent narrative that was linked to an interactive game. This process was
much like writing a play that worked within past and present storylines. The historical
locations and people mingling with the contemporary story of Gloria, her parents, and
immigration issues reactivates history and, in the words of Laura Luise Schultz, utilizes
“history as an encounter directed as much towards the future as towards the past” (2013,
p. 203). Archives’ ability to take a historical artifact and shift its reception with a future
slant can keep them relevant beyond the moment they are trying to preserve. In our game,
presenting historical archives in a way that carries past history into the present required
an infusion of performativity to make the jump.
An example of the performative jump with archival materials can be illustrated
with the following historical newsclip:
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Figure 6: Newsclip That Inspired Selfies

The photo shows two men talking in the foreground while several men appear to be
singing on a porch of a building behind them. We decided that this news clipping would
be the piece of evidence that Gloria finds that has her father and Tió P’s picture on it.
Finding this news clipping was a point of discovery in the narrative where Gloria starts to
piece together her parents’ past activist life and provide a clue as to where her mother
could be. The group of men in the background of the photo was the inspiration to create
the storyline of Tío P’s relationship to Gloria’s parents. We decided that one of those men
in the background was Gloria’s father and another was Tío P, which triggers Gloria’s
visit to Tío P’s office and the players’ website exploration of Tío P’s office. Then
tracking backwards through the narrative, we plotted out how, where, and when Gloria
would find this news article. The news article and the exploration of Tío P’s office were
transmedia points of design where Gloria discussed the news article in her video blog, we
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posted the clipping in Instagram and Twitter, and revealed Tío P’s office on Facebook
and on the game website as an additional point of investigation and clue searching. One
of the production challenges of The Resisters was to find compelling, interesting ways to
link the story narrative to historical events and archival materials in logical ways. The
archive materials in some ways were the fixed anchor points in the story. We could not
change the content of the archival materials, so we needed to craft the story and the game
to make sense around the fixed objects.
Toward the end stages of producing all the transmedia parts of The Resisters in
August 2014, the co-designers and I would discuss the ways that we felt like we were
encountering elements of performance that felt different than their preconceived notions
of research. In The Decolonial Imaginary, Emma Pérez (1999) asks the question, “What
are the ‘artistic’ elements of a ‘realistic’ historiography?” (p. xvii). The co-designers and
I were constantly balancing artistic elements that bridged the gaps between Gloria’s story
and our historical artifacts. Where were the borders of realism and historically-based
fantasy? Reading through the transcriptions of the Select Commission on Race and
Police-Community Relations from 2000-2003 at the Rhode Island State Archives, Felipe
and I felt like we were reading through an extremely lengthy play. The production of The
Resisters included selecting actors, crafting props, staging photos and mini-events, and
filming short videos. Each video released over the three weeks of game play invited
players to watch a story unfold through Gloria’s video narrative, and explore further with
other parts of the website, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. All of these elements added
to The Resisters’ repertoire, and the performance of our archives.

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CHAPTER FOUR: GAME DESIGNING IN DETAIL

The design team took six months of archival research and three months of
imagining and crafting for The Resisters game to be ready for play. This chapter provides
a recounting of how The Resisters was designed and the reasoning behind story, design,
and play choices. Based on previous literature that solidified how players learn things
through game play even if a game is not explicitly educational, as the principal game
designer, I needed a constant sense of procedural literacy to understand how our game
aesthetic, story, and mechanics were teaching players something, even if passively. From
the outset, the plan for The Resisters was to create a game about people of color’s social
movement history. How could game players experience race in a game without our
characters, the story, and the game’s feedback system reiterating problematic tropes of
race? As Anna Everett and Craig Watkins (2008) use the term “racialized pedagogical
zones,” could there be a pedagogical zone about race that wasn’t racialized? Michael
Omi and Howard Winant define racialization as “the process by which social, economic,
and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by
which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings” (1994, p. 61). These questions were
present in my mind, but I did not share these concerns with my co-designers because I
wanted to know what kind of story and game they would imagine without telling them to
avoid doing something. “Create a game that represents the way you want to present the
material” was the approach that I used instead of a “don’t do _______” negative
reinforcement. Race and constructions of race were at the forefront of the construction of
The Resisters’ narrative.
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Creating A Story
An alternate reality game plays with the border between the real world and the
game world—blurring the line between truth and fiction. For all games, there cannot be a
game world without the real world (Montola, 2009). The elements of fantasy and escape
in a game diminish if there is no ordinary world to measure against. Within an imaginary
game world, its construction is based on a subjective worldview and the images and
information must be consistent enough to make the game world coherent. When planning
a storyline, Kurt Squire suggests that the story does not need to be entirely fictional to
achieve the fantasy elements of play. This construction of the world is what game makers
call “the magic circle”: the boundary that defines the game in time and space (Salen &
Zimmerman, 2003). Within the magic circle of the game, it is still possible to create a
world with the same look, feel, and issues as the world in which we currently live. A
game mechanic can assist in making sense of specific social constructions and situations,
and can prepare us for action in the real world (Gee, 2008).
The challenge to creating The Resisters’ game world was to balance the elements
of history and fantasy. When creating a game that is tackling issues of race, justice, and
activism, it is possible that the wrong emphasis can lead to players to misunderstand or
wrongly interpret the point of the game. If the game’s story elements did not reflect
enough of real life within it, it was possible game players would take away the wrong
lessons about how the world works (Edery & Mollick, 2008). This careful balance
between constructing the world as it exists, and the world as it can be was one of the
reasons why I wanted to see the game world the co-designers would develop. Designing a
game would mean building a narrative, and in the words of Marshall Ganz, “Narrative
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allows us to communicate the emotional content of our values. Narrative is not about
talking ‘about’ values; rather narrative embodies and communicates those values” (2011,
p. 288). The world as seen through the eyes of Black and Latina/o teens would
demonstrate their thoughts about archives and activism.
Design Diversity Matters
Is designer synonymous with white person? The focus of this document is not to
explore the reasons why there are so few game designers who are women and/or people
of color, but the lack of professional designers of color in a research project about
educational justice in higher education has left me wondering why. The statistics in the
game industry are close in number to those in computer related fields, and Blacks and
Latina/os in the United States represent fewer than ten percent of computer programmers
(Flanagan, 2009). People of color lack adequate representation in contemporary gaming
culture, and even less representation exists in the design end of games (Consalvo, 2003;
Flanagan, 2009). In contrast to the previous demographics, higher percentages of people
of color and women play games than white men (Williams, 2006), which means that
many game players play games despite not being able to identify with in-game
characters.
What can be done about the cultural disconnect between game makers and game
players? One answer is to push back against the assumption that design is white by
default, and expand the parameters of access to skills that create designers and game
makers. Adam Banks (2011) finds that a solution is to “no longer consign black students,
writers, or scholars to token ‘colored day at the carnival’ status nor consign digital theory,
rhetoric, and writing as white by default because those areas and our American
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technology sector still appear to be so homogenous” (p. 27). Diversity in games means so
much more than being able to change the skin color on your avatar. The storylines, the
character dialogues, and feedback systems for scoring/winning are places that game
developers who are not white males may approach differently. An example of the cultural
disconnect in design research is congealing the complexities of Spanish speakers. Carlos
Santos (2003) found that lumping Spanish speakers together ignores “nuances concerning
culture, social interactions, and group dynamics in the context of [Latina/o] participants”
(p. 60). What this means in terms of diversifying games is that adding a few Spanish
words without paying attention to its context does not do much to help Latina/o game
players identify with the characters or game.
Design is as much about cultural reproduction as it is a learning experience. The
experience of designing puts the designers in the position of expressing their
understanding of social negotiation (Balsamo, 2011). Each person’s understanding of the
world is rooted in various contexts: physical, social, and institutional are examples
(Dewey, 1938). As design is an experience of synthesizing a coherent output of a
designer’s understanding of the world, the goal of my research was not the end product of
finishing a game with content—instead I was focused how the co-designers learned
through design and the game players learned through the effect of the design. Developing
The Resisters’ narrative was only part of this research process; what developed during the
design process was an understanding of how the youth game designers became experts of
the archival material through the process of experiential learning.
!!Game design remains a privileged practice, and the barriers to entry and access
affected the some of the co-designers’ ability to fully participate in designing and playing
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The Resisters. Aside from the previously described educational and racial barriers, the
co-designers had family obligations, paid work conflicts, and transportation issues. One
of the challenges of trying to design with the entire co-designer collective was that it was
nearly impossible to get everyone together at the same time. Usually I could get a
maximum of three co-designers together, but scheduling difficulties made me rethink
what success looked like. The largest conflict in trying to plan time for the co-designers
was their need for income. While I could offer small stipends and snacks, the amount of
time spent in The Resisters project and the amount of money these students needed could
not line up. Examples of how our time was spaced: Yenzi was only available after 4 PM
because she worked in her family’s home business, and was saving so that she could buy
a car. Yenzi lived in Cranston, the next town over, and with limited public transportation
options she felt trapped at home. Yenzi felt the family obligation of working with her
mother, but also needed the income that the job provided her. Anthony worked the 5 AM
morning shift at Burger King and a separate job in the afternoon as an art studio assistant
so that he could contribute to his household, as the adults in his family were employed
sporadically. Anthony had two younger siblings that he was constantly worried about and
wanted to make sure he could buy them little things they needed and wanted. Jay ended
up working full-time during the summer months as an art coordinator in a youth summer
program at a low-income housing complex so that he could save money for the following
school year while living at home in Warwick (about twenty minutes from Providence by
car, but up to an hour away depending on bus schedules). He would commute in the
morning and evening into Providence with his father, and unless he could find a friend’s
house to stay overnight, he would leave when father finished work because bus schedules
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were sparse in the evening. Felipe was able to work full-time during the summer on The
Resisters because he received a research grant from the university to work with me on the
project thirty hours a week. He was living with his family in South Providence, had
consistent access to a car, and we lived close enough to each other that I was frequently
able to give him rides to and from our workspace.
The main difference between Felipe and the other co-designers was that his time
spent on The Resisters was considered “work” and he received pay for it, while the other
co-designers needed to find other forms of paid work to make ends meet. When
formulating participatory projects, figuring out the barriers to participation is key.
Whether people’s participation is considered “work” and is compensated as such matters
(Robertson & Wagner, 2013). Participants should not have to sacrifice to be part of a
project and lose income, especially if the project has learning goals. An educational
project is only successful if the knowledge and skills are accessible and allows the
learners to maintain their identity (Gilyard, 2008). The identities of my co-designers
included strong cultural roots, but also time and financial obligations to their families.
What success finally ended up looking like while designing The Resisters was having just
one co-designer at each work session, and any additional designers who were able to
make it were considered a bonus. In this way, I left space so that the co-designers could
participate as they were able to. This model took the form of a co-designer attending an
occasional Saturday afternoon game session and text messages about their ideas passed
on to me, or a strategy session over sandwiches at a coffee shop during a break between
jobs. Or in Felipe’s case, completing items on our joint to-do list at 10 PM because it did
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not matter if he completed tasks during regular daytime hours, just that he completed
them.
Participatory Design: More Than Just User-Centered Design
Designing with the user in mind is a common practice, but sharing the power of
design decisions with participants is what separates participatory design from user-
centered design. Participatory design operates from the stance that
users/workers/communities/game players know their world best and are equipped to
make decisions that will have the most positive outcome on their lives. In the early stages
of designing The Resisters, one of the largest design hurdles with the co-designers was
separating their ideas of who a designer is (a white person using important technological
tools) from the reality of who a designer could be. Rethinking the idea of a designer was
the first step in our design literacy process. Designers don’t see the world as it is;
designers see it as how they imagine the world can be (Watkins, 2014). Simply defined,
design literacy is determining where the problems in communities are and figuring out
how to fix them. Design literacy also involves understanding that someone at some point
designed everything we see every day. During the design process, designers tell a story
and construct a representation that shapes the future projects (Gibson-Graham, 1996).
Design is performative in that it is an actor that shapes the current and future worlds
where we will live. Experience shaping design is why I wanted to use a participatory
design process with building The Resisters. The youth co-designers see and experience
the world in a particular way; their worldview influenced the particularities of how they
designed the game’s narrative and the challenges. The co-designers’ participation
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exemplifies “situated knowledges” (Haraway, 1988). What these young people know and
how they think is influenced by the constructions of the their day-to-day lives.
At the onset of imaging the design process of The Resisters, I wanted everything
about this project to be split evenly with the co-designers. Equality within the parameters
of this project was impossible because of factors like time, money, and power
differentials between my co-designers and myself. I needed to step into the role of
director and principal designer because I was at the foundation of this project. After all,
The Resisters was a measurement upon which my dissertation, and in part, my degree
would be measured. The control began and ended with me. And while there are ways to
share control, the foundation of this project was not established as that. Sharing all
decision-making within this project would mean allowing all the time it takes to reach a
consensus, and we were on a tight schedule to complete a project within the timeframe of
an academic calendar. Our game was scheduled to launch as part of the fall semester
schedule, so I made adjustments to our plans and executive decisions to keep the project
moving. Beyond this game developed as my research project, there were also other power
differentials that allowed me to be completely focused and dedicated to this project. I was
on a dissertation fellowship, which gave me the time and money to work full-time on the
design and execution of The Resisters. At most, one co-designer received ten weeks of
full-time work funding. I could not expect others to dedicate as much time as me because
they did not have the time and financial resources to be with the project full time.
Despite how work and decisions were not shared equally, these things did not
prevent the design project from having a participatory foundation. In their chapter about
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ethics involved with participatory design, authors Toni Robertson and Ina Wagner (2013)
call on practitioners to reflect upon the following questions:
• Who do we engage with in a participatory design project?
• How do we engage with participants?
• How do we represent participants and their work?
• What can we offer participants? (p. 71)
The first question asks how we engage with participants, and within my position, I
engaged with my co-designers as the director. As a leader, it was my responsibility to
provide a strong framework for where the project was going and be consistent with my
leadership in order to build trust. The co-designers needed to know they were listened to
and heard, despite the layout of the project as not entirely equal. As to how I engaged
with the co-designers, I acknowledged that they were the experts about how a social
movement history game would be received by their peers. I had an expert team that knew
what eighteen to twenty-three year-old college students of color would expect and
embrace in a game, and I knew success would be tied to listening to my co-designers. But
full participation is more complicated than just giving participants a voice. In the words
of other participatory design practitioners, “Having a voice does not mean having a say”
(Bratteteig, Bodker, Dittrich, Mongensen, & Simonsen, 2013). Respect for participant
expertise builds mutual trust (Robertson & Wagner, 2013), especially in project where
other variables are unequal.
One way I tried to balance the power differential was to give the co-designers real
work that mattered to the success of the game and not peripheral tasks. When the success
of a section of the project was riding on co-designer attentiveness and engagement, they
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knew. They also knew when they were given filler tasks that could be completed by
anyone, and in those situations their dedication lagged. An example of delegating primary
work tasks so that the co-designers had a real stake in The Resisters’ success was giving
Felipe the job of keeping the video filming log—the document that would be critical to us
being able to line up the appropriate sound and video takes for each short film. I reflected
about this task during the filming:
It's interesting to see how Felipe and the actors [flourished] within the structure of
the project- Felipe is very precise about all the details, so I put him in charge of
the video log, which he did really well at maintaining. What was nice too I guess
about putting him in charge of the video log is that I could trust that he would do a
great job keeping track of things. I hope he feels ownership of this project,
because I do feel like this is a shared collaboration between us. I think I am
keeping the ship moving, but he has equal…say in what we do. (Agloro
Fieldnotes, 8/15/14)
At times during the short video filming process, I would make the executive call that we
would not do another take because the actress stumbled on a sentence during the script.
Felipe wanted everything to be perfect, but at times I had to override his desire for
perfection for the sake of time and preserving the energy of the actors. My reflection
illustrates the balance between making decisions that would keep the project running and
giving real responsibility to the co-designers. At times, Felipe’s extreme care to get the
timestamp in the video perfect delayed the filming, but it was worth it to have Felipe
know his work was critical to the videos’ successful creation.
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The last question in the series asks what I could offer participants, and I struggled
with this one because on so many levels, the co-designer benefit was not always obvious.
In participatory design projects, project leads often feel like we receive more than we can
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(Robertson & Wagner, 2013), and my feelings were in alignment with this
sentiment. In tangible ways, I wrote grants so that there could be snacks at each meeting,
because I didn’t know who had access to food earlier each day. I also used some of my
grant money to pay the participants small stipends because I wanted these young people
of color to know their worth, even in a project with a tiny budget. Their thinking, labor,
and creativity are valuable, and I wanted to make sure they knew that. Before the design
process began, I had been working with an alternative university in Providence to attempt
to give college credit to my co-designers for their work. But at the time the project
formally started, the alternative university was undergoing changes with their
accreditation process, so my credit-granting proposal for the project was put on hold.
What my co-designers took away from this project were game design skills, website and
video editing skills, and research skills where they learned about the history of people of
color in Providence.
Felipe, the primary co-designer, presented parts of The Resisters at the Digital Media
and Learning conference with me in Spring 2014. His reflection about what he got out of
the project was this:
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Robertson and Wagner (2013) discuss how researchers within design projects often
have their own reward structures and can produce findings from a project that has
“failed,” whereas the participants may feel like their effort did not produce the intended
result.
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This project is really interesting for me because coming from Providence
and going to school in Providence and now doing this really interesting research
work in Providence- I’m seeing Providence in many different ways. It’s a small
city, and I have friends who are from New York or LA, and who say Providence
is nothing special but I’m seeing a lot of awesome things about Providence. And
in the whole research experience I’m learning these really really interesting things
about Providence through digital archives and physical archives.
But it’s a lot of information, so I’ve had to think through Black and Latino
activism in Providence. I have all these interview transcripts to go through, so
I’ve had to learn a lot about what’s important and what’s not important and that’s
a really cool skill I hope to use in the future for other research projects.
Another really interesting part of this project is how we’re going to take
all this information we’ve gathered and put it in some sort of immersive and
engaging game experience. How do we take information and present it in another
way? I think it’s going to be a really cool experience for me, I have no experience
in web design or game design but I hope to acquire those skills with this project.
Just a few months into our research process, Felipe had a sense of what the project was
offering him. The Resisters offered him not only skill sets, but also a sense of pride about
his home city because he was learning things about Providence history that had been left
out of his education until we began this project.
The Participatory Design research I utilized for this project has Scandinavian
roots and primarily addresses class and power perspectives as their main source of
difference and conflict. Working within the United States, race as tied to class and power
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must be addressed and analyzed, as the foundation of the United States was built by
racism. The community-engaged design model (Crum & Agloro, 2015) asks participatory
design practitioners to include race, gender, sexuality, age, and other -isms into the
conception of a community project. The strategies for community-engaged design are:
• Know Your Purpose
• Consider Your Biases
• Identify Shared Goals
• Build on Level Ground
• Identify The Best Tools
• Avoid Techno-Fetishism
The first two principles ask design practitioners to reflect about themselves and their own
practice before the start of a project. Knowing your purpose means asking yourself why
you desire to do this work. Particularly, practitioners must address their privileges first,
and put their desires into a history of paternalism and a more contemporary “savior
complex.” In the following chapters, I elaborate on my process of community-engaged
design and the community engagement elements of this project. Portions of these
principles will be addressed through the remainder of this chapter.
It’s Go Time! Moving Between Theory to Making
Writing this ethnography has involved a retrospective gaze about the project’s
process and trying to make sense of it in terms of others who have written about social
justice and educational-oriented design. The Resisters’ game design process was not
theory-laden at all, despite how much writing and advice exists and my researcher’s
predisposition to use theory first. We followed the spirit of Paulo Freire’s (1982) advice:
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learning to do it by doing it. The co-designers and I embarked on designing The Resisters
based on one question: What would make this game fun? As this ethnography is the
reflection component of this research project, I returned to theory after the design process
to make sense of what happened in relationship to other design projects. This next section
discusses The Resisters’ design process in conversation with anti-oppressive game design
(Gunraj et al., 2011).
Anti-oppressive game design and development is meant to identify and challenge
everyday oppressions and privileges, and in doing so, inspire players to take action
outside the game. The four anti-oppressive game design principles are:
1. Disrupt Stereotypes
2. Consider Your Players
3. Attend to Multiple and Hidden Perspectives
4. Marginalized Groups Guide Design and Development
The co-designers and game players formed a unique circuit of designers and game
players as they were all students of color. They lived in different neighborhoods and did
not necessarily know each other, but commonalities in their lived experiences were a
strong tie that linked them throughout the project.
Disrupt Stereotypes
This guideline suggests that game makers disrupt assumptions about the look,
feel, and play of the game by avoiding stereotypes, particularly stereotypes of groups that
are marginalized in society. In building The Resisters, the co-designers and I went
beyond avoid stereotypes and actively thought about realistic and complex
representations of people of color, particularly women. Representations of women,
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particularly women of color in videogames are flat—they are often objects of desire,
recipients of violence, and/or scenery. Anna Everett and Craig Watkins (2008) note,
The fact that Black women and Latinas are also portrayed quite casually as
sexually available bystanders in fighter games like Def Jam Vendetta and as
street-walking prostitutes in action/adventure/shooter games like [Grand Theft
Auto] reinforces lessons about race and sexuality, especially the sexual mores,
appetites, and behaviors of women marginalized by race and ethnicity (p. 248).
Knowing that these are the prevalent stereotypes, the co-designers wanted the story’s
protagonist to be a woman. I didn’t want the character to get lost in respectability politics
as an answer to the over-sexualization of women of color, so I was interested in knowing
how the co-designers would position her. Felipe recruited the actors to play Gloria and
her two friends Yuri and Nat from his friends who were around Providence during the
summer when we were creating the game. Gloria was a light-skinned Black woman with
multi-colored green braided extensions, and we positioned her as building the game
website as a way to help track down her missing mother. Her friend Yuri was a dark-
skinned Black woman with a geek aesthetic, who Felipe wrote into Gloria’s dialogue as
“the smartest person I know.” Gloria and Yuri were both intellectual women, not overly
sexy, but not intentionally buttoned up.
Consider Players
Considering your players means moving away from the assumption that one type
of player exists or will use the game in the same way. Game designers and developers
must think through the game’s target players, including the power they may hold and the
oppressions they may face. The Resisters’ game players were all college students of color
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linked to the Center For Students of Color. Many had been through the Third World
Transition Program, and others were Minority Peer Counselors—residential advisors who
lived in first-year student housing and specialized in managing race and class-related
student conflicts. The students held power and privilege as student members of a
perceived elite academic community. These students had guaranteed housing and access
to abundant food and information systems. Many of these students rarely went beyond
the university gates and into the surrounding Providence community, and the players had
a term for the school culture that kept students on campus, called the “Brown Bubble.”
Several players mentioned the Brown Bubble as an obstacle to being involved in
activities off-campus, even though they were interested in doing more in the Providence
community. The game players faced intersecting and overlapping oppressions based on
race, sexuality, class, and perceived gender. Several players voiced the need for more
activities that had a cultural focus like The Resisters in the post-game interviews because
of the alienation they felt on campus as students of color.
Attend to Multiple and Hidden Perspectives
According to Gunraj, Ruiz, and York (2011),
An essential element to anti-oppressive practice involves multiplicity, and game
makers should open space for marginalized communities to share their ideas,
opinions, and perspectives. Developers cannot assume that their own perspective
is definitive and need time in the development process to proactively search out
and reflect upon other perspectives, particularly those hidden in mainstream
discussions (p. 270).
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It occurred to me during the player recruiting process in the three weeks leading up the
start of game play that The Resisters would not be complete without game player
feedback post-game, turning the game from a finished product into a prototype that was
entering a playtest stage. This realization makes sense within the anti-oppressive game
development model, as game players needed to share their perspectives and not just the
co-designers. The co-designers, the game players, and I had different opinions about The
Resisters and its effectiveness.
Marginalized Groups Guide Design and Development
Developing a game from an anti-oppression model asks that marginalized groups
guide the process of design and development. This guideline speaks to why I chose to
work with youth co-designers for the development of The Resisters. I previously
discussed that I did not share as much control of the project as a truly anti-oppressive/
participatory design project should, but the co-designers’ feedback guided the themes and
mechanics of the game.
My Addition: Stealth Mode
Through the process of developing The Resisters, a design principle that emerged
during our project was Stealth Mode. The conversations I had with co-designers and
game players brought up how games whose primary purpose is education can be
dreadfully boring because their learning objectives are heavily obvious and impede on the
ability to have fun. A similar complaint emerged about social justice-themed—or
serious—games during the early game play sessions. The co-designers felt like the
desired imparted messages could be too heavy-handed and pushy thus rendering the
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game’s narrative as pandering and eye roll inducing. How do you create a game that is
educational, with advocacy-aimed goals, and still holds the players’ interests?
The desired action is Stealth Mode. Similar to the X-Men’s jet that has an
invisibility mode to travel undetected, Stealth Mode is the effort a game designer takes to
infuse learning and social justice principles into a game in a way that does not overpower
the complexity of the narrative, characters, and game mechanics. The guiding questions
for Stealth Mode are: Is this fun? Would you play this voluntarily? If the answer to either
of these questions is no, then the learning objective is overpowering the vehicle of a
game. A game is not a classroom lecture, and if a game resembles tactics of a lecture,
then this game is not successfully executing Stealth Mode. An example of Stealth Mode
is to have players’ roles within the game reflect the learning principles through action.
Squire et al. (2007) discussed how in building an augmented reality game, the roles the
designers played while researching the game (for example: ethnographers, journalists,
and historians) could be transformed into the game players roles for a better immersive
game experience. The authors suggested that instead of just learning about journalism,
letting the players be the journalists within the game environment provided a more
immersive experience. Game players with a sense of critical consciousness want to enjoy
games that are in alignment with their belief systems, and these values can be placed into
games without heavy emphasis on these features. An example of this would be to include
a diverse set of characters in to a game world without needing to pontificate on the
significance of the diversity of the characters.
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Setting Boundaries for Success
I learned that leadership within a co-designer process with less experienced
designers meant that leaving all the options and possibilities open in the design process
caused more stress and confusion than setting parameters and working on creative
elements from within boundaries. A major example of this finding was in building The
Resisters’ game website—a project that I primarily tasked to Felipe. We started this
process together by brainstorming the various elements that we both felt were needed on
the website.

Figure 7: Whiteboard Brainstorming

Knowing that I wanted Felipe to gain website building experience, I asked him to
research three website platforms (Wordpress, Squarespace, and Strikingly) and then
choose the one he was the most interested and most comfortable working from. While
Wordpress had the most functionality, Felipe narrowed his options down to Squarespace
and Strikingly because they both seemed to produce more beautiful website options for
his beginner skill set. He wavered between these two options, and I finally chose
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Squarespace because I had a familiarity with the interface and it would be easier for me
to help Felipe with his questions.
Armed with our whiteboard notes and the user introduction to Squarespace, Felipe
embarked independently to build the website from a template. It was his responsibility to
choose the page layout theme and determine where each part of game information would
be accessible on the website. Giving this much design freedom and not enough
substantial structure proved to be difficult for Felipe. We exchanged text messages while
he was working about his hesitations and worries about the website design. Writing the
language for the website was not difficult, but choosing the layout felt like a lot of
pressure for him. Our work compromise was for Felipe to write as much of the text for
the website as possible, and that we would work together to develop the look of the
website.
Felipe’s decision paralysis about the aesthetic design of the game website echoed
other experiences of how structure can allow for better design freedom. Brenda Laurel
(1993) reflects on the downside of limitless possibilities saying,
A system in which people are encouraged to do whatever they want will probably
not produce pleasant experiences. Whenever a person is asked to “be creative”
with no direction or constraints whatsoever, the result is, often a sense of
powerlessness or even complete paralysis of the imagination. Limitations—
constraints that focus creative efforts—paradoxically increase our imaginative
power by reducing the number of possibilities open to us (p. 101).
Once we narrowed down the website layout to just the one we were working in, then
Felipe found more comfort and creative opportunity to work within the existing structure.
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Choosing the color scheme, font and text size, and other important design elements
became fun and imaginative once the structure of the layout was in place. Reflecting on
this experience of balancing design freedom and structure, I wrote:
I was thinking about whether or not I should've have given Felipe the basics and
more training before I set him loose, because he didn't know a lot about layout
that I had learned when I was messing around [previously]. For example, he didn't
know about the drag and drop to shift the layouts, how to change the
style/font/sizing of the text, and most importantly, he didn't see the connection
between the sample layout and how they can correspond with your own pictures/
text. Which is what I showed him yesterday and that unleashed a whole new level
of messing around (making sure the font was perfect, the spacing was good, the
picture was just right, etc.) (Agloro Fieldnotes, 7/18/14).
The task of building a website seemed less daunting for Felipe when his responsibility
was to work within the parameters of certain established boundaries. When presented
with a big picture (“build a website”) and left with little direction and a screen of
nothingness, Felipe did not know where to start or what progress looked like. Instead,
when presented with particular tasks (“develop the page’s color scheme” or “choose the
best font for the landing page”), Felipe used creative reasoning and felt like he had
accomplished something through the process.
We developed the storyline for the game with a similar approach where I left
Felipe a lot of space to think through what he felt were important narrative elements for
The Resisters, and then I added parameters and shaped the elements mid-way through the
brainstorm. I noticed that Felipe’s hesitance to build a website from scratch or write the
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storyline for the game stemmed from his own self-conception of what he was able to do.
His hesitation to take on the role of “game designer” was influenced by his conditioning
through school, extra-curricular activities, and home life about what things he was good
at. He knew himself to be good at science and playing the piano. Our society conditions
people from a young age that they are “good” at certain things, which forms small
spheres of confidence around where they know they can excel, but making new tasks a
further reach(Clipson-Boyles & Upton, 2013). For example, arts education researchers
suggest asking a classroom full of kindergarteners who is an artist, and most students will
raise their hands. Ask the same question to a classroom full of twelfth graders, and only a
few will raise their hands. The few students left in twelfth grade that raise their hands are
the ones that have been told they were “artists” and encouraged, while the others are
afraid to try a skill that was accessible as a five year-old.
Building The Resisters’ Narrative and Game World
The Resisters’ story, characters, and game world were inspired and developed
from the historical documents from archival research, current events, and local
community controversies. The question we began our story building narrative was:
“What is the mystery?” We decided that a member of the main character’s family should
to missing, and part of the game’s exploration would be finding out what happened to
that family member. We began building narrative plot points in a non-linear fashion in
Popplet, so that we could collaboratively develop the story with visual story blocks.

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Figure 8: Narrative Building Blocks in Popplet

Figure 9: Outline of Daily Story with Accompanying Archival Materials in Popplet

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The main mystery of the game was to discover what happened to the main
character’s mom who disappeared without a trace. We decided that the main character’s
mother fled to join a Dan Brown-esque secret society of social justice activists because of
something that had happened within the family. Felipe and I thought that immigration
was a contemporary issue worth addressing from the side of what happens to families,
10

so we added the narrative block to the Popplet that the main character’s mother had
joined the social justice secret society because the father had been taken by Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Our story writing positioned the main character as
completely in the dark about her parents’ legal status, and we developed a back-story
about the circumstances of how the main character’s family ended up in the United
States.
Creating the Characters
The names and physical looks of our characters were important from a
representation standpoint because we felt the need to create a narrative that represented
the nuances of our local communities of color. The co-designers wanted to start by
focusing on crafting the perfect main character. We spent some time brainstorming the
characteristics that we wanted in a main character, but the co-designers felt stuck
committing to a character. To keep the process moving, we pivoted our focus and started
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At the beginning of the day’s work session, I had shown Felipe the music video for
the Los Angeles-based band La Santa Cecilia’s song “El Hielo” because he had never
heard of La Santa Cecilia. The music video shows the trauma of families who are
separated by ICE, and was most likely in the forefront of our minds on the day we
developed The Resisters story.!!
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on the narrative first, and developed our characters to fit in to our story as a second step.
To keep the story moving, we created placeholder letters and numbers for our characters
while we developed the story— for example: “S” was our main character, “M” and “D”
were her parents, “1” and “2” were her two friends. The chart below outlined our
character development in our Popplet:

Figure 10: Character Development

Gloria and Multiraciality

When we began developing our characters, we knew that we wanted the main
character to be a young woman in her teens with brown skin and an ambiguous racial
look. We wanted her story to be relatable to various racial groups, so we shaped our main
character to be ambiguously multiracial with Black features and a Latina name. Our main
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character’s Afro-Latina roots were also influenced by surroundings in Providence; the
city is 38.1 percent Latina/o with residents’ roots primarily in Puerto Rico, Colombia,
Brazil, Dominican Republic, and Guatemala (Myles, 2014). Two of the co-designers
were Puerto Rican and Dominican, and a third was a Haitian immigrant with close ties to
the Dominican Republic. These three co-designers were familiar with the Dominican
phrase “Tenemos el negro detrás de las orejas [We have the black behind the ears],” a
phrase that addresses the history of blackness and anti-black sentiment in the Dominican
Republic (Candelario, 2007). Students at New Urban Arts, where over half of the co-
designers participated as students or artist mentors, identified as forty-six percent
Latina/o and twenty-one percent multiracial.
11
Crafting a story about an Afro-Latina
made sense in terms of the demographics of Providence and the cultural roots of the co-
designers.
The inclusion of a multiracial main character tapped into anti-oppressive game
design techniques and Stealth Mode. At the time of designing The Resisters, two of the
co-designers were exploring their own multiracial Latina/o heritage and having a
character they could relate to felt important to them. Stealth Mode was enacted in our
character development because the game wasn’t about the main character’s multiracial
heritage, but markers that featured multiraciality were included within the game in
organic ways. For example, the main character’s external racial identity
12
is Black, she
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2012 Student demographics from New Urban Arts
(http://newurbanarts.org/impact/)
12
External racial identity is how others see and racialize an individual based on their
external appearance and social behaviors (Doyle & Kao, 2007).!
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had a Latina-sounding name, and she had various family members with Latina/o and
Black-sounding names. The main character never discussed her own internal racial
identity. These casual inclusions make the multiracial characteristics within the story
seem like normal, everyday occurrences instead of something unusual or rare. We
incorporated a multiracial character into an interactive learning experience as theory-into-
practice of critical mixed race studies. Michele Elam (2011) notes,
That educational environments have become a crucible for defining and refining
what it means to be “mixed race” should remind us that pedagogy is not the mere
by-product of research, that these classroom events and practices are more than
just the application of theoretical models and principles and certainly more than
an inevitable effect of changing demographics (p. 31).
Elam states that practices like The Resisters are “more than just the application of
theoretical models” because games are a reflection of cultural rhetoric and an
understanding of the world we live in (Gee, 2003). The co-designers were trying to make
sense of what it means to be mixed race in the United States through the creation of the
main character.

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Figure 11: Screenshot of Gloria Flores From Narrative Video

The co-designers’ construction of the main character, Gloria Flores, demonstrated
an acute understanding of the multiracial experience, and the specificities of what it
meant to be Afro-Latina. One of Gloria’s defining Afro-Latina characteristics is that she
looks Black and not like a “typical” Latina. In her research about LatiNegras, Lillian
Comas-Díaz (1996) found that these particular mixed race women do not experience
much outside curiosity
13
about their racial identity because they are perceived to be
Black, and a portion of their culture and ethnicity are denied. The main character’s
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One multiracial experience we did not address within the game, and was not
particularly relevant with our main character, is the curiosity with a multiracial person’s
ambiguous features. Described by Helena Jia Hershel, “Because of the ambiguity and
anxiety created by their presence, multiracial persons or families may be used as a blank
screen on which unresolved racial issues are projected, much like a projective test or
inkblot. This accounts for the sometimes curious, sometimes voyeuristic interest people
have in the multiracial person” (1995, p. 176).
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actions were emblematic of her namesake Gloria Anzaldúa’s meditations on mixed race
identity. According to Anzaldúa (1987), a mixed race person is a border crosser,
translator, negotiator, and mediator—all activities that Gloria Flores encounters
throughout The Resisters’ narrative. Gloria Flores’ story that unfolds over the course of
the game is illustrative of a young person’s understanding of mixed race identity in the
twenty-first century.
Inclusion of Asian Americans
The original proposal for The Resisters was a specific focus on Black and
Latina/o activism in Providence. The intention of this game was to offer an immersive
game experience for college student game players of color, and based on this particular
student communities’ needs, in March 2014 the co-designers and I intentionally expanded
our focus to include Asian Americans into our research and the game’s storyline. A major
impetus for this shift was seeing the development of Asian American/Black student
tension within the Center for Students of Color, which first erupted in November 2013
when Asian American women spearheaded protests against New York City Police
Commissioner Ray Kelly’s visit to the Brown campus to speak. The Asian American
protest organizers were accused of co-opting Black experiences. In March 2014, a post
on the “Brown Micro/Aggressions” Facebook page
14
and a thread of comments
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The Brown Micro/Aggressions Facebook page was an anonymous forum where
students could send their experiences with micro-aggressions to the page administrators
to be posted online. Posts within the Micro/Aggressions page were frequently topics of
conversation within the Center for Students of Color.
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negatively depicted Asian Americans within communities of color. Below are few
selections from the thread:
Post #1: As a dark-skinned Black person, I feel alienated from social justice
spaces or conversations about institutional racism here at Brown when non-Black
people of color say things like "let's move away from the White-Black binary"…
Oh, and I’ve noticed that when we do "move away from the White-Black binary",
I rarely see the inclusion of Latin@ or Native (ESPECIALLY Native) experiences
or perspectives in conversation
Post #2: This campus does not foster a safe space for Black students, especially
dark-skinned Black students, to engage in activism. As the [MicroAggressions]
post suggests, activists spaces become consumed with "moving away from the
Black-White binary." With only one exception, I have never heard this term used
on this campus to mean "We should be more inclusive of other narratives”…
In my experience/observations, the overwhelming majority of these spaces are
dominated by Asian and Asian-American students and White allies. The
comments of the post also allude to the roles Asian and Asian-American students
play in encouraging these spaces to move away from the B-W binary. Ultimately,
this leads to the principal inclusion of mainly East Asian narratives and fosters an
exclusion of Latin@, Black, Native, South Asian, and Arab narratives. This not
only makes the space less productive, it perpetuates a violent variation of the
Model Minority Myth in which mainly East Asian voices become the speakers
and examples for all marginalized minorities even though those other groups may
experience oppression in very different ways.
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Although anonymous, what appeared to be Black students voiced their concern and hurt
about their exclusion and erasure from the activist spaces on campus. The online
Micro/Aggressions Facebook page was the center of the discussion, and many students
felt concerned that these conversations were not taking place in real world spaces.
Motivated by Micro/Aggressions Facebook posts, a few Asian American students
reached out to Asian American faculty, staff, and graduate students to process and create
actionable steps stemming from what they felt to be posts specifically attacking Asian
Americans. Some Asian American students attempted to productively respond within the
comments section of the post, and they felt these posts led to little progress. This group of
Asian American students sent an email to the faculty, staff, and graduate students,
writing:
Today, 7 Asian American students got together for an emergency meeting to
process recent posts on Facebook by Brown University students and collectively
heal. Many students "liked" these posts… I'm writing to you as a concerned
student and on behalf of the group of us that met today. Some of us were
concerned about the implications of these posts that seemed directed towards
Asian American students…We decided that we would like to use this momentum
to move forward in a productive manner and would like to have a conversation
with faculty/administrators/etc. about what has transpired and what actions we
can take. We do not wish to take our concerns to the virtual and anonymous
sphere and would like to ask for your input and support as we figure out what to
do (email, 3/12/14)
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The students wanted to respond outside of the online Facebook platform and do
something in the real world that addressed the obstacles to activist solidarity that were
erupting along racial lines.
Being part of these conversations caused me reflect on my exclusion of Asian
Americans from my preliminary proposal. I reflected in my field notes, writing,
This [situation with the Asian American students] has me thinking about my
work- and immediately, why did I exclude Asian Americans from research in
Providence? I think this was more about simplicity—that it seemed too big to try
to do it all and I needed to downsize. But I think I need to respond to community
needs, especially this community where I'm doing my research. So Felipe and I
are thinking about ways to incorporate Asian Americans into this project (Agloro
Fieldnotes, 3/17/14).
As designers, we needed to respond to our communities’ needs. Asian Americans needed
to be visibly present within the story and the structure of The Resisters, so we worked to
make sure our narrative was inclusive. Within the climate of precarious racial
relationships within the Center for Students of Color, I wanted to contribute something
that offered an alternate version of what activism and coalition building could look like. I
wanted The Resisters to disrupt models and conversations of Asian Americans by
including them into this project. We decided that one of Gloria’s friends needed to be
visibly Asian American, so that there was representation of Asian Americans within our
story of Providence activism.

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Figure 12: Gloria and Nat

Additionally, we discovered that Grace Lee Boggs was born above her father’s Chinese
restaurant in downtown Providence, so we had a link to one the most important racial
justice activists in the twentieth century who fought for Black liberation and was also
Asian American (Boggs, 2012). Grace Lee Boggs became critical to our narrative, both
with her connection to physical place and as the leader of the fictional underground
network of activists where Gloria’s mother disappears to after Gloria’s father is taken by
ICE.
Considering Game Players
One of the questions I encountered was why the project’s design included only
game players of color. The answer is that the game would not always be solely for
students of color, but as a playtest prototype, I was interested in knowing more about the
experiences of researching, designing, and playing a game by and for young people of
color. Building upon two tenants of Ethnic Studies, self-determination and relevant
education (Umemoto, 1989), one of the goals of the project was to develop a gaming
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experience where students of color were the primary focus. Jeff Duncan-Andrade (2006)
describes how a critical media literacy pedagogy focused on urban youth holds potential
to “deconstruct dominant narratives, develop much needed academic and critical
literacies, and create counter-narratives of those in the media, which largely are negative
depictions of urban youth and their communities” (p. 150). Students have higher self
esteem when ethnic identity intersects with their learning experiences (Phinney, Cantu, &
Kurtz, 1997) and as this game was intended to be an informal learning experience, I
wanted the students to feel like The Resisters was a project that embraced their cultural
roots and history, and offered a narrative of people of color creating change in a
longstanding historical way.
Another reason for creating an interactive game experience for students of color
was to build in a “safety space” within the game experience. A safety space accounts for
knowing that there is no such thing as a “safe space”—that there will never be a
guarantee that you won’t be hurt by something in any space, but in a “safety space”
people are tasked to be brave with their expressions and receptions of feelings. Post-
game, I interviewed some of the game players and asked if it was the correct choice to
create a student of color-focused space. The game players felt that there was a higher
likelihood of creating a safety space within a network of students of color, and each
player I interviewed felt like it was the right decision in order to foster the learning
environment we were trying to create. One player said they were negotiating in their own
life when people of color need space for themselves and when they wanted to provide
knowledge to white people. Another player discussed the sense of kinship she felt with
other people of color, saying,
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When you’re with a group of other people of color, there’s a sense of safety that
you have. Versus when you aren’t in that kind of space. So, I do think there might
not be as big of a sense of camaraderie or shared experience just kinda shared
ideas about what this game is supposed to be for us.
Game players also said that in spaces where the focus is on people of color, they dreaded
inappropriate questions or behaviors from white people. Their sentiments echoed Vine
Deloria Jr.’s (1969) statement that “the white man must no longer project his fears and
securities onto other groups, races, and countries. Before the white man can relate to
others, he must forgo the pleasure of defining them” (p. 174). The playtest environment
we created for The Resisters was for students of color to learn their own culturally
relevant information and was not a space for white students to grapple with their own
power and privilege, however messy and complicated. Unpacking white privilege is an
important task and experience for students; but in defining the boundaries of this
particular project, addressing whiteness was not within the parameters of this version of
the game.
Aside from desiring a safety space for students of color, all of the game players
interviewed thought the information they learned in The Resisters was important for all
students to learn, including white students. One player said,
I think all students could benefit from this game because it gets you off [College
Hill] and into Providence and you learn about Providence’s history and activism
and a lot of important issues. But at the same time, there does need to be… a
game space for students of color specifically.
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I asked the game players how they would shift the game experience to make it available
to all students, and one of the suggestions was to leave it up to students of color to select
what kind of experience they were looking for. The game players’ sentiment was that at
certain moments students of color within a predominantly white campus were looking for
spaces to not have to explain themselves or be on the defensive, but at other times they
felt prepared and desired to share. It should be left up to students to decide the kind of
team they were looking to play with, and the game coordinators could craft teams based
on these desires.
15
Susanna Ruiz (2013) describes the game designer challenge of
balancing a player’s learning experience and the well being of community they are
learning about, saying,
The elephant in the room here relates to the myriad questions raised by playing at
or through fantasies about another community’s welfare. It is essential to posit the
critique that this can amount to positioning the player as tourist, and neither the
player nor the subject as truly empowered agents of change. However, equally
necessary is the defense that it points towards at least the possibility of a
transformative experience via play that offers new sorts of perspectival
orientations, discoveries and agency.

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Racial justice organizing techniques suggest that supporting monoracial talk
sessions about topics relating to race can be useful for white people as well (Doyle &
Kao, 2007). White people answering other white people’s questions allows for question
askers to ask questions more freely with less fear of negative response, and protect people
of color from the exhaustion of being on display for the benefit of someone else.
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Mary Flanagan (2009) questions whether locative play appropriates space and is a form
of “entertainment colonization.” These questions and critiques depend on players’
positionalities beyond racial lines. It is possible for people of color to be cultural voyeurs,
and as George Lipsitz (1998) says, “nonwhite people can become active agents of white
supremacy as well as passive participants in its hierarchies and rewards” (p. viii). Both
the game players and the experts seem to agree that cultural voyeurism is something we
have to be diligent about minimizing, but how exactly to do that is more complicated.
Someone’s right to exist wholly should be more important than someone’s desire to learn
something, yet finding that balance can be tricky, especially when play is involved.
Designing the Game Experience
How do we design an effective game experience? In his chapter “Research
Methods for Designing Effective Experiences,” Nathan Shedroff (2003) states that the
value of games is in seeing the emergence and development of some of the following
characteristics:
• Suspension of belief
• Levels of ownership and affection
• Language
• Behavioral patterns
• Rituals
• Interaction with other means of communication
• Re-definition of functionality
• Exploration of content
• Level of identification
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As a game making and game playing experience, both the co-designers and the players
experienced a combination of these characteristics. The co-designers had the highest
levels ownership, affection, and identification with The Resisters material. A month after
the game finished, I ran into Felipe as he was coming from a class and he said, “I don’t
know what to do with myself now that The Resisters is done.” Although Anthony was in
a different state in his first semester of college during the time game play happened, he
let me know that he was following along each day to see how it was all unfolding.
Players watched the daily videos, and to an extent believed in the coherence of the
narrative. The lines between reality and fiction were occasionally blurred when game
players encountered the actors who played Gloria, Nat, and Yuri on campus and for the
three weeks of the game, the actors would be in character if approached by game players
in public. The players explored the archival content on the website and participated in the
three game challenges, dedicating weekend time and shifting their normal weekend
patterns to be part of The Resisters.
Considering Physical Space
The three challenges were planned for real world spaces, and the co-designers and
I felt strongly that game play in real world spaces was a critical feature of The Resisters’
game experience. Games that take place in the real world transform the way players
understand the physical space, and “spatially expanded” games can heighten the character
of a city or a particular space (Montola, Stenros, & Wærn, 2009). It was important for the
game to be saturated in location; narrative and game parts of The Resisters could not
easily be ported to another city. If the game could be moved to another city without
changing much, it would be location free (Flanagan, 2009). The advice of Markus
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Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern (2009) supported our hunch about the
importance of physical space, suggesting,
The best pervasive experiences do not take place on screen, even if it shows
an augmented image of the surrounding world. Instead, specially expanded
games become most interesting when they make intense use of the city as it is,
including its history and ambiance, and use the game content to twist it, just
slightly, into a diegetic world (p. 79).
Academic subjects are sometimes accused of being disconnected from physical space,
and educational learning experiences can feel like they are removed from personal
experience (Squire et al., 2007). Centering game play about Providence’s history within
the actual boundaries of the city would create a learning-rich environment because the
players would learn the stories of activism and social movement building by engaging
with locations by visiting the actual sites—adding a place-based experiential element that
could not take happen behind a screen. The players would learn by participating in an
action, rather than through observation.
The co-designers and I were aware of the need to design the challenges in a way
that took into account the ways bodies of color move and may be harassed and/or policed
in public spaces. Studying the ways that other pervasive game makers have offered
advice for how to design games, most often, all bodies were presented as equal in public
spaces. These game designers asked you to consider building structures, having the right
equipment, and the legal issues of exploration (Montola et al., 2009). The effect of
people’s bodies in public was almost always absent. In reality, this neutrality is not the
case. From women getting catcalled in public; to Black men shot for looking suspicious,
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carrying a toy samurai sword as part of cosplay, or carrying a pellet gun in a store for
purchase; and a Black woman college professor aggressively arrested for assault when
stopped for jaywalking, current events demonstrated that all bodies were not treated
equally.
16
The co-designers were a team of queer young people, dark-skinned people,
and women of color who were constantly negotiating their space and safety in public.
Their lived experiences added a particular awareness of bodies and public space when
planning our real world game challenges.
Safety was our primary concern knowing that teams of young people of color
would be out together. Challenges were planned for limited daytime hours where the
players would not be in game play at night ever. The activity that seemed like the most
fun, space engaging in the real world, and generally safe was a scavenger hunt, and this
idea became the backbone of the first two challenges. We wanted the scavenger hunts to
incorporate elements of social media that young people naturally utilized, and we came
up with the idea of the selfie scavenger hunt
17
—teams would go to each location and take
a selfie and upload it to Instagram with the hashtag #TheResisters for points. In order to
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The murders of Trayvon Martin, Darrien Hunt, John Crawford III described here
and many others were traumatic events that affected the way the co-designers and I were
thinking about safety and public space.
17
We did have some concern about game players with their phones out to take selfies
in unfamiliar neighborhoods. After teams opened their packets, we expressed that
students be cautious and on alert at all times—but reminded them that they were as likely
to have their phones or wallets stolen on campus at night than in South Providence in
broad daylight under circumstances of carelessness.!!
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optimize interaction with other game players, including on other teams, the points system
awarded one point per team member per selfie and two points per member of another
team. Once we established that points-based selfies were the main game activity, we had
to figure out how to differentiate each team. We debated various methods of team
identification, including team color coordinating and team costumes, but thought both of
those options could make the players stand out undesirably in the local landscape.
18
In
the end we chose to have the game players wear their own everyday clothing and include
colored construction paper squares in the scavenger hunt packets that each player would
hold up in each selfie. This way players could be identified in the photos and still keep a
relatively normal profile when moving throughout the city in teams.
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18
An on-campus game that took place after The Resisters was called Humans Vs.
Zombies, where Humans wore bandanas on their arms and were “hunted” by Zombie
team wearing bandanas on their heads, who could chase Humans at all times outside of
class and turn them to Zombies by touching them. One Resisters player was also playing
Humans Vs. Zombies, who during his post-Resisters interview noted how he felt nervous
wearing a red bandana knowing its associations with gang culture and not knowing
anything about the local customs of gang identification but understanding his own
positionality as a Black man in public.
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Figure 13: Teams With Their Colored Square Differentiation

Avoiding Technofetishism
The co-designers and I also worked to find a balance between how to used
technology so that the game interacted with the players’ everyday habits without
saturating the game in too much technology just because we had the ability to do so. The
Resisters was inspired by the ARG from The University of Southern California’s Cinema
School game Reality Ends Here, and in reflections about this game, Jeff Watson (2012)
described avoiding technofetishism in their game design— which is using the most
technologically advanced tools without considering their appropriateness for the
particular activity. In Reality Ends Here, the final game product utilized physical card
decks after a preliminary mock-up of a mobile game app. Deciding the level of
technological immersion for our college student demographic was a task best left up to
my co-designers who were part of this demographic and would know intuitively which
media options to select. I presented options for a game website, using social media
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(Twitter, Instagram, Facebook), ARIS (open-source GPS located mobile app), and other
augmented reality phone-based apps. Smartphones today are essentially powerful
computers that, according to Klopfer and Squire (2008), have portability, socioability,
context sensitivity, and connectivity. Smartphones can travel everywhere, are equipped to
know where they are in real time, and can connect to other devices and other people
using these devices.
The co-designers’ insight was to utilize technological practices that were already
in use for most college students. The focus on habits already in practice aligns with Janet
Murray’s finding that it’s not about which media but the media’s meaning. Murray
(1997) states, “We focus so inappropriately on the worth of various media in part because
the last quarter of the 20
th
century has brought a general crisis of meaning” (p. 274). They
were less excited about a game website as a hub for daily play (the question was—would
players actually go to the website?), but saw its value as a way to display the archival
materials they’d discovered tucked away in boxes in library basements. The co-designers
also thought a website would be a location to keep all the transmedia parts of The
Resisters in one place that was easily accessible—returning to past Facebook or
Instagram feeds to retrieve information could be difficult for the players. I was the most
excited to develop an ARIS mobile location-based app for scavenger hunt navigation, but
the co-designers felt differently about my idea. Felipe felt strongly that a mobile app
would defeat the experience of being in the real world in teams playing something
together. Instead of experiencing the location, players would be what Sherry Turkle
(2012) calls “alone together.” Felipe expected that if a mobile app was used, players
would be walking together, not speaking, looking at their phones—defeating the purpose
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of team play in the real world. We wanted the players to have to talk to each other, look
around, and otherwise be present in the physical space. Instead of a mobile app, or even
some game parts online, the real world challenge packets were entirely hardcopy paper
handouts of instructions, info sheets about location, and treats.
19
[See Appendix B for
game packets from both scavenger hunts.] Felipe’s design intervention supports Ben
Stokes’ (2014) finding that paper is better for starting conversations than any fancy
mobile app.
We did not include paper maps in our game because we assumed a certain level of
technological immersion with our game players. We thought including a paper map
would be superfluous, as players would rather look at their GPS-loaded smartphone map
for directions to each location. We also figured that players would use their smartphones
to take selfies and then instantly want to upload them on Instagram. Each of the
previously mentioned processes assumed that players were all in possession of
smartphones or a phone with a camera.
For the majority of players this was true, but we had one player who did not have
a smartphone. For this one player, being part of a team with smartphones was critical and
essential to her participation. On a navigation level, she simply did not know the city
well enough to get from site to site without a map, and on a game play level, she could
not take pictures or upload them to Instagram—a key feature of playing the game. Her
smartphone access also meant another strategic consideration during game play. For point
totals, teams had to negotiate whether to stay together or split up. There were more
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19
!!!!!!Hardcopy paper handouts also limited the amount of time game players needed to
have their phones out, which we felt increased their level of safety.!!
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locations on each scavenger hunt than accessible in the three-hour game play boundary,
so teams needed to decide whether to stay together to maximize teammates in selfies, or
split up to spread the teammates across all the locations. The smartphone-less player’s
team decided to stick together as a full group in the end. Her preference for a non-
smartphone in life generally was something she reflected upon during her post-game
interview as something that made her feel different in comparison to the other players.
Despite claims that social media’s phase on the internet is over,
20
as designers we
over-assumed the social media saturation of our 18-23 year-old demographic. Of the
twelve players who signed up formally to play The Resisters, fifty percent of players had
neither a Twitter nor an Instagram account. Approximately seventeen percent of players
had only an Instagram account (although one first-year player created an Instagram
account on the spot when he signed up to play thinking a social media account was
required), and the remaining thirty-three percent of players had both Twitter and
Instagram accounts. Every player (one hundred percent) had a Facebook account.
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Social media venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson reflected on 2014 as year
that social media moved majorly in the direction of mobile and away from web browser-
based saturation. http://avc.com/2014/12/what-just-happened/
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Table 1: Players Who Use Twitter and Instagram

The players’ self-identified social media frequency varied from “I’m kinda excessively
on social media all the time” to “not at all.” One player thought that their friends from
home “were probably confused as crap because those were the first Instagram posts I’ve
posted in over a year” but appreciated having the personal visual collection on Instagram
of the places they’d visited during the game. This player felt like their Instagram account
created a “living archive, where I have something to go back to and look at this
experience” rather than photos that “just sit in a random memory card on some device
that I’ll never look at again.”
The original design of The Resisters’ communication with players shifted because
of their communication needs and uses early in game play. The website was initially
designed as a hub where a video would be released each day, picture galleries for each
specific collection (Graciela’s Closet, Tío P’s office, and Lucinda’s Library) would have
their section, and feeds from Instagram and Twitter could be accessed. Corresponding
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media elements would be released on different platforms. For example, picture clues
would go on Instagram and word-based clues would be released on Twitter. A Facebook
page was created as a means for backchannel communication between the players. In
reality, players primarily went to Facebook and I shifted our communication methods so
that all videos, clues, and communication were transmitted on Facebook in addition to the
original plans for each platform. Post-game player feedback identified Facebook as the
primary source for retrieving game information, because when the players “liked” The
Resisters’ page, it would show up organically in their newsfeeds as part of their regular
social media routines.
21
While we expected players to communicate by posting messages
on the public Facebook wall that we could see and anticipate their actions, no players
ever did that. Instead, all player communication with each other took place as private
Facebook messaging that we could not see.

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There was some variance in how players got their game information because of
what they concluded were Facebook issues. One player thought their Facebook newsfeed
had filtered out The Resisters’ posts, and another player found that their Facebook
newsfeed was “flooded with stuff” and the postings could slip by them. Instead they
could find the picture clues more easily in their Instagram feed, and would specifically
visit The Resisters’ Facebook page to watch the videos. Facebook was still the central
hub for game action.
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CHAPTER FIVE: PLAY AND POST-PLAY

No matter how much game makers prepare for pervasive play, there will always
be uncertainties that game makers must improvise for as play unfolds. Players have free
will that can influence and morph the direction of the game, and game designers must be
ready to shift to accommodate players’ wills within reason. Play is a ritual activity whose
rules are separate from everyday reality (Huizinga, 1938); so game makers should expect
that a pervasive game’s rules of engagement will alter dramatically from their original
plans. In this chapter I cover the divergences of play during The Resisters and how actual
game events drastically varied from our play estimations. The chapter concludes with
game player design suggestions to revise The Resisters for another iteration of play.
Game Advertising and Recruiting
The Cookie Drop
Official game events began on August 28, 2014, when Felipe and I distributed
custom fortune cookies to the participants of the Third World Transition Program
(TWTP). Felipe and I had discussed the fine balance between telling students enough
information to get them interested in knowing more without revealing too much. We
didn’t expect that there would be much questioning cookies distributed during a
sanctioned pre-orientation activity. Who wouldn’t want a fortune cookie? In order to
minimize awkwardness when a student replied “No thanks” to our cookies, we
strategized a plan to maximize distribution. We decided to play the role of cookie
distributors and not all-knowing game designers and tell the students something along the
lines of, “We’re not supposed to tell you too much, but you’ve been invited to play a
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game. It’s not about the cookie, it’s what’s inside the cookie.” What was inside the
cookie was a series of four custom messages that included the game’s website.

Figure 14: Mysterious Play Recruiting Cookies

In theory, the students would open the cookie, see the message, and go to The Resisters
webpage. From there, they would be connected to the logistics of player sign-up
information, our Twitter feed, Instagram feed, and Facebook page. Students seemed to
enjoy the messages in the fortune cookies; I witnessed groups of students showing each
other their cookies and saying, “My fortune cookie says ‘HELP ME!’” Felipe and I
passed out the cookies, took sneaky photos of the TWTP cohort for our Instagram feed,
and left. The students would also encounter The Resisters logo within the pages of their
TWTP information booklet.
Felipe and I had planned for a two-week window to advertise The Resisters
between the first cookie drop and the first initial player sign up session. Felipe, who had
access to various student-related Facebook pages as a residential counselor, posted the
game’s trailer a few times a week on Facebook. Initial action on the game website was
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slow, with the peak of students visiting the website on the day of the cookie drop and
slowly trickling down as the week progressed.

Figure 15: Website Analytics From The First Week After The Cookie Drop

On the day of cookie drop, the website (which was only a landing page at this point) had
thirty-two views—lower than we expected for distributing cookies to approximately two
hundred TWTP participants. I asked Felipe to ask around to the first years he supervised
to find out why the website visits were so low. From the responses, he felt like his asking
about the cookies reminded students about the website. Most students who answered
Felipe said they liked mysterious messages in the cookie and meant to go to the website
later, but either lost or forgot about the cookie paper slip and then in the bustle of a new
school year did not pursue the information. Based on this information, I added a question
that asked if the student had received a cookie at TWTP on the intake form for game
players. Of the first year students who officially signed up to play, none of the students
recalled receiving a cookie during the TWTP lunch. The Facebook posts with the game’s
trailer drew more attention. One student stopped me in the Center for Students of Color
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and asked what The Resisters was. I asked him why he was asking me, and he said he
saw my name attached to the Vimeo account and thought he should ask me to know
more. I asked if he had gone to the website that was listed on the game trailer, and he said
no.
The cookie drop did not successfully function as a lure to a rabbit hole that would
entice this group of students to sign up to play The Resisters. In the spirit of my designing
in detail methodology, I reflected to figure out what happened (or didn’t). This generation
of college students desires instantaneous information retrieval. In the age of Google,
Wikipedia, and even the iPhone’s assistant Siri, we live in information-saturated
environments where informational suspense or pondering an answer is unusual. In
retrospect, it was a poorly planned choice to embed a multi-step process to attract
students to The Resisters’ website in the middle of another activity (the TWTP
orientation lunch). The students needed to open the fortune cookie, retrieve the paper slip,
and then use an internet-connected device to type in the website. Was it possible that
more than a few cookies in their plastic wrappers went straight into a backpack or tote
bag, and ended up crushed into many little pieces and deposited into the trash unopened?
Felipe reported lost or forgotten cookie slips from TWTP attendees, meaning that the
immediacy of going to the website didn’t happen.
Another media mistake we learned through our playtest was that we needed the
game’s website to be accessible through a hyperlink when any game material were posted
online. We emailed the residential counselors’ email lists to encourage their students to
sign up to play The Resisters, and the game website was hyperlinked in those emails.
Felipe felt discouraged about email outreach because he thought students check Facebook
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more than they check their emails. He was the expert in college student habits, so in
addition to emails he would also post the game’s thirty-second trailer in related Facebook
groups a few times a week. The game’s trailer displayed the game’s website clearly at the
end of the trailer. In our desire to maintain the game’s magic circle, we did not provide
much explanation or text in the descriptions. Our mistake was to not post a hyperlink
within the video’s description and/or the post. Assuming the students’ level of
information saturation and their short attention spans, they needed to make it to the end of
the trailer and then type the address into their web browsers to get to the game’s website.
I think the website would have initially received more action had we posted a link that the
students could simply click through to get the information. Multi-step information
retrieval processes were not a successful recruiting technique with this group of students.
Initial Contact and Player Registration
We planned two player registrations on different days of the week over two
weeks. The player would come to the game office, fill out intake sheets that had their
social media information, emergency contact information, and dorm information so
players living close to each other could be grouped into teams. In addition, the players
would review and sign the IRB consent forms to participate in the game as a research
study. On the first sign-up day, two students showed up and another one emailed her
interest. Of those three, one of them was a second-year student who knew the game was
for first years but really wanted to play. Based on the low turnout, we decided to expand
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the game to include undergraduate students
22
at any level. The remaining nine game
players were not first years. The final game participants were two first-years, six second-
years, two third-years, and two fourth-years.
Our player recruitment estimation was twenty students, and we had gathered and
prepared enough materials to accommodate up to fifty players, so the twelve students
who officially signed up was lower than expected. Official sign up sessions may have
been a deterrent to student players. The game players who I interviewed after The
Resisters ended discussed how students feel over-booked with activities and might avoid
ones that seem like they have a high commitment level. In the co-designer notes, Felipe
wrote that more students might be interested in playing but didn’t want to commit
because recruiting took place a week into the school year during “shopping period”—the
first two weeks of the semester when students are free to drop in to classes and “shop”
them in order to finalize their courses. The game would not begin until about two weeks
after the first player sign up session and Felipe thought the students might not know what
their semester schedules looked like and did not want to commit themselves to an activity
that was a few weeks in advance. Felipe described how students were overly cautious
about sign ups for activities that were in the future. For other events on campus, it was
more likely that students would not sign up and just show up on the day of the event that
option was available. Advanced registration felt like a deterrent for decision-conscious
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Two graduate students emailed wanting to be part of The Resisters—we encouraged
them to follow along with the available content, but kept the game players to just
undergraduates.
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students. The game players who I interviewed post-game offered their suggestions for
player recruitment and retention; I’ll return to those suggestions later in the chapter.
Environmental Factors in the Real World ! Shifts in the Game World
In the previous chapter, I discussed how unforeseen circumstances shifted the
decision making process and the direction of The Resisters project. This section covers
environmental disruptions and how they affected the course of the game. It seems
important to outline what we had anticipated and prepared for through design and
material production, and the actual events that took place because ARGs are
predominantly player-driven (Stewart, 2009). ARGs in particular reflect the
improvisation and performative elements of game play because players’ actions change
the story, pacing, or set of problems (Kim et al., 2009). The circumstances of The
Resisters echoed these sentiments—we could not have expected or prepared for the
situations that arose during game play and for each challenge that required players to do
anything in the real world outside of the website.
Social Media Saturation
The end of Chapter Four discussed the players’ social media saturation and found
that student use of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook was different than I had originally
anticipated. Our plan was for each social media outlet to have a different function and
certain parts would be released on only one platform. When we learned that the majority
of game players had only an Instagram account or neither Instagram nor Twitter
accounts, we realized we could not release clues and story parts in the way we had
intended to. But all of the players had Facebook accounts, and actively used them, so
instead we decided to duplicate or triplicate the information across all three platforms
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each time we released a clue. So while Facebook was originally intended for player
backchannel communication, it became the predominant hub for information dispersal.
Each day when we posted a new narrative story video on the website, we also posted it on
Facebook. A picture clue that was originally intended for Instagram was posted there and
additionally on Facebook. During the challenges themselves we had some weather
obstacles, and we would keep our players posted about the plan by posting on Facebook,
Instagram, and Twitter.
We needed to be able to switch our communication tactics with players so that
they appropriately received our messages. Attentive puppetmastering meant we needed to
adapt our plan and not continue to play on methods we already knew wouldn’t work.
Game formats like ARGs need to adapt to the players, not the other way around. We
didn’t expect game players to start using social media that was not already in their
practice, because the new technology learning curve went against the principle of “mixed
reality”—things that were already in players’ technological practice were utilized to have
an ulterior function.
Pembroke Plague
The week we launched The Resisters, a highly contagious flu spread across
campus. The university sent out emails to the entire campus community with tips for
containing the illness and instructions for students and faculty to manage extensions
needed on assignments and missed classes. Felipe reported that all residential counselors
had a mandatory meeting about the spread of the illness, calling it the “Pembroke Plague”
because students on the Pembroke campus appeared to be the origin of the sickness.
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The Pembroke Plague hit the game players particularly hard. The forecast called
for rain on Saturday afternoon, and the first selfie scavenger hunt was set for 1 PM. As
Saturday morning turned into afternoon, emails from players arrived with similar
messages.
Player #1:
Hi all,
I'm not feeling well and I won’t be able to make it to challenge 1 today.
Player #2:
I'm on that same boat everyone.
I thought I'd recover from this cold in time but it didn't work out that way.
I'm sorry.
In the end, the Pembroke Plague decimated one entire team out of three teams, and
another complete team had other obligations ranging from managing a campus visit from
the Native Ivy Council, a tae kwon do out-of-town tournament, and other obligations that
took precedence on a Saturday afternoon.
One team, who named themselves Team Green Rage (after Lauryn Hill’s song
“Black Rage”), arrived to play completely intact. None of the players had come down
with the Pembroke Plague or had other obligations. Team Green Rage arrived promptly
at 1 PM, opened their challenge packet, and took off on the selfie scavenger hunt. They
had no idea that the other teams’ cancellation emails would continue to trickle in as they
mapped out their locations. At one point, they hadn’t seen any other teams, and sent out a
tweet:

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Figure 16: Team Green Rage Tries to Find Other Teams

Team Green Rage’s competitive edge wanted to maximize their points totals not knowing
that they were the only team in play.
The co-designers and I could not have anticipated that all members of only one
team would show up and we would only have one team in play. What could we do that
was unplanned and unexpected that would be memorable for Team Green Rage and make
them want to continue playing next week? Felipe suggested that we drive around to find
the team and surprise them with snacks. We quickly drove to the closest grocery store,
picked up cute scavenger hunt appropriate snacks (juice boxes and packets of cheddar
bunny crackers) and easily found the players about halfway through the scavenger hunt
location list at Rochambeau House. We surprised Team Green Rage with snacks,
explained to them that the other two teams called in sick and/or cancelled, and announced
them the winner. The team was all smiles, and wanted to tell Felipe and I about how
excited they were to be walking on the same streets where this history happened. The
players were accessing the past and present by physically inhabiting the same space
(Squire et al., 2007). After our brief interaction, Team Green Rage continued along
taking selfies at the locations until the rain rolled in and they called it quits.
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When Weather is Not On Your Side
It rained every time we tried to hold any event outside. The threat of rain during
Selfie Scavenger Hunt #2 became real and we needed to formulate a back-up plan. Selfie
Scavenger Hunt #2 was planned to be the challenge where game players explored other
parts of Providence. We intended for the players to utilize their student IDs to ride the
local bus system for free across the city. We included in the game packets relevant bus
schedules and the bus stop locations for the related bus lines to get players to the Mt.
Hope neighborhood, downtown, and South Providence. A few weeks before The
Resisters began, the city of Providence started renovating Kennedy Plaza, the main hub
for all the bus lines. Instead of being contained in one spot, the bus stops were scattered
across the perimeter of the downtown area. In Felipe’s words, finding the right bus stop
with their new locations was “epically confusing.” The bus schedules and maps were an
additional set of tools that mediated the players’ interactions with the city (Pea, 1993).
The scavenger hunt’s player constraint was that the players would need to strategize their
plan because traveling to each of the three locations on the bus within the three-hour time
limit was logistically impossible.
When Felipe and I realized the heavy rain downpour was not going to let up for
the afternoon, we had to improvise an alternative plan. As game designers, our logistical
challenge now was how we would juggle three teams, rain, and a severely limited Sunday
bus schedule. One of the buses the players would need to take did not run on Sundays,
and they would need a two-bus transfer. The Sunday bus schedule was huge constraint
for a three-hour challenge. Selfie Scavenger #2 hunt took place over a three-day holiday
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weekend, with the Monday holiday bus schedule just as limited as the Sunday schedule.
The rain forecast also called for sporadic showers throughout Sunday and Monday.
Our final decision was to extend game play from 1 PM on Sunday through 6 PM
on Monday, and teams would have to coordinate how they would participate within these
expanded parameters. The updated instructions released over social media asked for at
least one representative to meet at the pre-determined location to pick up the scavenger
hunt packet on Sunday at 1 PM. At the specified packet distribution time, two members
from two different teams showed up to retrieve the packets. We passed off the packets
and wished them luck. This small group of two mini teams decided to start the scavenger
hunt together, and ended up visiting Billy Taylor House, Billy Taylor Park, and the
Hardscrabble Riot commemoration bus stop in the Mt. Hope neighborhood on Sunday.
The final challenge stretched over three days (Thursday-Saturday) and involved
three parts: (1) the game players needed to find a water pump on campus where we had
placed a carved out book containing packets with puzzle pieces; (2) the teams would have
to coordinate with each other to put together the puzzle which contained the location of
the final event; and (3) go to this location at the specified time where they would be
inducted into the secret society activist group. On Thursday, the day of the book
placement, it was pouring rain again. The water pump was partially shielded by a large
tree that protected it from some of the rain, but as an extra precaution we wrapped the
book in plastic and placed a sticker with the game’s logo on the outside. We periodically
checked on the book throughout the morning to see if the puzzle pieces had been
retrieved. One team came shortly after we placed the book at the water pump, but the
other teams were never able to pick up their puzzle pieces.
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Figure 17: Puzzle For Final Challenge

Figure 18: Carved Out Book For Final Challenge
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Figure 19: Book Drop Location With The Book Wrapped in Plastic

At some point in the afternoon, the entire book—puzzle pieces and all—disappeared.
Locative games are influenced by not only by the players, but also by the variables in the
game environment. In this circumstance, the uncontrollable element was the non-game
playing people who saw the book wrapped in plastic, and took it inside. Community
projects, as well as locative games, are designed with a certain user group in mind, but as
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these are activities taking place in public, what happens when the public gets involved in
public engagement? For us, it meant needing to circumvent losing an important piece of
the game and making up for it with narrative. The improvised move was to post on
Facebook as Nat, where he left this note for the players:
Hey everybody, Nat here. I got too excited about finding the serpent pump and
put together the puzzle with Gloria. Oops, sorry.
The Resisters left us a note. It says to go to this location tomorrow at 2 PM
and to bring a token, photo, or something to this final location.
Under this post, Nat posted a picture (Figure 17) of the assembled puzzle. The players
missed out on being able to collaborate as a whole group to assemble the puzzle and
discover the location, but we were able to disseminate the important location information
without completely breaking the magic circle of the game.
Lessons Learned as a Game Director
My original plan for The Resisters did not include a reflective post-game
component, which I realized was a shortcoming if I wanted to evaluate the usefulness of
the game for its players. According to Mary Flanagan (2009), a reflective practice
encourages designers and technologists to create an intentional space to assess whether
design and value goals were supported during the project. For games specifically,
Flanagan recommends the Critical Play Method, an iterative process that includes the
following steps:
• Set a design goal/mission statement and values goals
• Develop rules and constraints that support values
• Design for many different play styles
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• Develop a playable prototype
• Playtest with diverse audiences
• Verify values and revise goals
• Repeat (p. 257).

Flanagan’s model shows these steps as a closed circle with the steps connected by arrows
so the steps are continuously looped. The steps in the Critical Play Method are directly in
alignment with Gunraj, York, and Ruiz’s anti-oppressive game design principles, and
incorporate play and reflection as complementary steps to complete the
design/play/revise circuit. I was able to interview five of the game players after The
Resisters was over in order to get their opinions on the design, play, and goals of the
game. The players’ insights confirmed some of my hunches about culturally relevant
games and higher education, and provided other pathways of inquiry that explored the
ways they had been thinking about and experiencing The Resisters. Combined with the
co-designer reflections, I was able synthesize findings related to the values and goals of
this project.
Game Design is an Underutilized Space for Learning
Much of the focus with learning-centered games, particularly in higher education,
has centered on what kinds of learning take place through play (Tierney et al., 2014).
Game design is a learning-rich activity that has designers absorbing content, translating it
from fact to activity, and re-packaging it to appeal to the player demographic. Within The
Resisters project, the co-designers became experts of our archival material from multiple
sets of processes (narrative story building, map making for scavenger hunts, aesthetic
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design of archival materials online). Within Squire et al.’s (2007) study of augmented
reality games for learning, they found that
Being a game designer was the most transformative experience for students,
because it combined all roles, data, and skills into an active identity. Indeed, game
design became the ultimate curriculum (p. 285).
This project had similar results—the co-designers’ capacities for learning and their
identities as community members of Providence flourished during the design and play of
The Resisters. The co-designers felt a tie to the archives and the game, and this activity
transformed how they were thinking about themselves. During the months of game
design, the co-designers reflected on their experiences:
The more and more I look through these archives, I see parts of my
identity highlighted - whether it be about the ‘colored’ section of the city, or the
Dominican population, or even the Elmwood neighborhood population. It’s really
awesome to see parts of my identity and how they were represented in the past
(Co-Designer Design Journal, 6/21/14)
I would even say that this research has empowered me. Collecting all the
information from the archives, reorganizing it, etc., I’ve learned a lot! And all of
this knowledge does make me feel special. I feel like I have the tools and the
ability to make a difference in the world because I am educated. I could teach
someone else and spread the empowerment (Co-Designer Design Journal,
7/24/14)

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This research has affected me so positively (even as it is gearing down
now). It has been a blessing to immerse myself in historical archives, and travel to
the other side of things and build a game. I have touched upon so many different
techniques and skills that I can't help but to feel grateful. I feel honored. I'm also
confident to continue acquiring research opportunities because they are such
grand and transformational experiences (Co-Designer Design Journal, 8/20/14)
The co-designers, and Felipe especially, were able to verbalize what they were feeling
through the process about the ways they felt that they were growing intellectually and
emotionally through game design. From my informal conversations with the co-
designers, I believe they began this project because they thought they were going to be
part of teaching others history and activism through game play. One co-designer wrote,
“Players will actually learn about Black and Latin@ activism in Providence, while
looking at primary source documents, listening to testimonials, etc. It is an awesome way
for players to be really engaged in the concept and practice of the game” (Co-Designer
Design Journal, 7/14/14). They were surprised at their own intellectual growth through
the game making process and felt empowered by the information and skills they learned.
A game’s content is what makes it fun to play and compelling to return to,
although a game’s content is ironically less of a priority than teaching the desired skill
set. In The Civic Tripod, Ben Stokes (2012) discusses how learners who make games are
in a position to acquire content and perspective unexpectedly. Stokes investigates real
world locative games and finds,
The act of designing such a game often demands an iterative curatorial review of
the social issue content, choosing which historical events should be prioritized
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and arranged. For the mobile case, deep content is often embedded in physical
neighborhoods with long histories, and so play-testing the game requires long
walks, and pulls the creators into unexpected conversations with residents and
local activists. Choosing a path for your player can thus be an invitation for a deep
informal learning of place and history (2012).
The co-designers went through a process of culling the collected archival research
materials to determine its suitability for The Resisters’ story, and then created scavenger
hunts that grouped the historical places and events by neighborhood and geographic
region within the city.
! Game design was an additional creative outlet that in a way shifted Felipe’s
identity of himself. Felipe was fairly entrenched in his identity as someone who was
interested in biology and classical piano. Researching and designing The Resisters was a
transformative experience for his identity, where he described his shifting self-perception,
saying, “I'm seeing myself as more of a game designer. It is an awesome feeling! Playing
with the different software and apps has been really fun and engaging thus far. These
different experiences are not only rewarding but will benefit me in the future.” A critical
property of games that makes them suitable for education is that they can provide
transformative experiences (Galarneau, 2005). The transformative experience is usually
thought of as the immersion into a game world that the players experience, but
transformation also takes place when game design is used as an educational tool. Felipe
reflected that he explored “ website building, wireframing programs, video editing, video
production, game design, and game development” while making The Resisters. His
exposure to these tools expanded his own desires for his education as a college student;
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Felipe found that he wanted to explore basic computer science and other digital academic
disciplines in the future because of his involvement with this project.
Without Credit, It’s Not a Priority
Game player sign-ups had been modest and lower than my expectations for The
Resisters. Of the twelve students who signed up to play, about seven students consistently
participated in challenges and social media interactions. These low numbers surprised
me, but the participation rate was in alignment with the Annenberg School of
Communication & Journalism’s replica of the USC’s Cinema School game, named
Xposure. In the summer before the fall game launch, I had a conversation with an
Xposure designer who passed on this advice: “It’s a big step between signing up and
participating.” The designer described how Xposure’s failure to gather student player
support within the Annenberg School was in part due to a disconnect from the student
culture and the expectations of the game. While the spirit of Reality Ends Here was
intentionally non-institutional, Annenberg students needed an institutional incentive—
degree credit, or extra credit as part of a course. In short, the game lacked “local fit” to
the community of learners (Stokes, 2014). The designer expressed how I needed to make
sure that The Resisters was integrated into the students’ lives on personal relevance level;
the game world needed to incorporate things that mattered in their lives.
As the students were recruited from the Third World Transition Program and/or
affiliated with the Center for Students of Color, I assumed this link would be strong
enough to carry player participation. I was wrong. Alongside emails about being sick,
players emailed to let us know they had other conflicts with the challenge times, usually
activities that dealt with coursework or formal student groups. So despite signing up and
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seeing the time commitments of game play,
23
playing The Resisters in their teams was
less of a priority than other scheduled activities. During the post-game interviews, the
level of player commitment seemed in line with other programming that came from the
Center for Students of Color. One player remarked:
There’s always an interesting dynamic of who’s going to show up to MPC
[Minority Peer Counselors] workshops or WPC [Women’s Peer Counselors]
workshops. It’s like, those are the main ways people try to connect with the
[Center for Students of Color], after TWTP.
This player was not surprised that so few students signed up, and of those players who
did sign up, even less actually came to the challenges. The player’s description of time
commitments of other students was this:
It’s probably the same thing that happened with the game, like, [students say],
“I’m interested in this topic, but I just have things going on, like other
commitments, or work, or something, it keeps me from going”… Also, the
organizers of the workshops, those people have a friend group and friend base
where people are like, “We are going to support these people talking about this
thing that we all care about.”
Student time seemed like it was at a premium while classes are in session, and singular
activities that were in addition to organized extra-curricular activities were the first things
to get cut when students ran out of time.

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When students signed up to play, they had to sign Human Subjects IRB forms that
explicitly stated the time commitment.
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Table 2: Distribution of Student Player Time

Student Time is Crunched and Timing During the Semester Matters
Table 2 illustrates how the game players I interviewed mapped out their time.
Coursework and obligations tied credit-bearing activities are the students’ priority and
take up the majority of students’ time. After coursework, students prioritized their jobs or
activities that provided income. From the first two time-block obligations, students
needed to succeed in their coursework and then be able to afford to pay for their
expenses. After coursework and jobs, the students prioritized their formalized groups. For
this group, their school groups were recreational sports teams, duties associated with
residential housing, and writing for literary journals, among others. The final category,
and where The Resisters fell in the priority scale, was their expendable activities—what
one player called “leisure activities.” This category includes talks and film screenings on
Coursework)
Employment)
Clubs)and)Groups)
Expendables)
(Workshops,)Talks,)
Screenings,)Games))
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campus, various workshops, and short-term activities like games. This leisure category is
the first one to be cut if students are feeling stressed about time limitations. About The
Resisters and time dedicated to leisure categories, one player said:
I think it’s hard because it’s a cool thing that you want to prioritize, but at
the same time there’s always this pressure, like, I should probably
consider classes before [other non-course activities].
Time management as coursework intensifies during the semester was another
issue for the student players. One player described allotting time to go on a selfie
scavenger hunt as a thought process that looked like this:
We’re gonna take selfies, cool! So it was more like, we have this time, but we
have to be places after this, and that kind of mentality is time management. But I
don’t know if it’s a personal thing because I’m always kinda like, “I have so many
things to do!” STRESS.
Students have to make calculated choices about where to spend their time, and the benefit
of particular activities. The player who described their experience with the selfie
scavenger hunt thought it was cool to do this activity, but even in the moment of game
play, they were thinking about the obligations that were coming next.
On top of time management, the student players spoke about how their workload
intensifies as each week approaches semester apexes of midterms and finals, and these
coursework deadlines affect their decision-making about non-coursework activities. One
player was specific when talking about October, the month where the majority of game
play took place. This player said:
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So we did [The Resisters] early October on weekends, and for me those three
hours were really fun and useful because we got to walk around. But looking at
that on paper ahead of time, you don’t really know what that means in terms of
three hours on a weekend so you don’t know if you’ll be extensively exercising or
running around or anything like that. So I think starting [the game] before people
get really in depth, or before people get caught off guard by the fact that they’re
three weeks into the semester.
October was the month that coursework obligation started happening; midterm papers
and problem set deadlines began to look menacing and started to stack up at this point.
This player was suggesting that game play needed to be in full swing before students
could have a chance to feel skittish about additional time commitments.
Although the student game players felt like there was a tradeoff between their
coursework and playing The Resisters, they still felt like the game held value for them.
For some of the players, the game felt more important in the moment than the required
prerequisite courses for their majors, but still felt the pressure of coursework and grades.
One player said:
[It’s difficult] to balance learning outside of the classroom with the learning
you’re required to do as a result of a class. Or the work you’re required to do as a
result of a class is always an interesting tradeoff because this game was really
really useful, and it’s very much in line with what I’m studying and what I want
to know about and why I’m at the university. This game is not a waste of time,
it’s very much still supporting an academic purpose, but because it’s not in an
academic classroom means that you kinda have to attribute value to it less
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because you’re not getting a grade, so I think that’s a really weird trade off that
happens a lot.
While The Resisters had direct correlation to students’ interests and research, in a
university setting where learning is measured by grades and institutional hurdles
completed, a game that doesn’t leave some kind of quantifiable mark is difficult to
prioritize.
But Learning Happened!
Despite the time constraint obstacles the students felt, the ones who fully
participated in the game reported that the time spent in the game activities resulted in
learning something. For this particular group of students, learning about the activist
history in the neighborhood where the Brown campus is was one of the most formative
experiences of the game. The players found that the structure of the game was inclusive
to their busy lives and the real world scavenger hunts that had them walking on the same
streets and to the buildings of actual significance was an embodied learning experience—
different from reading about something in a book and discussing it in a classroom. Even
watching a video paled in comparison to actually standing in the location they were
learning about. One player’s response to what they enjoyed most about the game was
this:
I loved getting to learn the different places and I love that we did a scavenger hunt
to do that. Going around town and doing the Instagram scavenger hunt was really
fun, and I think it gave me a chance to not only hear about things, but [also] see
what they were.
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This player’s positive reaction about learning anchored real world is echoed by Brenda
Laurel’s (1993) finding that “Direct, multisensory representations have the capacity to
engage people intellectually as well as emotionally, to enhance the contextual aspects of
information, and to encourage integrated, holistic responses” (p. 119). The multisensory
representations of seeing, walking, and being in the physical space was an important
aspect of the learning experience. Confirming Laurel’s statement that people are
intellectually as well as emotionally engaged during multisensory experiences, one player
described how even if she couldn’t remember the factual information about what she read
on the scavenger hunt information sheets, she felt like she had better sense of the space of
the neighborhood, and the spatial awareness felt empowering to her.
The Resisters was a learning experience even for those who were not able to
participate in the selfie scavenger hunts. The multi-platform use of media meant that
players who missed the scavenger hunt could see the locations pinned on the online map,
the pictures from Instagram, and watch the Monday recap video. In the video released
after each weekend challenge, Gloria—along with either Nat or Yuri—talked through the
significance of each scavenger hunt location with accompanying photos. These recap
videos were another way to pass on information about the historical activism even if the
videos were separated from any other additional game media. One player noted, “I
learned things through the way that the game was structured… The recap videos were
really interesting and helpful because even though I didn’t go on the actual mission
myself I could watch it and still learn similar things.” If The Resisters’ game website is
meant to function as an archive of game play and a point of access to research materials,
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it seemed advantageous to have the material we wanted our players to learn accessible
across multiple platforms.
Culturally Relevant is Key
The game players expressed a desire for more learning experiences, inside or
outside the classroom, that involved a focus on people of color. They were excited to play
a game that involved their own cultures. In the post-game interviews, I asked the game
players if they would have been just as interested in playing The Resisters if I had just
advertised it as social movement history and not people of color’s social movement
history. One player responded saying, “If it was broadly about social movements, I
naturally think it’s going to be about white people, which is a lot less interesting to me.”
Another player said, “I think there’s a lot of activism that happens that we focus on that is
not about people of color, and that’s cool too and activism is awesome but I like being
able to uncover voices that are not shared—which is usually people of color.” These
student game players are referring to the absence of people of color throughout their
educations. Peggy McIntosh (1998) calls the students’ lack of access to relevant cultural
education the invisible knapsack of white privilege, while Manning Marable (2002)
considers it structural racism and Shawn Ginwright (2004) calls it “complex systems of
control and containment” (p. 30). These student game players of color were hungry for
learning that was relevant to their histories and their cultures.
The student players valued learning about their own histories because seeing their
own culture and their own histories reflected in their learning experiences matters. Even
though “people of color histories” is an deployment of strategic essentialism (Spivak,
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1988), the game players wanted to be involved in what Michael Omi and Howard Winant
(1994) would call a racial project that was inclusive of their histories. One player said,
I think the history of social movements, especially for people of color, is not told
that often, and I think I crave that knowledge. That’s what I gravitate towards
because it’s important to me, and it helps me think about my identity and things I
want to be involved in.
For this player, seeing her culture and history within a game environment caused her to
reflect on her identity and actions she wants to take in the future. Another player felt that
seeing their culture reflected within the game strengthened their sense of self. This player
said,
The fact that I learned so many new names and new historical figures who were
of color is really empowering to see because we always forget that those people
exist or don’t know that those people exist, I think when you do something that’s
specifically around people of color, it brings out a level of discovery…like
reviving those stories. And digging up those stories and bringing them back to
life.
This sense of empowerment supports how culturally relevant education can produce
higher self-esteem along with higher grade point averages (Sleeter, 2011). The players
felt supported within this game, and a few players wished the game were part of a class
because their dedication and effort would have been positively reflected within an
institutional measurement of grades. But more important than grades, seeing their
histories in a learning experience offered recognition, that in the words of Langston
Hughes (1945), reflected, “I, too, am America.”
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Is Learning Enough?
The game players felt they learned historical information through playing The
Resisters; they could recall memorable documents from Tío P’s office, and they knew the
significance of some of the buildings around campus. But is learning enough? At the
onset of this research project, one of my research questions was: How does interactive
game play translate into real world engagement in social issues? Through this process of
game play, I wanted to find out if playing a social movement history-focused game
would create tangible activism with the game players. By the post-game interviews, none
of the game players had concretely committed to action but were interested in trying to
get off campus. One player said that they “loved exploring the outer boundaries of the
Brown Bubble,” but the Brown Bubble still seemed to have impermeable boundaries for
these students. Players had a similar hesitation that they would actually take steps to get
involved in issues off-campus.
Player 1: I want to get more involved—I don’t necessarily trust myself to do that,
as much as I’d want to. But yeah, I definitely think it sparks the interest in the
knowledge that [these organizations] exist.

Player 2: Not really be more involved [in things off-campus], but learn more
about them I think…I’d want to engage in activism in Providence in particular,
because even though I did the [Asian American community organizing]
fellowship over the summer, I haven’t continued that work here, so I definitely
would like to continue to be involved in something like that.
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Player 3: I definitely want to learn more about the history of the activism off
campus. I’ve been wanting to do a lot more stuff off campus, especially in terms
of art and youth arts, and then campus always pulls me back.
These game players had already self-identified as people interested and concerned with
social justice issues, so the game was a reminder that they cared about these issues—but
not a catalyst for further action.
While The Resisters did not mobilize the game players in large, tangible activist
ways, to answer the question How does interactive game play translate into real world
engagement in social issues?, we should consider shifts of perspective about activism and
the player’s own identities as precursors to real world engagement in social issues. In
short, expecting tangible results after a three-week game may have been overly
ambitious. Nicolas Fortugno and Eric Zimmerman (2005) warn about expectations for
social issue games:
One final word on this topic: keep expectations in check. The hype of educational
games often runs away with itself, resulting in unrealistic promises. A game can
teach about activism, but that doesn’t mean it also needs to be a generator of real-
world political activity. It’s difficult enough to conceive and execute a game on a
social issue; when such a game gets saddled with the responsibility of generating
letters to senators, planning a demonstration, and real-political organizing
(difficult activities to coordinate in and of themselves) the result can be a diluted
heap of nothing. To put this another way, you can learn about medicine from a
game, but don’t expect by playing the game to discover the cure for cancer.
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The players learning about and engaging with the physical sites of real world historical
activism ended up being more than a diluted heap of nothing. These results are not clear,
but the method of designing in detail creates a space to account for opaque answers.
Felipe related learning as a precursor to activism to making an egg custard.
Knowing that the game players did not dive in head first into local activism, he said:
Baby steps. [Involvement in activism] is like tempering eggs…you don't want to
add the hot liquid in to the egg all at once - it will curd. If you add a little bit every
time, slowly the temperature will rise in the eggs and it will not curd. And voila!
You have made your egg custard.
What he meant by the egg custard metaphor is that people engage in social issues a little
bit at a time. If we tried to do too much within The Resisters game, we could have
overwhelmed or made the players lose interest. Too much at one time would violate our
principle of Stealth Mode—playing a game that has an activist end goal without sucking
out the fun. He also positioned education as a step for real world engagement in social
issues. Felipe noted, “Education gives people the tools to tackle the real world, jobs,
encounter people, etc. It is essential to being a conscious human being who is aware of
the severe problems that still plague the world in the 21st century.”
In their game feedback, the game players identified themselves at different stages
in their own self-conception as it related to issues of race, organizing, and social justice.
Some game players could obviously see themselves and their experiences within the
game, but for others, the game’s narrative and issues required more translating. One
player’s reflections about the game placed her within the spectrum of people of color, but
outside the realm of experience discussed in the game. This player said:
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The game forced me to negatively reevaluate my identity. Because the game play
and narrative backbone revolved around the historical injustices and oppressed
people of Providence, the game was difficult to directly relate to. Instead, the
game forced me to examine why my personal upbringing, despite my status as a
person of color, was so alarmingly different, so alarmingly free of discrimination
and disempowerment. I mostly concluded that the geographical isolation and
camaraderie between immigrant field-workers contributed to a more leveled
socio-political landscape. This observation, spurred by the journey through the
constellation of resistance sites, led to a recursive kind of reflection, as a desire to
understand how these contexts produced such radically different results. I began
wondering about how this oppression spawned, and who had conceived of its
systematic reproduction. I wondered what historical currents swept certain people
into devalued bins,!while other cultural contexts could lead to immeasurable
ethnic heterogeneity. Thus, the experiential aspect of The Resisters, in its
unfamiliarity, forced me to engage with conditions I had taken for granted for
years. In this sense, I believe the game was very successful in an unexpected way
because it made me critically evaluate the silent systems of everyday domination.
This student shared how she felt outside the narrative of oppression that many other
people of color feel. But seeing activism and struggles of other people of color made her
want to know how racism is systemically enacted and kept in place. Critically relating her
own position to other struggles that she has not necessarily experienced touches upon
Lisa Lowe’s (1991) construction of multiplicity, that it
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Designat[es] the ways in which subjects located within social relations are
determined by several different axes of power, are multiply determined by the
contradictions of capitalism, patriarchy, and race relations, with… particular
contradictions surfacing in relation to the material conditions of a specific
historical moment (p. 67).
In her essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Making Asian American
Differences,” Lowe describes the formation of an Asian American identity as a political
organizing bloc. A “people of color” identity is similarly enacted to form a more
powerful unit for fighting again a similar oppressor. This player is describing her own
multiplicity and the ways she sees how axes of power have shielded her from certain
systems of oppression. She sees herself as a person of color and complicit in structural
racism unless she is more aware and critical of the advantages it provides her. In Felipe’s
analogy, critically assessing her own surrounding and privileges is the first bit of water
toward making an egg custard.
For other players, The Resisters highlighted organizing techniques of coalition
building. Coalition building requires an understanding of multiplicity and the ways that
certain identities are leveraged against each other to distract from their common
oppressor. For one game player who was active in organizing the protest against the New
York City Police Commissioner’s visit to Brown the previous year, the themes in The
Resisters made them think about the Black/Asian American student conflict around the
protest. They said,
Building coalition is something that is important and the game highlights, it’s like
you can’t do this alone, and that so many of the sites in the game were connected
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to each other, whether it was through [Christiana Carteaux Bannister and Edward
Bannister] or through the people, or the communities they were serving. It’s really
important to be able to build coalition, to build community and make sure you
have an expansive network.
This game player identifies as Black, and recalled feeling supported that Asian
Americans wanted to organize against a phenomenon that less people in their community
experienced. While The Resisters’ purpose was not to teach organizing skills to game
players, this player gleaned from the historical examples the importance of coalition
building and overlapping networks.
The Resisters’ online and offline structure drew attention to the importance of a
physical, real world connection when trying to participate in social issues for certain
game players. The website, Facebook page, and social media feeds felt like regular social
practices, while the activities in teams in the real world that went to physical sites of
activism drew importance to physical connection. The importance of connection was
found between players, but also how players could physically pinpoint a site where
people gathered in history. One player connected the difference between online activism
and physical space remarking, “Having physical spaces is important too, in order to foster
community… and provide physical space to provide for activism.” The importance of
physical space was especially evident for this game player who participates in online
communities.
[Participation in] asexual communities, it’s mostly online, which is cool, but
through that, I’ve seen that having physical spaces where you can actually talk
face-to-face is really important, and it can foster a certain type of activism that I
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don’t think you can see by just communicating online, or just communicating
virtually… being able to sit down and talk is really important.
In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community, Robert Putnam
(2000) laments the decline of social interactions in public spaces. The experiences of
these college students would dispute that the desire for connection in public space is
declining. The generation of college students who played The Resisters still craves
physical connections as a means of organizing.
Future Design Suggestions
Much of this dissertation is about documenting process, and it seemed useful to
share suggestions the players offered as contributions to iterative design. In the Critical
Play Method discussed earlier in this chapter, the last two steps are:
• Playtest with Diverse Audiences
• Verify Values, Revise Goals
After playtesting The Resisters with the student game players, I asked for their
suggestions to make it a better game. Their suggestions led me to verify the values of the
game, and to think about revisions for future iterations of The Resisters. The players
offered three overarching suggestions:
1. Turn The Resisters into a credit-bearing activity
2. Incorporate better team bonding
3. Enhance the experience of the game
In the remainder of this chapter, I’ll explain these player suggestions and their
relationship to revising the values of The Resisters and revisiting the goals of this project.
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1. Turn The Resisters into a Credit-Bearing Activity
Many of the game players remarked throughout play how much they would have
enjoyed The Resisters as part of a class. They creatively suggested ways for The Resisters
to fit into the framework of a course—from having the game count as an entire course to
playing it as an activity for analysis. The players especially recommended the experience
as a First Year Seminar, a type a course that was limited only to first-year students that
encouraged acclimating to new cultures of learning and classmates. The most interesting
suggestions were the ones where students would play The Resisters as a credit-bearing
activity, but wanted to see it executed differently than the structure of a traditional course.
One player said,
I feel like this game provides a really great basis for nontraditional learning. How
can we move really important learning outside a classroom setting where we’re
having a lecture or discussion and move it into something that’s more active
where we’re moving around? [In The Resisters,]we’re moving around town,
getting to know people in Providence, and we’re getting to know the history of
Providence. And I feel like that could be a really cool new design for how we do
learning.
This player’s suggestion for how to create a non-classroom mandatory experience would
be to expand The Resisters into a series of shorter activities (about one hour each) during
the length of a full semester and receiving credit for playing would depend on how many
of the activities each student completed. The grading structure would be a mandatory
pass/fail one, where if players participated and completed at least seventy percent or more
activities they would earn course credit. This concept of game play and learning without
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the classroom is a bold one, but if infused with activities that included completing
readings and writing reading responses (still traditional measurements of learning), could
exploratory game play replace class needing to exist in a classroom?
The conversations about The Resisters’ social justice message carried over to
some of the players thinking about how the constructions of the classroom may have been
set up in opposition to the ways they learn best. One player said:
We need to start getting out of classroom setting[s] because it’s very constraining
[to] how you learn and what learning means. I feel like we’ve constricted what
learning is and what education means into a way that’s not always the best for
everyone. I think doing more things like an interactive game where you’re
actually learning a lot of history of Providence—where I’ve never heard anyone
in my classrooms talk about [the material in the game]—can be really really
beneficial and a lot more meaningful in a lot of ways because you’re not just
reading something in a book, you’re actually going to see the place where it
existed.
Students are looking for interactive experiences that go beyond reading about topics in
books. It’s possible the skills of play and discovery can be academically rigorous, but
keeping them apart maintains the dominance of the traditional classroom and as Tracy
Fullerton says, “relegates games and play to the feel of a ‘rainy day’ activity, something
detached from normal, everyday learning” (2014, p. 131). The ideas of games as a fully
academic, but also, fully exploratory and fun seem paradoxical to each other.
Is the difficulty of making games work in classroom setting because games are
counter-intuitive to traditional classrooms? College classrooms exist with syllabi and all
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expectations delivered up front. The fun part about games is discovering what’s coming
up next, and discovery is a type of work involved in game play (McGonigal, 2011).
Games’ designs are purposefully inefficient (Fullerton, 2014), and require that players
explore and learn though problem solving by inefficient dead ends and do-overs. It’s not
that students are asking for their learning experiences to be efficient. Students are smart,
and they want to problem solve. Even when positioning The Resisters as a credit-bearing
learning experience, some of the players wanted more discovery work. One player said,
I think it would’ve made it a little more fun, to have a bit more discovery work,
since we had the exercise were we had to decode the addresses, but we also had
the [information] sheet where the addresses were printed out, so we didn’t have to
search out the addresses and the decoding part wasn’t as necessary.
This player wanted to do more work to get from problem to problem solved. Positive
evaluations reward efficiencies, and for traditional structures of school, rewarding
discovery is a foreign concept (Lee & Hammer, 2011). These are the reasons why
gamification in the classroom functions as points-based or badge-based systems; it makes
more sense within a traditional school structure to dole out merits based on linear
completion of tasks.
2. Incorporate Better Team Bonding
All of the players wished there was more time built into The Resisters to develop
more substantive team dynamics and build a sense of camaraderie. Some players wanted
team bonding because they enjoyed the element of spending time getting to know new
people, while the more competitive players wanted deeper team relationships so that less
involved teammates would feel guilty and obligated to fully commit to game activities—
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seeing teammates in the real world on campus and online through social media was a
compelling strategy. Players also reported positive feedback about the human element of
playing a game in the real world with real people.
Player 1: I did think [the hardcopy game packets] forced us to have to talk and get
to know each other better, but also forced us to read [the game packet] we had,
because it’s all we had…And I did appreciate having a physical group to go with,
I thought that was very useful.

Player 2: I really enjoyed the scavenger hunt and talking with the rest of my team
was really cool to get to know them too- because I didn’t know all of them.
In a world where we can do everything online, these college students desired a real,
human connection. Felipe’s design strategy of giving teams hardcopy packets instead
of a mobile app had the intended effect; players were together in the real world doing
the activities together. On the side that wanted more team activities as a way to know
more people, one player reported making better friends through being placed in teams
together. Another player said that she ran into another teammate in the dining hall and
they had lunch together for the first time and watched the latest videos that had been
released on The Resisters’ website.
Activities that increased communication between players and not solely
communication that connected players to the game was an added desire for a future
iteration of The Resisters. One player felt like the game was not as successful as it
could have been because of the loose connection between players. She said,
The game takes place in this team format, but I felt like it was hard to
communicate with other members of the team because I don’t think we
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established the team identity…But I think it would’ve had a better experience if I
got to know other members of my team, and it felt cohesive, and it also brings in
this competitive nature that would make people participate more.
This player was one of the ones who wanted more intense team competition, but her
sense of competition is anchored in full group participation—something that’s important
to civic activity. She continued her desire for team connection, saying,
I feel like it could almost be incorporated into one of the missions, I think the
reason why team building was important is because it also creates personal
investment, because then it feels like these people are counting on you and they
know who you are now, and they know your face and your name so I think it
would’ve helped people engage more.
This thoughtful assessment of game play is also at the root of how to involve students in
real world social issues off campus—one of the research questions I set out to answer.
Feeling that you’re needed in a movement is a key organizing function. Team building
has real benefits for life skills; teams that have a high level of comfort and
communication with each other are more innovative, make less mistakes, and work better
with other groups (Edery & Mollick, 2009).
The suggestion for how to increase communication between game players was to
have smaller teams and shorter activities for a longer period of time. The suggestion for
smaller teams would be to make coordinating and communicating easier:
It’s hard because other than [another teammate], I never really saw any other
people that were part of our team, so I think even if we couldn’t have played all
together, it would’ve been nice if we could’ve split up the game and played in
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smaller groups. But we couldn’t really, it was like us pulling all the weight and it
was hard. And I think it could’ve been really fun to like, do it, as a group, like a
real team and play all together, but I think it was just hard to reach people.
The desired outcome was to have all players with the same level of dedication, but in
smaller teams it’s easier to communicate—especially with people that they didn’t know.
As for shorter activities, we had designed the game to have very little activity during
weekdays because of coursework and other obligations—the players only needed to
watch a daily video and read the Twitter/Facebook/Instagram clues that unfolded parts of
the story. The weekend challenges were three hours long on Saturday afternoons,
required decoding the locations, and traveling to at least ten sites. Instead, the players
wanted the long Saturday challenge to be broken up in multiple parts that lasted no more
than an hour. They envisioned breaking up decoding the address puzzle for one activity,
and going to half as many locations per exploratory session would have made the game
more interactive and interesting for the players. More activities for less time would
facilitate more face-to-face communication, and completing smaller tasks would give
players an element of fulfilling game play: completing more satisfying work (McGonigal,
2011). In addition, shortening the long Saturday challenges into several small activities
would mean that students who missed one session would not miss out on one-third of the
game’s activities, and could boost player retention.
3. Enhance the Experience of the Game
The Resisters was designed with a low-intensity buy-in for the game players. In
order to play, it involved two parts: (1) watching videos and reading clues online that
were triplicated across social media platforms and (2) traveling to locations around
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Providence and taking selfies in teams. The players wanted more discovery work both
online and in the real world sites.
The two ways the players suggested making enhancing the online experience of The
Resisters was to disperse different clues across select platforms and make the website
more interactive. The players wanted to see different clues across Twitter, Instagram, and
Facebook—even if they didn’t visit each platform.
Player 1: A lot of my transmedia interests came from web series, because I spend
a lot of time thinking and watching web series, and like the idea of it being a very
immersive reality. [I’m interested in] these characters and as a way to tell a story,
or how it’s interesting because you can have one experience just watching videos,
or just doing one part of it, but if you want to get more into it [you could do it all].

Player 2: I think I didn’t really use the Twitter account even though I have one. I
think it wouldn’t be necessary to put everything or duplicate everything across all
platforms. I used Instagram for most images, and Facebook to look up clues and
links. And maybe that would add to the discovery work if they had to go to
different places for clues.
It didn’t matter to the players that they knew every detail of our intricate story. If there
was a storyline on Twitter that they were not checking, it did not seem like it would
detract from the experience of the game as each player experienced it. Instead of seeing
every detail of the story triplicated across the platforms as I feared the players were not
seeing all the information, the players wanted to see different things on each platform—
the way we had originally envisioned the design of The Resisters. The players also
wished the website did more than just display pictures, videos, and the social media
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feeds. They wanted to be able to see the archival materials in the same manner that
someone interacts with a video game environment. One player had an idea of how she
would like to see this interactive layout:
I’d probably make the information from the archive interactive in a different way,
so kinda make it something like, you know how at [the induction ceremony] we
had all the things laid out and we could walk around the room? If there was
something like a virtual room where the player could go through and look at all
this stuff that Gloria found. You know how like in Gone Home [an online game],
and this is probably really high level [coding] because I don’t even know how to
do this— that would be really cool if it could be like virtual room, not super
intensive, but they could go and pick something up.
This player reminded me that we can do more with archives than just display things. In
the same manner that we set out to take the archival materials from boxes in library
basements and put them online for public viewing, the public view of the archival
materials does not need to look like an online iteration of the way physical archives
function. This player thought exploring an online room would be more visually pleasing
than just seeing snapshots of the archival materials and that visitors would spend more
time with the materials if they were more engaging.
During the Selfie Scavenger Hunts, the players appreciated the team selfies as a
game activity, but wished there was more interaction with the physical sites. The players
found that the selfies constructed an environment where they had to think about
themselves spacially within each physical site. One player said, “I think taking selfies,
like having to take some kind of picture, makes you have to consider where you’re
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standing, in relation to the physical location.” But the players wanted the selfie to do
more than just serve as a photographic snapshot. One player suggested that their selfies
could require further analysis, saying, “It would be great if we had to reevaluate our
selfies to try and solve a hidden pattern or something—like letters or numbers
strategically placed near the site's entrances.” Other players craved the so what else?
element after taking the selfies. One player wanted the selfies and the real world locations
to be part of the game’s feedback system—that something within the physical
environment would point to the next location to visit. Another player wanted more
structure to the Selfie Scavenger Hunt than taking any kind of picture. She said,
We were walking [in Billy Taylor Park] and when we were climbing on the
equipment, [I thought] that there was something we’d have to find, at the location,
that we had to do. Because I think that may be personally motivating, like, “I have
a mission here!” I like being able to go where I want to go, but also, I think
sometimes, direction is nice and kind of comforting.
The general sentiment with the players was asking for more rules and more directions.
They also wanted there to be stronger repercussions for not achieving certain goals. For
example, one player said,
We also wanted to see consequences for not reaching a certain checkpoint, even if
that meant that we would be missing a few of the jigsaw pieces for the riddle, or
that we were given two hours instead of three. This would have made our actions
significant and would cause us to conspire between game days and come up with
better game plans. That kind of consequence would have made the experience
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hugely more rewarding and would have allowed us to revel and reflect on our
group's ability to achieve collective goals.
This suggestion is a reminder that players want to take risks and fail. As designers, we
were concerned that the players would lose interest if they felt like they were on a losing
team. Instead, the players wanted to see how more effort is rewarded and less effort has a
consequence.
The final suggestion to make the game more interactive was to involve
community organizations in a way that had students interacting with them face-to-face.
The game players were discussing how they’d like to get involved in things off campus,
but reaching outside the college campus bubble was difficult. The gap between thinking
about being involved and actually participating in real world movement building could
close some by involving the organizations at some of the sites. For example, one student
said,
[When] going to a place, like The Congdon St. Baptist Church, instead of just
going and taking a picture, you’d have to go in and get something from someone
who goes to that church, or works at that church. Which would definitely have to
be coordinated with open times … [but] kinda forcing that interaction with people
at the sites would be sorta cool.
The players wanted to do more than just go to the physical site and see it externally. They
wanted their selfies to be more involved and they wanted each site to require some kind
of engagement. The players’ feedback demonstrated that they wanted a more intensive
buy-in for game play, which lines up with pervasive game research that says that says
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game players want to do more work within game play, not less (McGonigal, 2011;
Montola, Sentros & Waern, 2009; Salen and Zimmerman; 2004).

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CHAPTER SIX: PARTICIPATORY POLITICS AND THE COLOR OF CIVIC
ENGAGEMENT

This concluding chapter departs from the previous chapters’ themes of design,
games, and play in order to delve more deeply into the relationships between universities
and their surrounding communities and to examine the color of contemporary civic
engagement. The work around designing and playing The Resisters was a vehicle for an
extended community project; to me, the research was less about a game as a final product
as it was about the process of game making and the relationships that formed while the
project was in development. I selected ethnography as a research method so that I could
holistically document the rich details of community-based research even if the game
ended up as a pile of nothing, to revisit the words of Nicolas Fortugno and Eric
Zimmerman. I analyze the invisible whiteness of civic engagement within universities
and offer pathways for faculty and students of color to shift this model. In the final
portion of this dissertation, I discuss researcher/participant relationships and offer a mini-
toolbox for scholars of color who engage in community-based work.
Researcher/Participant/Community Relationships
As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) says, “Defining community research is as
complex as defining community” (p. 127). Particularly for scholars of color, defining the
boundaries between participation in a community and the lines where research begins and
ends can be difficult. Another blurry concept is construction of “the field” as a scholarly
place of observation that is somewhere out there away from things that are familiar
(Clifford, 1997; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). For this research, I chose to return to Providence
as the place that I had spent the most time consecutively since I moved away from my
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parents’ house to go to college at seventeen. I maintained relationships with people and
organizations as well as created new ones over the span of a decade as a periodic visitor
to the city. This project disrupted fieldwork as “going out in search of difference”
(Clifford, 1997, p. 85) and instead I returned to something familiar to research and reflect
on community and participation. Continuing with the words of James Clifford, “staying
(or making) home can be a political act, a form of resistance” (p. 85). From the outset of
this project, the communities of Providence were my places of home and research. My
research participants were co-designers, and never subjects for analysis or informants.
Constructing The Resisters as an art installation or a humanities-based project creates
some distance from detached social science that often use statistics and numbers to
determine the significance of the work. In the edited volume Civic Dialogue, Arts, and
Culture: Findings from Animating Democracy, editors Pam Korza, Barbara Schaffer
Bacon, and Andrea Assaf describe how arts and humanities projects can shake up
structures of power. They write, “Art and humanities projects can unsettle traditional
power dynamics that privilege certain viewpoints, or ways of working in a community,
and can help equalize power in the dialogue experience” (2005, p. 108). The Resisters as
a project experimented with different ways of working in community; my observations of
community research were different from the opinions of the young people I was
conducting research with, and their experiences as private school/ public school/ high
school/ college students meant that we made sense of community differently. In this
section, I address the various configurations of researcher/participant relationships within
this research project and their significance.
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Game Play Sessions as a Conduit for Discussing Larger Societal Issues
Before any archival research or game design happened, I gathered the newly
recruited co-designers for a few game play sessions as extended icebreakers. We mostly
played videogames on a Playstation console while eating snacks
24
and having casual
conversation. The co-designers kept their design journals on hand with the instructions to
take notes about anything interesting they noticed within the games, but the real goal of
these early game play sessions were to get to know each other in a casual setting where
there was an activity happening. Talk-based activities centering on discussion or
introductions can be awkward and intense for young people, and they may refuse to open
up in these situations. Instead, I set up game play sessions as open-ended where our focus
was on the action onscreen and we conversed casually about whatever was on their
minds. Within this loose structure, I was able to learn about their histories and the ways
they made sense of their identities and surroundings. The game play sessions had similar
scheduling conflicts—it was impossible to get all the co-designers together at once so
whoever was available at the set time would show up.
In the early game play sessions, Jay emerged as the activity leader. He shared the
most about his take on each videogame, supplementing play with other memories from
his childhood. Jay recounted trying to play videogames and how the electricity brownouts
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!!!!!!Gathering around food was a standard practice within this research process.
Community-based researchers should provide snacks whenever possible to young people,
as it’s never certain that they’ve eaten during the day. Especially with free and reduced
lunch at school, there may be a stigma attached to accepting the free lunch and students
may forego the food as to not draw attention to themselves.
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in Haiti would disrupt play. He recalled multiple occurrences when a game CD got stuck
in a friend’s console when the power went out, and he would have to take the entire
console on a hunt to find power in order to get the CD out. Electricity brownouts also
meant he and his friends would have unexpected treats of ice cream or other frozen
sweets that would melt if they weren’t eaten as soon as the power went out. Jay, an
illustration major, also had commentary about inclusion of diverse characters within
various games. He appreciated seeing characters that were more than straight white men
in the games, but felt critical about illogical or out of place representations. For example,
he disliked overly sexualized women characters with flimsy armor. The lack of realism
when comparing the men’s armor and the women’s armor was a point of contention for
Jay; he frequently commented on the poor design of “lady armor” and wished it looked
more substantial for warriors in combat. Jay also talked about gay characters and the
importance of incorporating them into game worlds in organic ways, instead of including
stereotypical gay signposting and character conversations that seemed illogical for the
scenario but pointed to queerness. The conversations about diversity, representation, and
queerness flowed naturally because Jay led unstructured conversations during play. I
learned more about the ways the co-designers imagined themselves within a social
landscape because they shared information about themselves willingly.
The Resisters’ research project was the reason I was in contact with my co-
designers, but over time my relationships and conversations with the co-designers
involved topics and activities that weren’t part of The Resisters. The co-designers
contacted me multiple times a week, usually with questions and situations related to
school, money, or jobs. Their issues with school, money, and jobs spilled over into time
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that was originally set up to be The Resisters work time and at times I had to make the
decision to prioritize handling issues in their lives over the research project. As a
researcher interacting with young people, I had to be aware of the other issues that were
coming up in their lives and be prepared to handle issues that did not directly relate to
The Resisters. In the spring and early summer, most of the co-designers were looking for
summer work to make money. Felipe received a grant to work on The Resisters full-time
during the summer, but other co-designers were shuffling around trying to figure out how
to find work. In early May, I met with Jay at a coffee shop to think through his ideas of
how the game mechanics would work and he seemed distracted and fidgety. I asked him
what was going on, and he said he really needed to make a resume because he needed a
job for the summer but had never made a resume before. Instead of game planning that
afternoon, I showed Jay various templates for what resumes look like and what he should
include. Around the same time period, I was assisting Anthony with financial aid forms
as he was the first person in his family to go to college in the United States. The
boundaries between our research relationships and their real world issues blurred because
the co-designers looked to me as an educated adult to help with these obstacles. In
August, I reflected in my field notes about how much time I was spending with the co-
designers outside of “research” stating,
It feels more and more that this game is a means of mentoring [and] the
boundaries of the project are not where our relationship ends. I've helped with
summer jobs, recommendation letters, tax help, financial aid forms for college,
college applications, and interacted with these young people in ways that I
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wouldn't have if there hadn't been a project that we were working on. (Agloro
Fieldnotes, 8/15/14).
As a researcher doing work in a community, interactions with participants do not stop
when the research ends. But as a community-based researcher, isn’t that the point?
Community-based research is structured to be in fellowship with community, where
professional ties and experience are utilized to diffuse town/gown dynamics.
Working with young people within a community-based project is also meant to
extend networks of knowledge to benefit young people. In the case of The Resisters
research, part of doing research in the community of Providence was for the co-designers
to learn about the histories of their communities. Immersion in the culture and context of
communities and movements can support local youth civic engagement. Ellen Middaugh
(2012) states,
Youth need opportunities to see that they are not working in isolation when they
are engaged in civic and political work, to practice the social skills of deliberation
and leadership, and to think broadly and systemically about the issues they are
working to address (p. 21).
Particularly for a game whose theme was around people of color’s social movement
history, the co-designers were immersing themselves in hands-on work with local
archives, organizations, and institutions of higher education where they were creating
something with networks of support. The Resisters is a kind of civic work that created
something for the community to pass on as generational history.
Additionally, I specifically created a research design that included young people
of color as co-designers because research can seem intimidating and alienating for
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anyone not well acquainted with the rituals of academic research. Relationship building
with the co-designers gave them the opportunity to engage with a Ph.D. scholar who was
researching their communities who also looked like them. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999)
finds that “surviving undergraduate work is the first hurdle for potential research students
as the more systematic mentoring and training of researchers does not normally occur
until either graduate level or when employed as a researcher” (p. 135). I agree that
surviving undergraduate work is a hurdle, but I would add that the survival process
includes graduating from high school and maneuvering the systems to access college,
including applications and financial aid forms. If college life is not a familiar experience
to a student or their family, simple things like forms and checklists can be daunting. For
example, once Anthony was already accepted and heading to college, he was baffled by
the packing list that his college sent to prepare for a pre-orientation outdoor hiking trip.
For a low-income student, a thirty-plus item list was out of his price range and he did not
know which things were necessities and which were optional. The relationship we
formed through our research carried over to assisting Anthony to get ready for college.
Weeks before Anthony left for college, Jay and I staged for a “life skills day” for
Anthony where we covered financial literacy, took him to the Social Security Office for a
new card, shopped for computers, and helped him pick out cost-effective supplies for his
pre-orientation trip. Research, coupled with mentorship, is part of why Felipe thought
that The Resisters experience was “grand and transformational” and he planned to pursue
further research opportunities.
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Conversations About Race
Anthony and Jay were both emphatic about how race shouldn’t affect their lives,
believed that the best person should be chosen for a job, and truly desired colorblindness
as a feature and function in their world. In many ways these young Black men wanted the
world to be fair and just, but at nineteen and twenty they had already learned about how
racism constricted the ways that they were able to move around in the world. Jay had
firm beliefs about the raceless way the world should work, and hated the ways he felt
himself racialized in public. Jay experienced the world around him as an immigrant
outsider, living in a society that still felt strange to him. Jay immigrated to Providence
from Haiti with his family at fifteen, and carried with him the ways that constructions of
race are particular in the United States. Jay said that discrimination in Haiti is class-
based, and when he first came to the United States, he was shocked at how openly racist
people were toward him. Things that were said as sarcastic jokes in Haiti were said to
him with full seriousness in the Providence school system, and it was painful for him to
gain an understanding that many of the horrible things he had heard about U.S. racism
were real. In particular, anti-black sentiments and the ways they proliferated from not
only white people but also other Black people stood out to him. Jay recounted a story
about interacting in an online dating website with a dark-skinned Black woman who said
she would never date a Black man. He found the whole exchange ridiculous, but from his
perpetual immigrant outsider’s point of view, he felt sad about what he described as this
woman’s own self-hate.
Jay was only a year older than Anthony, but had assumed a big-brotherly
protection over him since they were in high school and afterschool arts programs
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together. At the time when I met Jay and Anthony, Jay was into his third year of art
school locally, and Anthony was still living at home and occasionally talking classes at
the local community college while thinking about applying to a four-year program. Jay
carried himself with an art school cool; he wore a leather jacket and motorcycle boots and
always had paintbrushes and drawing pencils tucked into his pockets. Anthony did not
have that same sense of confidence—he was shy, quiet, and had difficulties advocating
for himself. I was able to experience the ways that Jay looked out for Anthony, especially
the ways he thought that Black men needed to be careful when moving through the
world.
I would usually drive everyone home after a game play session, and after one
session, I told Anthony and Jay the plan for dropping them off at home based on their
proximity to the Trader Joe’s grocery store about twenty minutes away in Warwick—the
only one in Rhode Island and out of the way from the city of Providence. Both of them
wanted to come with me for the grocery store trip. Jay was moving out of the on-campus
dorms and into his own apartment for the first time and said he wanted to shadow me in
the store to learn how to food shop for himself. Anthony didn’t have easy access to a
grocery store beyond the discount Food 4 Less market and since we lived a few blocks
away from each other, he took advantage of the moment to come grocery shopping with a
guaranteed ride home. This trip to Trader Joe’s was one of the most formative moments
of the entire research process where I was able to understand the ways both of these
young men constructed their race and class identities.
Once we entered the store, Anthony asked me if they took EBT cards. I said yes,
but he doubted me because he thought the store looked too nice to take EBT cards and he
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felt nervous about shopping there. Jay instructed me to explain the rationale for each of
the things that went into my cart, which for me was a flustering exercise to have to
explain why I selected certain things. Neither of them liked that I would leave my cart
and go through the store picking things up and they would both want to retrieve the cart
and bring it along with us to go over to the next isle. While perusing up and down the
aisles, Anthony said out loud, "Seeing all this food makes me hungry. I haven't eaten
much all day." I told him to go pick out a sandwich and anything else he wanted and to
put it in my cart. Anthony retrieved a sandwich from the prepared foods section of the
store, and when he went to find Jay and I, he accidentally put his sandwich in someone
else's cart. Anthony eventually found us and realized his cart mix-up. He was about to go
back and retrieve it from the other cart when Jay grabbed Anthony’s arm as he was
walking away and emphatically said, "No man, leave it, just go get another one. You
don't want to be the scary Black guy taking things out of someone else's cart." Anthony
paused to absorb what Jay told him, and nodded slowly in agreement once he processed
Jay’s words.
It is unlikely that Jay, Anthony, and I would have spent extended time together if
it weren’t for the research project they had agreed to be part of. Within the structure of
the research project, I treated the co-designers as scholars and thinkers in their own right.
I asked that they bring their whole person to the research, and not their conception of
what a researcher is. As much as I could, I tried to shield them from interactions with
librarians or organization heads that might infantilize them or dismiss the magnitude of
the work they were doing because of their age. In my own research, I experienced being
called “sweetie” and “girl” in academic settings largely due to my physical presence as a
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young-looking woman of color. Those moments insulted me, and I wanted my co-
designer’s first experiences with research to be positive. To minimize negative
interactions, I would email or visit the special collections reading rooms ahead of time to
let them know I was bringing my “research assistant” into the space. But the moments
that I couldn’t structure, especially the ones in non-academic real world settings, were the
ones where I observed how my co-designers (and especially the men) made sense of how
the world existed for them. Jay’s ardent emotion that it was better to leave the sandwich
than to be racialized as a “scary Black guy” acknowledged that Jay felt that there were
actions which were deemed as socially unacceptable in certain settings because of his
race, gender, and tall stature.
Jay’s frequent Facebook messages with me would be a mix of research-related
questions and sharing his thoughts about the world as he experienced it. He would
message me questions like, “Is it me or is the internet trying to start a gender war?”
Below is a portion of a series of Facebook messages typical to an exchange with Jay:
Jay: Yeah the tall black male thing helps me relate to that
Pearl clencher is my new favorite word
Alex: What does that mean?
Jay: You know how some people get all tense when a black person walks by
Thinking they will get robbed
And what not
I think that word is perfect
It has the implied status and everything
Also I updated the google doc
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This series of messages is emblematic of my relationship with Jay and the other co-
designers. In this instance, Jay was expressing to me the way he constructed his world in
Facebook messages—the medium that felt the most comfortable to him and our most
regular method of communication. He was sharing his thoughts in the moment as they
related to his identity while also filling me in on the project-related material. The fluidity
between “research” related conversation and personal conversation was a regular
occurrence.
According to Ellen Middaugh (2012), youth civic engagement is best supported
when young people can contend with what justice and fairness look like in their worlds
and through authentic learning experiences. My conversations with the co-designers,
particularly the ones around race in the United States, were usually conversations where
the co-designers were trying to make sense of something they experienced. Middaugh
finds that “grappling with such issues not only provides youth with opportunities to
practice an important aspect of the work of civic engagement but helps them see the
importance of the work they are doing” (2012, p. 21). When the co-designers grappled
with the significance of social movement history through the process of creating The
Resisters, they were interacting with the outcomes of past political activity. The co-
designers were able to see what happened when artists and activists created spaces for
themselves because segregation and discrimination otherwise excluded them. One co-
designer noted how arts and activism were intertwined within the materials we
researched, and was able to link those historical findings to art’s place in contemporary
social movements. Within Middaugh’s terms, an authentic learning experience is one that
is “in service of [a] purposeful activity” (2012, p. 21). The co-designers weren’t learning
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about social movement history through a textbook or memorizing facts; through game
design they were applying the significance of historical events and contemporary issues
like immigration to a narrative game story and planning scavenger hunts. Their
conversations about their experience of race in the United States when coupled with the
historical elements of the game added an element of relating historical moments to real
occurrences in their lives.
Interweaving the research project where we worked with historical politics and
real world experience is part of what kept the co-designers engaged across the multiple
months the project took place. As evidenced by the college student game players’
priorities through their limited time, young people have many things they’re juggling at
one time, and the success of The Resisters’ project was insisting that the co-designers
bring their whole person to the project and whatever was going on in their lives in the
moment. Youth civic engagement flourishes when lessons about civics and politics
emerge in unexpected places (Shresthova, 2014). The co-designers experienced lessons
about politics in unexpected places like Facebook messages, in Trader Joe’s, or while
posing for Jay’s painting course assignments. An example of the unexpected link
between historical and present day was when Jay was searching for jobs we were also
researching Edward and Christiana Carteaux Bannister, the famous painter and Black hair
salon entrepreneur duo. Edward Bannister and some other artist colleagues formed the
Providence Art Club in 1880 as an outlet to show their art because other galleries were
reluctant to show his work because he was Black. Jay was trying to sort out the best
method to display his own art and was able to see that as an artist he may have to create
his own path if the traditional ones weren’t working out for him. At the same time, he
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learned that Edward Bannister got his start by cutting hair as a barber while painting on
the side. Edward Bannister’s start-up scenario let Jay see that his passion and his income
source may not always be in alignment, but it was worth continuing to pursue art even
though it wasn’t immediately lucrative for him.
My Relationship to the Community as a Researcher
Community-based research is not efficient, and the process is more important than
the end product. Community-based research is intentionally not efficient because it
accounts for a multiplicity of voices, and absorbing multiple ideas and opinions takes
time. Community-based research validates a process where communities define
themselves (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). Giving the space for the Providence youth
community to define itself meant that as the research director, I had to come to terms
with some level of uncertainty about the timeline of the project. There were times in the
project that I didn’t feel like enough tangible “research” was happening even though I
was in touch with the co-designers multiple times a week. During one week of archival
research, I noted in my fieldnotes that I had been in touch with four of the five designers,
but none of it was strictly research-related. During the course of that week, Felipe texted
me to let me know that he was hired for a job where I had provided a reference, Anthony
asked me to help him find places where his dad could get free tax assistance so he could
submit tax forms for his college financial aid, Yenzi Facebook messaged me about some
family issues, and Jamilah wanted me to help with her application to a summer program.
Despite my own stress about the configuration of my project at many moments
during the research, academics who participate as part of a community need to let
relationships develop organically. And those relationships take time. Real relationship
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building doesn’t happen on an academic timeline parsed between finals and summer
break. Community engagement doesn’t always fit within the parameters of evaluation
and value. Adam Banks (2011) describes clashes between university and community,
saying,
I hope to make a case here for genuine community engagement—not as
“programs” or initiatives but as the unofficial kinds of work that won’t always fit
into the official language of academic departments or grant makers or the
academy’s tenure and promotion reward structure and as a central part of the
work we choose to do (p. 66).
The clash here is between unofficial community work that doesn’t count toward
academic tenure and promotion yet is still central to the research and knowledge making
we choose to create. Community-based research in the way I constructed it was more
than what Banks called a “traditional one-way service model” (p. 67). The project did not
have neat beginning and end dates, as lasting community relationships will continue after
this dissertation is submitted.
My role through this research process straddled between the prestige of the
university and the cultural competence and comfort of being a contributing member of
the Providence arts community. I was in a privileged position to have access to the power
of a university where I was in classrooms and creating programming that could reach
beyond the gilded gates of College Hill. At the same time, I spent afternoons as an artist
mentor in a youth arts organization. I would code switch my language to explain the
value of the university to public high school students who were struggling to find value in
their educations. In the moments where I felt inspired by the aesthetic ingenuity of young
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people who were making sense of their lives through art, I knew I had to carry the fire
back to the university and take a seat at that table, no matter how tiny, rickety, and
uncomfortable that seat was. Former New Urban Arts Executive Director Elia Gurna
called the work of moving between these worlds as a unique position of working in
“Muggle relations.” We have to continue to vouch for the value of the communities that
surround universities and sustain relationships that are more than perfunctory lip service
tucked away in an under-funded center.
Civic Engagement in Universities
In the previous sections, I discussed relationships between researchers and
community, where “community” stood in for groups of people outside of the university.
The university itself is also a community with its own overlapping networks and rules of
engagement. One of those community networks within the university are the individuals
and centers that work toward “community engagement” with an outward focus beyond
the boundaries of the university. The scholars affiliated with civic engagement look much
like the composition of university faculty as a whole. Academics across all disciplines of
the university are mainly white and middle class, and the field of civic engagement
equally reflects this trend. What do scholars of color committed to community
engagement offer that can shift the field away from its current incarnation? In the
following sections, I describe roles of whiteness and people of color within civic
engagement in the university, and how continuing to diversify this field is crucial.
Whiteness in the University
Academics of color on college campuses have an absence of presence, to use
Native American scholar Gerald Vizenor’s phrase. Angela Harris and Carmen G.
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González (2012) find that the demographics and “the culture of academia is distinctly
white, heterosexual, and middle and upper-middle-class. Those who differ from this norm
find themselves, to a greater or lesser degree, ‘presumed incompetent’ by students,
colleagues, and administrators” (p. 3). Eight percent of full-time faculty members in the
United States are of African American or Latino/a origin and the majority of black
teaching faculty have positions in historically black colleges and universities, two-year
community colleges, and second- and third-tier public universities where teaching
demands are high and resources for research are minimal (Marable, 2002; Moffitt, Harris,
& Forbes Berthoud, 2012). Women of color are overrepresented in less prestigious
institutions, including community college (Jayakumar, Howard, Allen, & Han, 2009). In
2007, women of color held only 7.5 percent of full-time faculty positions and that
percentage declined as academic rank increased (Harris & González, 2012). A 2001 study
found that only 3.6 percent of all faculty members were black (Marable, 2003). George
Sanchez’s (2004) discussion of the University of Southern California’s faculty reflects
similar findings. In a total faculty of 2,900, there were only thirty-five African American
and forty Latina/o faculty members on the entire campus. These numbers reflect how the
lack of diversity for academics within the field civic engagement is not unusual when
compared to the rest of the university.
The above numbers describe the demographics of the faculty, and the culture and
practice of research functions with an invisible whiteness as well. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
and Tukufu Zuberi (2008) describe the culture and practice of research where “white
logic and white methods work in practice and how they blind (or severely limit) many
social scientists from truly appreciating the significance of race” (p.4). Bonilla-Silva and
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Zuberi demonstrated how the founder of statistical analysis also created a theory of white
supremacy, where statistical analysis explained racial inferiority. The authors outline how
research is structured to keep racial order in place and that white logic “assumes a
historical posture that grants eternal objectivity to the views of elite whites and condemns
the view of non-whites to perpetual subjectivity” (2008, p. 17). The race of the researcher
is treated as neutral, as if all bodies are the same in every setting. The researcher is a
variable and a factor for affecting the results as well as interpreting the data of the
respondents. Jill Morawski (1997) analyzed over one hundred studies that focused on
race over a span of seventy-five years and found that ninety percent of those studies
omitted the race of the researcher. Race is an important characteristic that influences how
individuals experience and perceive social phenomena (Goar, 2008), yet race within
research is seen as irrelevant.
Whiteness in the university, including white methods and white logic, is utilized
by all people—both white people and people of color—to uphold the racial hierarchy in
the university. As George Lipsitz (1998) says, “White supremacy is an equal opportunity
employer” (p. viii). Academics of color can be just as complicit in upholding structures of
whiteness if we do not problematize and work to dismantle these systems of oppression.
Education scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings (2000) urges that our inequalities run deeper
than representation. She states,
The issue is not merely to “color” the scholarship. It is to challenge the
hegemonic structures (and symbols) that keep injustice and inequity in place. The
work is not about dismissing the work of European-American scholars. Rather, it
is about defining the limits of such scholarship (p. 271).
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If race and lived experience influence how we perceive social phenomena, then research
that investigates communities of color from investigators who do not identify with that
community are limited. This is said not to essentialize race or the lived experiences of
people of color; instead I bring attention to this so that research can reflect a spectrum of
full-color conversations.
It is possible to be a white anti-racist scholar, and it is a much-desired trait within
the field of civic engagement. An acknowledgement of privilege is missing from much
academic civic engagement writing. Cynthia Kaufman said, “Anyone interested in
liberation needs to have an idea of what he or she wants to be liberated from” (2003, p.
19). We need not shy away from conversations about privilege, because our silence
around the topic gives it more power. Acknowledging privilege is different from being
forced to feel guilty about it. As Ruth Gilmore said, “Scholar-activism always begins
with the politics of recognition” (2005, p. 178). As practitioners of community-based
research, we can be so focused on the marginalized status of the communities we work
with, while forgetting how our own personal privilege affects relationships with our
colleagues and our community partners. Overlapping levels of privilege happen within
civic engagement work, especially around race and the university. Academics of color do
not have the same access and privilege as white academics, and this fact can bring
feelings of guilt to white faculty members. Cynthia Kaufman (2003) describes the hurdles
that white guilt creates:
Whites often feel that when they look honestly at the history… their only
option is to feel guilty, and since they don’t want to feel guilt and don’t
believe themselves to have done anything wrong, their only option is to
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avoid discussions of race. And when racial discussions are forced upon
them, they are likely to feel all sorts of confusion and discomfort. In
addition to feelings of guilt, and resentment at experiencing that guilt. (p.
135).
Encouraging white faculty members to embrace anti-racist positions takes effort
to acknowledge their own privileged positions while also not reproducing the
systems of oppression designed to benefit them.
Researchers of Color in Civic Engagement
If the perception is that the contemporary environments where university civic
engagement takes places is in communities of color, why aren’t the sparse numbers of
faculty of color found participating within this field? Their vulnerable position within the
university as extreme minorities who are already battling presumed incompetence means
their actions are already under scrutiny. Faculty of color risk critique for not pouring all
their time into pursuing “serious” scholarship and try to camouflage their community
relationships. George Sanchez (2004) calls the precarious position of faculty of color a
third culture, where they are “pulled between the commitments to communities of color
almost all bring with them to the academy and the departmental culture which tells them
either directly or most indirectly to abandon those ties or risk professional suicide” (p.
23). In an academic culture where civic engagement work is often not recognized by
tenure reward systems, and faculty of color already struggle in the tenure process, official
involvement in civic engagement at the university level can look like professional
suicide. I want to stress that the absence of presence of academics of color within official
university-sanctioned civic engagement projects does not mean these academics have
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abandoned their community ties altogether; rather, the community work many academics
of color participate in goes undetected (and sometimes concealed) within a university
system that already questions their scholarly legitimacy.
The difficulties academics of color have navigating this third culture leave their
white, middle class peers largely responsible for conversations about diversity and
inclusion within the organized field of civic engagement. Conversations include
recognitions of difference, but taught from the same white, middle class perspective. bell
hooks considers the inclusion of difference into the discussion a step forward, yet the
inclusion of difference “does not seem to coincide with any significant increase in black
or other nonwhite voices joining the discussion” (1994, p. 10). José Muñoz describes how
artists of color within queer studies receive a contained reading that does not address the
questions of race the artists interrogate. Muñoz declares: “The powerful queer feminist
theorist/activists that are most cited—Lorde, Barbara Smith, Anzaldúa, and Moraga,
among others—are barely ever critically engaged and instead are, like disco divas …
merely adored from a distance” (1999, p. 11). The lack of teaching perspective about
diversity and difference is particularly alienating for students of color and may also
partially explain the low numbers of students of color who participate in university-
sponsored civic engagement projects. Students of color can be subjected to being singled
out as the authority on matters of “the community” regardless of their proximities to these
neighborhoods, or obligated to listen to their cultures and communities described in
fetishized ways by fellow students or even their professors.
If civic engagement is truly about engaging the community in a partnership
model with universities, the representation of the university in its outreach matters. In my
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experience, the teens of color at the afterschool art studio considered the prestigious
private colleges in Providence like Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design as
“white schools” and wrote them off as inaccessible because they rarely saw people of
color from those scholarly communities interact with them. When young people have
role models of the same race, they think more about the possibilities of their futures and
attain a higher number of academic and personal achievement-related goals than when
matched a role model that isn’t the same race (Zirkel, 2002). If young people of color do
not see people who look like them as representatives of the university, the implied
message is: this will never be you. Cynthia Lin et al. (2009) reflect on the current climate
of civic engagement, particularly service learning, and make these observations:
Diversity is probably the thorniest issue facing service learning in higher
education today. If the institutional culture and structure is so inadequate
for supporting diversity among faculty and students, and the service
learning practice is so driven by the charity model, how could it possibly
provide effective service learning to diverse communities? (p. 118).
These questions are significant for interrogating the uneven race and class structures
within formalized civic engagement.
Successful scholar-practitioners of color who engage in community-oriented work
must be double qualified, much like how W.E.B Du Bois (1903) spoke of double
consciousness. They must have first survived the intellectual and emotional hurdles of a
degree-granting institution to be sanctioned as researcher; and second, they must
understand the cultural standards endorsed by the community and be recognized as
sincere. Scholars of color who participate in community are still seen as “the outsider
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within” (Collins, 1986) since a research agenda from a university may still create
suspicion within a community.
Despite the pressure for scholars of color to maintain an “objective detachment”
(Yu, 2002) from their communities, community connection and conducting research to
benefit our communities is something sustaining that keeps many scholars of color able
to continue their research. Beth A. Boyd (2012) describes how her community work was
frowned upon but also critical to continuing her work at the university while she was one
of few faculty members of color on campus. This is an excerpt of her experience:
As the only ethnic minority faculty member of my department and one of only a
handful on campus, it was important to connect to other Native people and create
a sense of community for myself and my family. Within the first year, I got
involved with the Indian Education Parent Committee of the K– 12 public school
system. By the end of the next year, I was the president of this group. My
supervisor warned me that these activities would be a dangerous drain on my time
and not be heavily weighted for promotion and tenure. She expressed surprise that
I had so quickly become involved in the Native American community and
cautioned that it would not be a good use of my time. However, it was very
isolating to have my ethnic minority status be so prominent and then be the only
one in my program and department, and one of very few on campus and in the
community. It took a great deal of energy, and being involved in my community
was actually the lifeblood that sustained me in my professional life. To suggest
that I give that up felt even more isolating, but even this was often difficult to
explain to my colleagues (p. 279).
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Scholars of color who come to the academy in opposition to being a bodiless mind should
at minimum not be discouraged to remain in their bodies. By this, I mean that scholars of
color who choose to engage community with their research should be able to bring their
full selves to this work, including their commitments to the “geographically close but
socially distant” (Sanchez, 2004) communities of color. Scholars of color at universities
are counted in diversity pie charts, prominently featured in brochures and on university
websites, and then asked to leave behind any trace of their ethnicity and community
beyond the color of their skin.
Conclusions
Tools for the Toolbox
In this final section, I write to other scholars of color invested in community-
based work, and I offer a mini-toolbox with instruments for how to continue their work.
These tools offer a way to, in the words of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2004), be in
the university but not of the university. It is important to acknowledge the challenges and
difficulties of being scholars of color in the academy who choose to work within
communities. Earlier in this dissertation I wrote about my decision to conduct research
from an asset-based rather than a deficiency model, and continuing to do research from
an asset-based perspective requires that we believe that we can create change through this
work. Chicana feminist writers Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (1983) address how
we need to be critical of our field and of our work, but identifying the problems with no
tools or next steps to disrupt these systems can leave us further in despair. Cherríe
Moraga says, “To assess the damage is a dangerous act,” and Gloria Anzaldúa continues
saying, “To stop there is even more dangerous.” The earlier sections of this chapter
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describe the deficiencies that whiteness in the field of civic engagement leave. To stop
there would be an incomplete story. The Resisters’ logo that Jay created was a serpent in
a circular shape biting off its tail to break repeating cycles oppression. As academics fully
involved in a system with issues, the tools I offer are my attempt to bite off the tail.
Keep Expectations in Check
When embarking on critical social justice research, a question to keep in mind is:
Critical for whom? Research has an agenda, and as scholars we must ask ourselves where
the focal point of the research lies and be real with ourselves about the end goal. It’s okay
if the research needs to meet some kind of benchmark to satisfy a funder’s goal or
scholarly output that can be translated into academic evaluation of productivity. Without
grant funding or academic positions as graduate or faculty researchers, we would most
likely not be able to engage in these projects at all. Be prepared to jump through
institutional hoops to keep the lights on and snacks on the table. Also keep in check the
expectations of liberating life change for your participants and be flexible in knowing that
the project’s trajectory may vary from the research plan and the end results may not look
like you expected them to. Understand that portions of the project may be partitioned into
separate sections that must be completed for “research” and certain sections that will be
tailored to “community.” Adam Banks (2011) troubles constructing research that is
entirely community-based. Banks suggests that it is “impossible to develop a successful
model of scholarship that is genuinely community-based” and argues that
A search for “success” in one’s community work or for successful models is a
fruitless task that should be avoided. Rather than searching for what works or will
work or will be rewarded by university structures, or creating demonstrable or
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measureable success according to some matrix or set of desired outcomes or so-
called best practices, or pursuing that one profound argument, that compelling
statement that people want to adopt or debate, one should think about how he or
she can create the best possible mix (p. 36).
Banks’ suggestion to create a mix allows for some days to look more measurement-
oriented and some days to be spent “deep hanging out” as a member of the community
not in research director mode. If you don’t have a desire to spend time in community with
this group of people unrelated to a research project, you probably should not be doing
research with—or more likely on—this group.
Other expectations to keep in check are the discrepancies that academic structures
have with organizations and individuals who are not on an academic calendar. Academic
structures like semester-long time frames and financial resource allocation are not the
same structures in the non-academic world. Nonprofits and community-based
organizations have their own crunch periods and busy times that do not revolve around
midterms and finals. When working with high school students, their midterm and final
periods may be at different times than university finals. In nonprofits and other
community-based organizations, is likely that there are no such things as winter break,
summer break, or other periods of time that academics rely upon to complete their
research.
Openly explaining how university funding works may be important to the health
of your relationships with your participants. Be overly thorough to explain that money is
often allocated to certain expenses and cannot be used for other purposes. Here is an
example: I once worked with a youth media organization and we applied to attend a
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critical participatory action research institute together. When we were accepted, my
private university agreed to pay the tuition and travel fees associated with attending the
institute. The financial aid package offered to the organization from the institute was only
a $200 discount on the institute tuition, so the cost of attending the institute was still too
steep. The youth media organization director could not understand how all of my
expenses could be covered, yet I could not come up with money to cover the cost for an
organization representative to attend. Our relationship was strained because of the
financial barrier of how university funding could or could not be used. University and
grant funding is a mysterious process to those outside of our bureaucratic systems.
Thoroughly explaining how and why money is allocated to things is a step toward
demystifying university processes and allows researchers to build from a more level
ground. For The Resisters, I received a grant for the game design phase and outlined
where the money was being allocated with the co-designers. While I know a lot of these
figures were uninteresting and did not make a difference in their everyday lives, I wanted
these young people to know how grant budgets work and be transparent with how much
money we had and where the money was going.
Know Your Audience and Remind Yourself Why You Do This Work
When writing up your research, have a clear picture of who the intended audience
for this work is. At certain moments it may be a discipline-specific journal or it might be
the community you are working with. These audiences should be attended to with
different attention and the writing should reflect an understanding of the specific written
register. As a scholar, being self-reflexive and visible in the work is also important.
Edward Said (1983) asks the following questions: Who writes? For whom is the writing
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being done? In what circumstances? These questions summarize prime positioning for
disseminating community-based work.
There is value in writing to community. Particularly for scholars of color, writing
for our communities can be just as powerful and necessary as a peer-reviewed journal
article. Cherríe Moraga (1983) laments how infrequently writing from writers of color
reach our own communities saying, “Our writings seldom directly reach the people we
grew up with. Sometimes knowing this makes you feel like you're dumping your words
into a deep, dark hole. But we continue to write.” It’s true that very little academic
research—including from scholars of color and non-scholars of color—reaches the
people we grew up with, regardless of background. The difference is the commitments to
community most scholars of color bring with them to academic positions are not valued
and are not in alignment with the obligations of these positions, as George Sanchez has
illustrated. Additionally, young people of color infrequently have the chance to read
culturally relevant writing and research, and many are pushed out of school and
university systems before they have the chance to study culturally relevant materials.
As scholars of color, we must continue to stand in the front of classrooms and
conduct culturally relevant research to disrupt young people’s imagined model of what a
college professor or a Ph.D. looks like. Stereotypical images of teachers and professors in
the media and popular culture portray a certain archetype of what type of person is in the
classroom (Weber & Mitchell, 1995), but the imagined standard of white teacher is quite
close to reality. Teachers of color at the elementary and high school level make up only
seventeen percent of all teachers across the United States (Boser, 2014), and the
percentages mentioned earlier in this chapter show that college professors of color are
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less than half of that number. Students of color have better academic performance when
they are taught by instructors of color (Ingersoll & May, 2011) and we know we need
more teachers and professors of color. How can we patch our leaky pipeline to get more
scholars of color in universities? Knowing that community relationships can be a
sustaining force for the scholars of color, how can we continue to engage in community-
based work?
Continue to Name and Examine the Effects of White Supremacy
As academics, the research gaze is to the outside, and almost never on ourselves.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) reminds us that colonialism, racism, and imperialism are not
ills only found outside university gates. As scholars of color who have agreed to become
part of these academic systems, we too are complicit in upholding white supremacy in
our work inside and outside the university unless we are actively questioning processes
and taking part in dismantling pre-existing systems of oppression. In an interview with
Paula M. L. Moya, Junot Díaz asks us examine within ourselves how we uphold white
supremacy saying,
How can you change something if you won’t even acknowledge its existence, or
if you downplay its significance? White supremacy is the great silence of our
world, and in it is embedded much of what ails us as a planet. The silence around
white supremacy is like the silence around Sauron in The Lord of the Rings or the
Voldemort name, which must never be uttered in the Harry Potter novels. And yet
here’s the rub: If a critique of white supremacy doesn’t first flow through you,
doesn’t first implicate you, then you have missed the mark; you have, in fact,
almost guaranteed its survival and reproduction. There’s that old saying: The
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devil’s greatest trick is that he convinced people that he doesn’t exist. Well, white
supremacy’s greatest trick is that it has convinced people that, if it exists at all, it
exists always in other people, never in us (Moya, 2012).
Díaz finds that we must name and examine the effects of white supremacy in our
research, teaching, and community work in order to dismantle its hold. Where do our
research methodologies hold implicit whiteness? What requirements of grants or funders
uphold white supremacy? How do our pedagogical and epistemological practices utilize
white supremacy? Once we identify the places where white supremacy exists in our
research and teaching, we can find ways to transform our practices.
Radical Patience
This dissertation described situations where things did not go as planned,
disruptions happened that altered the trajectory of this research, and other unanticipated
difficulties navigating bureaucratic systems. Radical patience is what kept The Resisters
project afloat. Radical patience is “the ability to remain engaged in the messy,
unpredictable process of public participation without burning out or being cynical”
(Mathieu, 2005, p. 147). The model of radical patience encourages us to acknowledge
how things that happen along the community-based research process can suck and be
horribly disillusioning. Some days are better than others. Radial patience helps
community-engaged practitioners to have long-range vision to attempt to see past short-
term setbacks.
Within The Resisters project, I needed radical patience to manage my
expectations of the co-designers and game players, institutions, and community
organizations. One example of a moment when radical patience was critical was when we
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needed to re-imagine a major portion of a real world challenge just weeks away from the
game’s launch. In the original plan of the game, the final puzzle challenge would lead the
game players to the Broad Street Synagogue, an abandoned synagogue in what is now a
primarily Black and Latina/o South Providence neighborhood. A group of community
organizers, a rabbi, a nun, artists, and a few city councilmen had been organizing for
years to turn the abandoned synagogue into useful space for the neighborhood to match
their needs. The plan for The Resisters’ final challenge was to create Day of the Dead-
style altars to represent the various historical figures the game players had encountered
during the game. These altars would complement an art installation in the main space
created by artist Alice Mizrachi. A few weeks before the game’s launch, a real estate
developer bought the Broad Street Synagogue and the organizers had to hand over their
keys to the building. We could no longer use the space for our final challenge and we
were left scrambling trying to figure out how to salvage the challenge. This was a tough
moment for me, because I needed to find a solution for the final challenge and manage
the emotions of the co-designers around losing potentially the coolest feature of the
game. Our last-minute solution brought the final induction challenge to my tiny office in
the basement of the building on the Brown campus. We had much less of a natural
environment wow factor than the crumbling synagogue, so we did our best and covered
the bookshelves, file cabinets, and walls with black fabric and strings of white lights to
transform a room with institutional office furniture into a game spectacle. In the end,
Felipe remarked that the tiny office filled with homemade paper flowers and decorated
skulls ended up offering a much more cozy feel and the space felt full with only a few
people in it at a time. Radical patience helped me to continue planning and keep my co-
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designers out of despair. The end result was not as grand as our imagined spooky,
crumbling synagogue, but it still worked.
Paula Mathieu conceptualizes radical patience as a mechanism for working in
community, but I also see this concept’s potential for being a person of color at a
university. Scholars of color must have radical patience to navigate institutionalized
racism, confrontations of scholarly legitimacy, and the extra, unacknowledged demands
that come with being a person of color in mostly white university settings.
Educated Hope
Hope within a civic engagement framework is what “mediates between the
insufficient present and an imagined but better future” (Mathieu, 2005, p. 19). As
scholars, educated hope is the foundation of social change research, because educated
hope is the balance between passion and reason (Mathieu, 2005). For scholars of color,
educated hope is a reflexive position where we move between the community ties we
already have and the university structures we’ve become part of. Educated hope is a
sense of knowing where to push to instill change, and where to not exhaust ourselves.
Tricia Rose offers another method of hope, what she calls ““represent’ what you
want, not just what is” (2008, p. 268). An important addition to the first definition of
hope is acknowledging how scary it can be to actually admit what we want. Rose
describes this next level of hope as:
Serious reflecting on the question of what we want is a risky venture because it
means displaying a sense of hope and longing. If we want affordable housing and
good schools and safe streets, then we have to work toward getting them. Even
when anger drives some of this wanting, there is a vulnerability in it. It expresses
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a wish that can be denied, mocked and rejected—especially in a get-mine-at-all-
costs attitude. Hoping, such an attitude suggests, is for suckers. Given the
multigenerational betrayal of African-Americans’ many demands for equality and
justice, it shouldn’t be surprising that disengagement from hope becomes a
necessary form of self-protection. Cynicism takes root where hope has begun to
wane. The hustler is the quintessential cynic (2008, p. 269).
This second level of hope asks scholars of color to take down our protective armor and be
ambitious about futures for our communities and ourselves. Within the intergenerational
consciousness of our communities, a professorial position is our elder’s imagined better
future. These locations in cultural memory are why Rose’s statement “‘represent’ what
you want, and not just what is” is a grander dream than educated hope, because the
rationalization of the latter would say that to be reasonable, scholars of color have already
achieved enough.
The most resounding tactic of hope I encountered through this research is love.
This concept of love manifests itself in multiple ways: love for ourselves, our
communities, and even those who oppress us. bell hooks (1994) discusses how as
academics we need to care for ourselves as whole people, and the separation of our
public, scholarly lives and our private lives creates an unhealthy schism within us. That
separation is another way of talking about Sanchez’s third culture, where scholarly lives
become our public life, and our community ties shift to something that is private and
unseen in university settings. If our culture and community ties are our souls, then we
must work to make sure that as intellectuals our minds and our souls are healthy. Another
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form of love in doing community work is remembering to document our joy. bell hooks
says,
Working within community, whether it be sharing a project with another person,
or with a larger group, we are able to experience joy in struggle. That joy needs to
be documented. For if we only focus on the pain, the difficulties which are surely
real in any process of transformation, we only show a partial picture (1994, p.
296).
hooks’ positioning is a reminder that focusing only on the pain of struggle does not make
us whole people. There is struggle and disappointment in civic engagement work, both
within the neighborhoods and the institutions where we work. We must not let the
struggle and pain consume us.
Conclusion
Beretta Smith-Shomade (2014) asked the question, “How can we be activists who
act in academic settings?” This question is something that has deeply affected the
outcome of this research and the future trajectory of my academic career. How do we
continue to fight for the things that matter to us within the structures of our chosen
profession? A way to understand this question is to acknowledge the particular strengths
a seat at the academic table (no matter how small) can hold. We are knowledge creators,
educators, and policy-influencers. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) says that we “rewrite and
reright our position in history” (p. 28). Intellectual and creative practices like The
Resisters are survival technologies—public expressions of music, dance, storytelling, and
other forms of making that create “a forum for existential affirmation… against the
dominant society’s attempts to eviscerate one’s individuality and cultural heritage”
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(Banks, 2011, p. 18). Survival technologies do not require new media—in its basic form,
a technology is a tool that aids someone to complete a certain process. The “new” new
media is constantly shifting if we look at it from a historical trajectory, recalling Dennis
Baron’s (2000) assertion that technology has shifted from pencils to pixels.
My dissertation highlights intersections between interactive media and survival
technologies. This research has worked to expand thinking around what interactive media
means in our contemporary technologically saturated and increasingly wireless world.
Interactive media can mean that both digital and non-digital media are utilized for groups
of people to interact with each other. Interactive media is more than an individual having
a solo experience with digital technology. The Resisters utilized technologies ranging
from physical puzzle pieces to online videos in order to remember and reinvent traditions
of interactivity and inquiry. It was an act of public engagement that involved interactivity
among people, interaction with previous and contemporary built environments, and
interaction with the historic memory of space and place.
The written portion of this dissertation opened with the final words of Cherríe
Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s introduction to This Bridge Called My Back: “The
revolution begins at home.” Trying to imagine how the day-to-day practices of
community-engaged work are revolutionary can feel overly heavy and loaded at times.
Instead of feeling encumbered and stuck by imagining revolution, I would rather envision
revolutionaries as Grace Lee Boggs (2012) does: solutionaries who are solving the
practical problems of everyday life. The Resisters was a playful solution for teaching and
learning the lasting importance of the histories of people of color. It is not and should not
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be the last word in Providence’s local social movement history, because those histories
still remain to be written.

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246
APPENDIX A: LIST OF CHARACTERS’ NAMES

Each character in The Resisters was named in honor of scholars, artists, and
activists that inspire us.
Gloria: named after Gloria Anzaldúa
Gloria's Mama/Angela/Graciela Flores: named after Angela Davis and Grace Lee
Boggs
Gloria's Dad/Octavio/Ricardo Flores: named after Octavia Butler and Ricardo Flores
Magón
Lucinda Carteaux: named after Lucy Parsons and Christiana Carteaux Bannister
Yuri: named after Yuri Kochiyama
Nat: named after Nat Turner
Cousin Cornel: named after Sergeant Cornel Young, Jr.

247
APPENDIX B: GAME PACKETS

Your Mission:
Selfie Scavenger Hunt

The rules:
• Go to the locations on Gloria’s sheet of
addresses.
• Take a selfie showing each location holding
your team color in the photo.
• Upload the selfie on Instagram with the
hashtag: #TheResisters

Scoring:
• Each person on your team in the selfie gets 1
point per photo (1 person = 1 point, 2 people =
2 points, etc)
• Each person from another team in your selfie
gets 2 points per person.
• 1 photo per location per team for points.

Instagram selfies are eligible for points between
1 PM – 4 PM. At 4 PM the challenge closes!

Tweet at us (@TheResisters) or post on the Facebook
page if you have questions while in play. We’ll
respond!

248
24
Meeting
Street

The Old Brick Schoolhouse

Children living in Rhode Island prior to the era of public schooling received their education
by means of home schooling, private schools, or some sort of special circumstance. This access to
education, however, was for the privilege few. By the mid-18
th
century, prominent members of
Providence had organized to establish a public school system to harvest young minds for the future.
Reverend James Manning (co-founder of “Rhode Island College”, now Brown University) was
among the leaders of this social movement. This two-story, timber-framed brick schoolhouse,
completed in 1769, was the first site of public education in the community. The first floor was used
for public education while proprietors of the property used the second floor as a private school.
The Old Brick Schoolhouse served its members in many different educational endeavors.
During the early half of the 19
th
century, the Schoolhouse was used as a primary location for the
schooling of Black children in the town. It was then named the Meeting Street Grammar School,
and had roughly one hundred pupils enrolled. The building has served multiple purposes since then
– such as becoming the first fresh air school for tubercular children in America.

http://www.ppsri.org/documents/brick-school-house-history-report-for-web-pdf.pdf
School
Committee
of
the
City
of
Providence,
Report
of
the
School
Committee
for
the
Year
1899-‐1900
(Providence:

Snow
&
Farnum,
1901),
131.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2294/1774867022_91e12ad8fe_z.jpg?zz=1

249
Meeting
&
Congdon
Streets

The First African-American Meetinghouse
About one to two houses up from the corner of Meeting and Congdon Streets (where the
Mary K. Hail Music Mansion currently sits), use to stand the First African-American Meetinghouse.
The congregation gathered in 1819 and acquired the property from wealthy abolitionist Moses
Brown to build a meetinghouse in 1822. The meetinghouse quickly became an important center for
the African-American community in Providence. The Meetinghouse functioned as an important
center for the African-American as a space to come together and worship. It was also a valuable
resource for the African-American children in the area because the basement of the Meetinghouse
served as a schoolhouse. There were limited resources for children of color during this time in these
communities to find schooling.
The Meetinghouse was mostly interdenominational with various Christian Protestant
religions. Tragically, in 1863, the Meetinghouse on was burned down by a mob of hostile White
neighbors. This act of prejudice didn’t disband the Meetinghouse members. The Congdon Street
Baptist Church is the present day continuation of this historically African-American church
community in Providence.

http://www.blackpast.org/aah/congdon-street-baptist-church-1819
Ray Rickman, RI Black Heritage Society African American History Walking Tour, July 2014

250
84
Prospect
Street

Mrs. Mary Elizabeth & Mr. Henry Dexter Sharpe House,
currently Rochambeau House at Brown University

This beautiful home, built in 1929, recalls the Parisian hotel architectural styles and
picturesque châteaux of the eighteenth century. On the west side of the house there is a small terrace
that overlooks a formal lawn. The grace and beauty of this home is due in part by Mrs. Sharpe’s own
taste of color, balance, and elegance. Almost all of the interior decorative features were imported
from France. The home was donated in 1985 to Brown after the death of Mrs. Sharpe and
appropriately houses the Department of French and Hispanic Studies and renamed Rochambeau
House.
The Sharpe mansion invited and housed prominent African-American musicians during its
time as a private residence. One such very famous African American artist was Black Canadian
contralto Portia White. Her voice was powerful and very well received all around the globe. During
the Jazz Age, other African-American artists performed and entertained guests of the Sharpe family.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/BrownUniversity-RochambeauHouse.jpg
http://www.brown.edu/academics/french-studies/home/rochambeau-house

251
11
Thomas
Street

Providence Art Club

The Providence Art Club was founded in 1880 by a group of professional artists and art
collectors (among whom was the well known African-American painter Edward M. Bannister). It is
one of the oldest art clubs in the United States. The Club holds galleries of the works of many
prominent African-American artists and continues its mission to make art accessible, free, and open
to the public. It was moved to its current location on Thomas Street in 1887 due to high popularity
and lack of space at its previous location.

http://mappingartsproject.org/providence/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2013/11/Screen-Shot-2013-12-11-at-3.37.03-
AM.png

252
93
Benevolent
Street

Mrs. Christiana Carteaux & Mr. Edward Mitchell Bannister House

The African-American artist Edward Mitchell Bannister and his wife, Christiana Carteaux
Bannister, lived in this house from 1884 until 1898. The home is currently owned by Brown
University.
E.M. Bannister was a successful Black Canadian-American painter . He was born in New
Brunswick, Canada in 1828. He is best known for his outstanding landscapes and seascapes and
delicate use of color and light. . In 1876, Bannister won the first prize bronze medal for his
impressive work Under the Oaks at the Philadelphia Centennial Expsotion, becoming the first
African-American to win an award at a major art exposition. Bannister’s style reflected the Tonalism
movement in art during the 1880s. Bannister was proud of his talent and background, and he likely
ignored the racist sentiments that welcomed him in Providence and beyond as a successful, African-
American artist. He is the co-founder of the Providence Art Club, one of the oldest art clubs in the
country. The Club established a unique and distinctive arts community in Providence.
Bannister’s wife was also a well-known figure in Providence and southeastern New England.
Christiana Carteaux Bannister was born in 1819 in North Kingston, Rhode Island, to a family of
mixed African-American and Narragansett Indian ancestry. She inherited her French last name from
a short marriage to local clothier Desiline Carteaux, believed to be of Caribbean origin. Christiana
Carteaux eventually entered trade of hairdressing, and produced a line of successful hairstyling
products and services, earning the title Madame Carteaux. She was successful in her business and
eventually owned and operated several salons in Boston and Providence between 1847 and 1871. In
1853, she met E.M. Bannister when he applied to work at one of her salons for extra income. They
married in 1857, and moved to Providence in 1869. C.C. Bannister generated considerable income
from her business, and she provided much of the financial support to push her husband’s career
forward.
The Bannisters were social activists; they supported abolitionists, and participated in the
Boston Underground Railroad. The Bannister hair salons functioned as popular “secret” meeting
locations for African-American and White abolitionists. C.C. Bannister founded the Home for Aged
Colored Women for older women of color who worked as housekeepers but became to old to work,
and subsequently homeless. The Bannisters were successful and popular members of the African-
American community and their legacy still lives on today.
E.M. Bannister died in 1901 and his wife died one year.
Both are interred at the North Burial Ground in
Providence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiana_Carteaux_Bannister

253
Pratt
&
South
Court
Streets

Plaque of Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones

Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, better known as Sissieretta Jones, was an African-American
soprano. Her fans sometimes called her “The Black Patti”, in reference to famous Italian opera
singer of the late-19
th
century, Adelina Patti.
She was born in 1868 in Portsmouth, Virginia, but raised for the most part in Providence,
RI. Most of her professional musical training comes from the Providence Academy of Music and
the New England Conservatory of Music, but Jones could always trace her gospel roots to her
father’s Pond Street Baptist Church in Providence. She made her debut in New York’s Steinway
Hall in 1888 and from then on her career escalated. In February 1892, Jones performed at the White
House for President Benjamin Harrison. Jones’s virtuosic talent invited her back to the White House
to perform for three more presidents. Jones was the first African-American to sing at the Music
Hall in New York (now Carnegie Hall). Jones toured the world, traveling to South America, Africa,
and India and giving performances in large international cities such as London, Paris, and Cologne.
She also sang for Queen Victoria and the British Royal Family. This success brought produced great
wealth and fame, and Sissieretta Jones became the highest paid African-American performer of her
time.
In 1896, she returned to Providence to care for her mother, who had fallen ill. This didn’t
stop Jones from continuing to perform and entertain, however. She started the Black Patti
Troubadours, a musical and entertainment act that was made up of many different acrobats,
comedians, dancers, and trained singers. The Troubadours toured extensively and were very popular.
Jones owned a few homes in Providence. She owned a home at 15 Church Street, and
another home that used to stand next door to the house on the corner of Pratt and South Court
Streets. It is said that Jones used to sing in her backyard to entertain her neighbors when she was
home in Providence. She died in June of 1933.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_Sissieretta_Joyner_Jones#mediaviewer/File:The_Black_Patti.jpg

254
45
East
Transit
Street

The Home for Aged Colored Women

During the late 1880s, African-American communities in Providence started to organize a
home for retired Black women who had become homeless with no family to care for them. Most of
these women worked as domestic servants. Christiana Carteaux Bannister of Providence felt moved
to help these women and initiated the funding for the project. She enlisted solicited donations from
her own friends and acquaintances (via connections she made through her successful hairstyling
empire). Bannister extensively fundraised and personally financially contributed to the foundation of
the Home. One notable White benefactor of the Home was Elizabeth Goddard Shepard.
The Home for Aged Colored Women opened at 45 East Transit Street in April 1890, with
many women filling administrative and secretarial roles. C.C. Bannister and the whole administrative
team worked tirelessly to fundraise and acquire donations of food, supplies, and goods. For the most
part, they were successful in their endeavors. By the age of eighty, Bannister was no longer able
handle the business, and was admitted into her own Home for Aged Colored Women.
The Home moved from the East Transit Street location to Dodge Street and was renamed
Bannister House, Inc.

http://library.brown.edu/omeka/archive/fullsize/home-for-aged-colored-women---45-transit_033533de2b.jpg
http://www.rihs.org/assetts/files/publications/2001_Nov.pdf

255
17
Congdon
Street

Congdon Street Baptist Church

This church can trace its roots to the early half of the 19
th
century in the congregation of the
First African-American Meetinghouse on Meeting and Congdon Streets. The Meetinghouse served
as a center for religious services for the community and schooling for the African-American children
in the area. In 1863, the Meetinghouse was burned down by a mob of White neighbors. The
congregation found a temporary location for worship after one year.
By 1875, the congregation had collected enough money to build a new, larger church at the
current Congdon Street location. The Italianate-Medieval Revival cost $16,000 to build. Throughout
the 20
th
Century the Church was also used as performance space for artists in the area. In 1968, the
Church was used as housing for the 65 African-American Brown University students who walked
off the Brown Campus in protest of Brown’s failure to admit and actively recruit African-American
students. The Church occasionally holds galleries and lectures

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/Congdon_Street_Baptist_Church-2.jpg/250px-
Congdon_Street_Baptist_Church-2.jpg

256
Brown
&
Waterman
Streets

The Third World Center (TWC) at Brown University

From the Brown University TWC website, “The Third World Center emerged in response
to the needs of students following protests in 1968 and 1975. Established in 1976, the Third World
Center was designed to serve the interests and meet the needs of all students of color and to
promote racial and ethnic pluralism in the Brown community. Originally housed in the basement of
Churchill House, the Third World Center was relocated in 1986 to Partridge Hall on 68 Brown
Street, directly across the street from the Faunce House Arch and the Main Green.
Brown’s Third World Center provides an arena in which students can explore cultural
heritages and learn about race and ethnicity as components of American identity. The center, in
collaboration with student organizations, academic and co-curricular departments and centers,
sponsors over 250 lectures and programs throughout the academic year to which all Brown students
are invited.
Brown students of color continue to use the term "Third World" in a similar fashion: to
describe a consciousness that recognizes the commonalities and links shared by their diverse
communities. Using the term "Third World" reminds students of the power they have in coalescing,
communicating, and uniting across marginalized communities to create a safer and more open place
for all individuals. This consciousness at Brown also reflects a right, a willingness, and a necessity
for people of color and others to define themselves instead of being defined by others.”

http://www.browndailyherald.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2625007785.jpg
http://icerm.brown.edu/html/programs/events/awm_anniversary_2011//images/brown-logo.png

257
155
Angell
Street

The Rites and Reason Theatre, in the Department of Africana
Studies at Brown University

From the departmental website, “As one of the oldest continuously producing Black theatres
in the nation, the Department of Africana Studies' Rites and Reason Theatre is dedicated to giving
voice to the diverse cultural expressions of the New World. Rites and Reason uses its unique
Research-to-Performance Method (RPM) to develop new creative works.
Rites and Reason was founded in September 1970 by Professor George Houston Bass and
became a formal component of the then Program in Afro-American Studies in 1975. Born out of
the Black Arts Movement and student protests at Brown University, Rites and Reason evolved into
a Research-to-Performance Method theatre. The RPM nourishes organic diversity and collaborative
creativity.
Throughout its history, Rites and Reason has developed works by undergraduate and
graduate students and professional playwrights who have gone on to national acclaim. In recent
years, Rites and Reason has developed and produced student plays about foot binding in ancient
China and the conscription of Jewish boys into the Russian Czarist Army in the 1830s.
The Department of Africana Studies' Rites and Reason Theatre’s mission is to develop new
creative works that analyze and articulate the phenomenal and universal odyssey of the African
Diaspora. Through this commitment, Rites and Reason has developed creative works that have
explored the experiences and expressions of peoples and cultures from across the world.”

http://www.browndailyherald.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/1879486010.jpg

258
225A
Westminster
Street

Downtown Providence, RI.

This address isn’t an exact location for The Resisters, but it’s certainly worth it to just ‘get off
the Hill’ and to see what else Providence, RI, has to offer.
Following the Revolutionary War, Providence, RI, had the ninth-largest population in
nation, with a population of over 8,000 people. The economy was diverse - job opportunities
included manufacturing, tools, machinery, jewelry, silverware, and textiles. By the start of the 20
th

century, Downtown Providence boasted some of the largest manufacturing plants in the country,
like Brown & Sharpe (from Rochambeau House) and Gorham Silverware. The city attracted many
different immigrants for job opportunities. From the 1890s until the 1950s, a Chinatown existed in
the city in the Empire and Burrill Street neighborhoods, which were razed because of a highway
construction plan.
The city witnessed a decline in industries, notable textiles, after the 1920s. The Second
World War did help to temporarily relieve the effects of a declining economy and The Great
Depression, but the relief ended right as the War ended. By the 1950s, Providence saw a decline in
its population and activity. The ‘Fabulous Fities’ decade suburbanized American families and many
people moved away from crowded cities. Between the 1950s-1970s, Providence, especially in Federal
Hill, was a notoriously popular community for the Italian Mafia.
The ‘Renaissance’ of Providence began in the 1970s, with the help of many local and
community development funds. Revitalization projects showcased the city’s arts scene and natural
New England beauty (most of the rivers you see in Downtown Providence today were covered by
paved bridges before the Renaissance! It wasn’t until this major revitalization project that the rivers
were finally uncovered.). Other improvement such as the creation of Waterplace Park, the
Providence Place Mall, high rise condominiums, renowned restaurants, and a dynamic arts scene
pushed Providence back on the map as an attractive spot for tourism, good eats, arts, and culture.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dippy_duck/749691468/in/photolist-29fn9Y-pm45-
68pUUr-7jm8Pu-7jhgwt-98PMev-6zkQ6H-22wUBq-e2HGTF-j3pDuy-8M3TPa-
6fuAen-cvnEKA-6MqWqW-9F9fng-7jma4A-gpcLHk-gpc2No-gpchMx-9G9PE4-
62ds1h-629ekc-62dryq-62dpRb-hV2FnK-dtTyxd-dtTyU9-5Bdiem-7zK2Ak-dtMXjM-
dtN5jZ-dtTuhu-dtTPeN-FsSWx-dtTwmL-68u8Wd-63hcS3-63hd63-nFZ7K2-68pUPk-
68u8ym-54QAz2-9SU5VD-RrfA-dtTvsq-4gwCF9-HMuiu-92Deh-fLUGCL-5dHBSC

259
79
Washington
Street

Arcadia Ballroom/The Strand (now Roxy/Lupo’s Heartbreak
Hotel)

On the corner of Matthewson and Washington Streets in Providence, on the fourth floor of
the Raymond Building, was the home to Providence’s legendary Arcadia Ballroom. The famous Paul
Whiteman and his jazz band led the inaugural concert in October 1922. The creation of the Arcadia
Ballroom was in direct response to the growing influence and popularity of Jazz music of the age.
The Arcadia Ballroom hosted some of the biggest names in Jazz, and many local Rhode Island jazz
musicians started their careers in the Ballroom. The Arcadia Ballroom was unique because it was
first popular integrated racially integrated Ballroom. Donald King, interviewed for the oral history
project Underground Rhode Island stated that the Arcadia Ballroom was ‘certainly one of the first
integrated Jazz clubs in New England, if not in the country.’
The Strand was a popular club in Downtown Providence on Washington Street before it was
remodeled and renamed to Roxy/Lupo’s (as the space is known today). It was a popular spot for
young people searching for a night out in town, or to see their favorite artist on tour.

(Actual picture of the interior of the Ballroom)

http://www.rihs.org/assetts/files/publications/2005_Sum.pdf
http://library.brown.edu/cds/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=1125432613591868
http://www.rirocks.net/Band%20Articles/Buddy%20Holly%201958%2010.04%20-%20Arcadia%20Ballroom.html

260
Your Mission:
Selfie Scavenger Hunt Part 2:
City-wide Bus Edition

The rules:
• Use the decoder to solve the locations contained in
each quote.
• Use the enclosed bus schedules and any other tools to
get to each location (don’t forget- your Brown ID is a
free RIPTA pass too!)
• Take a selfie showing each location holding your team
color in the photo.
• Upload the selfie on Instagram with the hashtag:
#TheResisters

Scoring:
• Each person on your team in the selfie gets 1 point per
photo (1 person = 1 point, 2 people = 2 points, etc)
• Each person from another team in your selfie gets 2
points per person.
• 1 photo per location per team for points.

** Bonus: Team Selfies near bus stops or on the bus = 5
extra points**

Instagram selfies are eligible for points between
Sunday at 1 PM and Monday at 6 PM. First team to complete
6 location selfies will get an extra 10 points.

Tweet at us (@TheResisters) or post on the Facebook page if
you have questions while in play. We’ll respond!

261
185-‐187
Camp
Street

The Billy Taylor House

From the organization’s website, “The Billy Taylor House is a grassroots non-profit
organization founded by residents of Providence RI's East Side, who desire to promote youth
engagement for the well-being of the community as a whole. The organization has its origins in the
mentorship of the late William “Billy” Taylor, after whom the park on Camp Street is named for his
exemplary work in the 1980s with youth from the Mt. Hope Neighborhood. Noticing the need for
youth engagement in the neighborhood, ages 14-21, this group has come together in order to
acquire the abandoned property that Billy used to live in, 185 Camp Street, and turn it into
programming that supports youth in the pursuit of their dreams…
Our mission is to ignite the ambition of Providence’s most disconnected young people. We
accomplish it by providing regular enrichment activities and a workforce development program that
afford youth the opportunity to trade crime, violence, and poverty for social cohesion and economic
vitality.”
The Billy Taylor House supports positive youth and civic engagement, community service,
self-awareness, and self-care. Organizations such as these are essential to the success of youth and,
in turn, of the community. Youth now have a place to go afterschool or during the weekend,
instead of getting into crowds with negative influences. The founder, Billy Taylor, was born in
Providence in May 1956. He died at the age of 29, yet his legacy – the multiple programs he created
for youth in his Mt. Hope community, his teachings, etc., will forever continue as long as the Billy
Taylor House stands.

www.billytaylorhouse.org/about
http://providencemedia.static2.adqic.com/uploads/inline/1396644019_4133.jpg

262
124
Camp
Street

The Billy Taylor Park

The park on Camp Street in Providence, RI, was named in honor of the late Billy Taylor – a
man whose dedication to his community continues to positively impact the lives of people today.
From providencejournal.com, “Mount Hope is a mainly residential neighborhood in
northeast Providence, north of College Hill, the historic center of the city. It is bordered by
Rochambeau Avenue to the north, Hope Street to the east, Olney Street on the southern edge, and
Route 95 and the Amtrak line to the west. Mount Hope was only sparsely developed until the 1850s,
when real-estate speculators began to build more housing there to accommodate the city’s growing
population of factory workers.
Mount Hope is also a historically African-American community…“More settlers came to the
[Mount Hope] neighborhood in the first part of the 19th century, locating primarily in the southern
area of Mount Hope on Olney Street, Bacon Street (no longer in existence), Jenkins Street, Pleasant
Street, Abbott Street, and North Main Street. African-Americans, deeply ingrained in the history of
the neighborhood, were the predominant residents of this new settlement,” the Providence Journal
said.
The Church of the Holy Name of Jesus is a beautiful example of the rich diversity in the Mt.
Hope neighborhood that borders College Hill.
The Lippit Hil Redevelopment Project spanned between the 1950s and 1970s in Providence.
City planners were desperate to create a shopping plaza in this neighborhood. Hundreds of Blacks
had to move out of Mt. Hope and seek housing elsewhere. Many went to the West End and
Southside of Providence. Many historic homes in the southern portion of Mount Hope near Olney
Street were lost duringthis time. The project “resulted in the demolition of a large portion of
dilapidated low-income housing in the southern portion of Mount Hope” and it “displaced large
numbers of residents, particularly African-Americans, to other parts of Mount Hope and
Providence.”, according to the Providence Journal.

http://www.providencejournal.com/homes/n
eighborhood-of-the-week/20140202-an-urban-
melting-pot-in-mount-hope.ece

http://council.providenceri.com/sites/default
/files/imagecache/gallery_assist-gallery_assist-
preview-

263
Trinity
Square

The Trinity United Methodist Church/Southside Cultural Center

The Trinity United Methodist Church is located across the street from Trinity Square in
Providence, RI, at the junction of Elmwood Avenue and Broad Street. In 1964, Rhode Island
citizens wanted a local and professional theatre in the area and Trinity Square Repertory Theatre was
born. The first physical space for the Theatre Company was the auditorium in the Trinity United
Methodist Church. At Trinity, theatre productions represented some of major names in Black
theatre, with Black actors and actresses starring in roles. By 1973, Trinity grew large enough to move
to its current downtown location in what was known as the Majestic Theatre. Trinity Rep (as it is
known know) is a Tony award-winning theatre company and considered one of the best regional
theatre companies in the country. It has given over 58 world premieres in its 50-year history, offers a
MFA program in conjunction with Brown University, and has pioneered educational outreach
programs for southeastern New England.

http://mappingartsproject.org/providence/wp-
content/uploads/sites/3/2013/12/Trinity_United_Methodist-640x388.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Repertory_Company#mediaviewer/File:TrinityRepertoryThe
ater.jpg
http://mappingartsproject.org/providence/locations/trinity-united-methodist-church/
The
church
on
Trinity
Square
Trinity
Rep
downtown

264
60
Union
Street

Fay’s Theatre

Built in 1912 and formerly known as Union Theatre, renowned vaudeville performer
Edward M. Fay founded Fay’s Theatre in 1916. It was a racially segregated vaudeville house during
its time. The height of its operation was during the decades between the First and Second World
Wars. Many big names in music passed through Fay’s Theatre, and even some prominent African-
American musicians entertained an audience, such as Mr. Don Redman. Don Redman is credited as
the one of the founders of big band and swing. He was an arranger, composer, and musicians who
collaborated with some of the biggest names in Jazz from the 20s up until his death. In 1950, the
theatre closed because of declining numbers in ticket sales. Vaudeville was nearly obsolete at this
time. Fay temporarily closed down the theatre, and soon city officials razed the building to build a
parking lot, and that purpose remains today. The space is now the Biltmore Hotel garage.

http://photos.cinematreasures.org/production/photos/2123/1307133416/large.jpg?1307133416
http://www.rihs.org/mssinv/Mss409.htm

265
Randall
&
Charles
Streets

The Celebrity Club

From the Rhode Island Small Business Journal, “In the 1950s the Celebrity Club was
Providence’s premier jazz nightclub, drawing top names including Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington,
Sarah Vaughn, Etta James, and Louis Armstrong, some engagements lasting as long as a week… ‘I
can remember Ray Charles performing there,’ noted Steve Kass in an interview regarding a
documentary film about the club…In addition to the big names, many local jazz and R&B artists got
their start at the Celebrity Club. Located in Randall Square, the club quickly gained a reputation as a
world-class venue. It played a crucial role in shaping the city’s musical and social culture.”
Founded by Paul Filippi 1949, the Celebrity Club was not just the first integrated club in
Providence, but also the first integrated club in New England. The influence of the Celebrity Club in
Providence today is undeniable - despite its short career and premature closing in the early 1960s.
Nevertheless, the Providence arts scene subsequently flourished; many original, and young Black
musicians made their way to Providence as a mecca for performance and artistic opportunities.
During its time in Providence, the Celebrity Club was still met with racism that was normal
for its time. Police sometimes would terminate an ongoing concert and ask all of the White people
to leave the Club. They believed that each ‘color’ needs its own space. If a bunch of African
Americans desired the Celebrity Club then it will just be their own. Most obliged these orders just to
return to the club later that night. The Celebrity Club provided quality local and national
entertainment and music to this small New England city. A plaque proudly stands a few feet away
from where the building used to stand. The structure was demolished after closing.

http://www.rirocks.net/images/1954%20Celebrity%20Club.jpg
http://mappingartsproject.org/providence/locations/celebrity-club/
http://www.rihs.org/assetts/files/publications/2005_Sum.pdf

266
North
Main
&
Olney
Streets

Hard Scrabble & Snow Town Race Riots

Hard Scrabble and Snow Town were two predominately African-American neighborhoods
in Providence during the 19
th
century. These neighborhoods existed in the area surrounding where
the University Apartments complex and Plaza now stand. These neighborhoods were away from the
city center and provided cheap housing for working class free Blacks and their families. Other cities
in the north, like Boston, Massachusetts, Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Staten Island, New York, had
similar historically African-American communities composed of working class people looking to rise
the social ladder.
In Providence, tensions still developed between Hard Scrabble and other neighborhoods
because of prejudices. In 1824, a white mob attacked multiple Black homes in Hard Scrabble after a
Black man refused to get off a sidewalk after being approached by a group of White men. The mob
claimed that they were only trying to get rid of places in Hard Scrabble with bad reputations, but
over 20 Black homes were destroyed. Four members of the mob were tried, but only one was found
guilty. The police was barely mattered.
Snow Town was another interracial, predominately African-American neighborhood in
Providence during the 19
th
century. It too experienced the wrath of an agitated White mob seeking
revenge for the shooting death of a sailor. This Snow Town mob also destroyed multiple Black
homes in the area. The Snow Town riots received more media attention, and voters in Providence
approved a measure for a stronger police force. These riots are examples of the fact that although
the North was relatively progressive, the horrors of racisms affected these communities.
There is some controversy as to where these neighborhoods existed. Some scholars say that
the neighborhoods were located where the State House back lawn is located, on the river. Some
scholars say that the neighborhoods were located where the base of Olney Street is today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Scrabble_(Providence)
http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/13888-memorializing-the-1824-hardscrabble-race-riot-take/

267
75
Chester
Avenue

The Pond Street Baptist Church

Organized in 1835, the Pond Street Baptist is located on the West End of Providence. It was
formally known as The Second Free Will Baptist Church. Jeremiah Malachi Joyner, the father of the
famous soprano Sissieretta Jones and a former slave along with his wife Henrietta, accepted a post
to become the pastor of this church in 1876. The Church was known to be a part of the
Underground Railroad and participated in antislavery movement. By the late 1880s, Providence had
a moderately active and large African American community, and the city’s atmosphere was relatively
progressive in terms of racial matters (although marginalized communities in Providence still
experienced racial prejudice).

http://mappingartsproject.org/providence/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2013/11/Photo212993.jpg

268
40
Westminster
Street

E.M. Bannister Art Studio

On the second floor of the building adjacent to the Textron skyscraper downtown was the
studio of the eminent African-American painter Edward Mitchell Bannister. It was here that he
created his famous works of art.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Edward_Mitchell_Bannister.jpg

269
340
Lockwood
Street

D.A.R.E.

Who is or what is D.A.R.E. ? Direct Action for Rights and Equality

From daretowing.org,

“1. We believe that poor and working class families, people of color, oppressed nationalities
including immigrants regardless of documentation status, women, LGBTQ community members
and youth must be at the forefront in leading the way to our liberation.
2. We believe that there are related systems of oppression and exploitation that are responsible for
the conditions our communities face here and around the world, and that our work must challenge
these forms of oppression. Specifically, we fight against:
• Racism and white supremacy (oppression based on race and nationality)
• Sexism, patriarchy, and heterosexism (oppression based on gender and sexual orientation)
• Capitalism (oppression of the poor and working class by the rich and ruling class)
• Imperialism (oppression of entire nations and peoples by other nations and peoples).

3. We believe that these systems of oppression aim to maintain power by continuing to divide and
conquer our communities; however our solidarity and strength is at its best when we understand and
appreciate our various cultures, backgrounds, and histories.
4. We believe that our local struggles are connected to a larger movement of national and global
struggles of oppressed people and that together, we need to move toward our goals of social,
economic, and political justice.
5. We believe in creating long-term solutions that address the root causes of problems and in
building real security in our communities and beyond, by addressing the origins of conflict and
violence and by fostering greater commitment and accountability to one another.”

http://www.daretowin.org/en/who-we-are/principles-of-unity.html

270
441
Prairie
Avenue

Soul Patrol

You stopped at the South Providence Branch of the Providence Public Library. This isn’t a
location on The Resisters, but Prairie Avenue is. The Soul Patrol was a group of volunteer Black
‘policemen’ who patrolled the streets around Prairie Avenue, probably because Providence cops
weren’t ever available for this side of the city. The Soul Patrol maintained and protected this
neighborhood to quell riots after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., according to Isadore
Ramos from Underground Rhode Island. Almost like the Minutemen for the Continental Army, the
Soul Patrol was willing to tend to the needs and safety of the community.

https://www.provcomlib.org/sites/default/files/styles/display/public/locations/_dsc5750_0.jpg?itok=91YrpxMH

271
60
Portland
Street

Afro Art Center, Inc.

The Afro Arts Center, Inc. was the Black communities project dedicated to Black Arts. It
was founded in Providence in August of 1967. The location was chosen because it was in the heart
of the community. The Afro Arts Center provided much needed space for Black artists in the
community, as well as formal training in the Fine Arts for young Black artists. The Center offered a
variety of instruction from drawing to Modern Dance. The Center provided the materials to create
works of art, the space, and the spirit to encourage young Black artists in the area. The instructors
were community members, men and women who have created beautiful works of art but never
received proper recognition because of the limited opportunities for Black artists during the time.
The Center also sponsored Black Arts Festivals for public showcases of Black Arts and artists.

!
!
2
APPENDIX C: ARCHIVES UTILIZED IN THE RESISTERS

David Beckwith Papers 1946-2008. MS.2010.010, Brown University Library.
Jay Saunders Redding (1906-1988) Papers. John Hay Library. Brown University.
Mapping Arts Project, Providence. From!http://mappingartsproject.org/providence/
Life Story Theater Oral History Project 1987-1988. Mss. Gr. 66, University of Rhode Island
Special Collections.
Rhode Island Select Commission on Race and Police-Community Relations. Rhode Island
State Archives.
Rudolph Fisher Papers. MS-1U-15, Brown University Archives.
The Urban League of Rhode Island, Providence College, Phillips Memorial Library, Special
and Archival Collections.
The Whole World Was Watching: An Oral History of 1968. From
http://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/1968/
Underground Rhode Island. From http://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/undergroundri/

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Asset Metadata

Creator Agloro, Alexandrina Renee (author)

Core Title Game recognize game: performative archives and alternate reality games

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 07/10/2015

Defense Date 05/07/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag archives,games,OAI-PMH Harvest,participatory design,people of color,social movements,youth

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kun, Joshua D. (committee chair), Jenkins, Henry (committee member), Kuhn, Virginia (committee member), Sánchez, George J. (committee member)

Creator Email agloro@usc.edu,alex.agloro@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-592237

Unique identifier UC11301885

Identifier etd-AgloroAlex-3588.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-592237 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-AgloroAlex-3588.pdf

Dmrecord 592237

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Agloro, Alexandrina Renee

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA