University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Critical game literacies and Afrofuturist development

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Critical game literacies and Afrofuturist development

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Content CRITICAL GAME LITERACIES AND AFROFUTURIST DEVELOPMENT
by
Matthew W. Coopilton
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
(URBAN EDUCATION POLICY)
August 2023
Copyright 2023 Matthew W. Coopilton
ii

“…Imagine everything you’ve been told about the future...who will survive and who
won’t? What will life on Earth become?

…Who usually gets to write these stories about the future, and whose stories become
real?

…Imagine that all of your dreams and nightmares for the future have been decomposed
and recycled…

something unexpected has grown out of them.”

–A prototype of the abolitionist videogame Kai UnEarthed,
coded in early 2020, right at the beginning of the COVID19 pandemic

iii
DEDICATION
For everyone gesturing toward unpoliced futures - before, during, and after the summer
of 2020.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation is inspired by my students, who had been labeled extra by carceral
systems, often for learning through play. They taught me to value everyone and everything
labeled extra, including games. Some of them participated in the worldbuilding and early
iterations of curriculum design prototyping that informed this project. Thanks especially to Nia
Cole, Devonte Aycox Serrano, Dametrius Simmons, Gerard, Me’kiyel Taylor, Magic Chen,
Keandra Pascua, Mohammed Hilfi, Liban Abdi, Matthew Clairmont, Henri Moussakayi, Sylvain
Moussakayi, Jordan Maaele, Mulan Chen, Mia Chen, Tristan Agosa, José Zapata, Ayub Budul,
and Mukhtar Omar. Thanks also to my colleagues at Southwest Education Center who provided
insightful feedback on those early iterations, especially Camella Coopilton, Ramon Jiménez, Lisa
Gascon, Mikhail Tatrin, Bryan Hayes, Fatuma Mohamed, Meixi Ng, and Mayte Castro. And
thanks to fellow members of the ARTifACTS collective: Ed Mast, Beverly Naidus, Carol
Rashawnna Williams, and Camella Coopilton. Together, we created games to prototype futures
without youth incarceration, some of the first games I co-designed. The influence of this early
work on the current project is discussed in Chapter Three of this dissertation and in an upcoming
book chapter on “Abolitionist and Afrofuturist Game Design Pedagogies” (Coopilton et al., in
press).
This dissertation would not have been possible without Camella Coopilton’s brilliant
companionship. We met at a workshop for teachers incorporating play and games into the
classroom, and we later worked at a high school reengagement program together where we co-
designed theater improv games with our students. Camella is from South Central Los Angeles,
and I followed her here when she moved back to be close to her family, which is what prompted
me to apply to USC in the first place. Besides being a loving and nurturing partner and spouse,
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Camella is an amazing co-thinker who provided extensive feedback on games I designed, the
curriculum for the game jam, and the overall research process. While she transcribed some of the
data (paid through a grant), she also drew my attention to important patterns and contextual
details which later informed my analyses. This study is informed by our shared philosophy of
life, and this degree is ours. Outside of work, we continue to develop our imagination by playing
together and imagining liberated Afrofutures where our descendants will thrive.
I wrote this text while living and working in colonized Tongva territories, and I hope the
forms of learning it inspires will result in greater solidarity with the Tongva and other indigenous
peoples who are attempting to decolonize their lands. This research also would not be possible
without all of my friends who have been active in movements for Black liberation and abolition
of anti-Black systems such as police and prisons. Their camaraderie and collaborative study gave
me the wisdom and confidence to engage in abolitionist intellectual work when it was unpopular,
when it became popular, and during the backlash against it. Thanks especially to Daniel Bash,
Dara Bayer, Grace Bryant, Jenny Garcia, E. Rose Harriot, Kiana Harris, Leith Jasinowski-Kahl,
Cody Lestelle, Escenthio Marigny, Erika Merz, Ian Morgan, Gina Rodríguez-Drix, Shemon
Salam, B Stepp, Addie Tinnell, and Bigg Villainus for conversations and collaborations that
helped shape my thinking as I imagined this project.
I would not have completed the PhD program without the support of my family and
chosen family. Thanks especially to my parents Dana and Mary Hamilton, my sister Theresa
Foley, and my aunts and uncles (Carol, William, and John Miele and Madeline Miele-Holt) for
encouraging me to apply and for supporting me along the way. Marrying into a family that loves
to play and laugh together also kept me grounded and inspired throughout the program and the
pandemic; my mother and sister in-law Kim Clark-Cooper and Jazzmin Cooper helped me feel at
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home in LA. I got through the pandemic by playing board games with them and Zoom theater
games with Camella and our close friend Jenny Garcia, and exploring virtual reality with our
close friends Kiana and Savion Harris. My grandparents-in-law Addie and Arlinda Clark lived
down the street from USC, and every time I saw them, they would ask how school was going and
would encourage me to keep going when it was hard. Mrs. Clark and I would share stories about
our teaching experiences over the years, and Mr. Clark and I would talk about racial politics.
Camella and I hope to carry on their legacy of community-building, nurturing, and education in
Los Angeles, and I am honored that this research made them proud.
I am immensely grateful to my advisor and dissertation committee chair Brendesha Tynes
for mentoring me as a researcher and for funding and supporting the Critical Game Jam I studied
for this dissertation. Her commitment to Black liberation, her deep interdisciplinary training, and
her encouragement of my unusual interdisciplinary research trajectory all made this project
possible. Colleagues at her Center for Empowered Learning and Development with Technology
also contributed to the ideas developed here, especially Josh Schuschke and Ashley Stewart who
collaborated with Dr. Tynes and I on the Afrofuturist Development framework that informs this
study (Tynes et al., 2023). Other friends and colleagues at the Rossier School of Education also
gave feedback on various iterations of this research and encouraged me to pursue it, especially
Aireale Rodgers, who welcomed me into the world of the critical learning sciences and helped
me feel at home there. The Rossier School of Education also supported data analysis through the
Internal and Dean’s Research Grants and the USC Graduate School supported it through a
Summer Research and Writing Grant. I am grateful for this support, and want to note that the
ideas presented here do not necessarily represent Rossier or USC. And of course, thank you to
vii
my dissertation committee members Antero Garcia from Stanford and Zoë Corwin from USC
who gave thoughtful and useful feedback on multiple iterations of this project.
Thanks also to the faculty in the USC Games program and the USC School of Cinematic
Arts Interactive Media and Games Division (IMGD) who taught me to design video games and
who inspired me to study how people learn to design them. Thanks especially to my mentor
Tracy Fullerton at the USC Game Innovation Lab. The idea for this project congealed in my
mind after co-presenting on our curriculum development work around her Walden game at the
Connected Learning conference at UC Irvine, during a semester where I was experiencing the
dynamism of her own game design teaching practices in the classroom at USC. She later gave
valuable feedback on early iterations of the literature review and theoretical framework, and has
encouraged me to keep designing abolitionist games. Thanks also to professors Andreas Kratky,
Richard Lemarchand, Margaret Moser, and Maureen McHugh.
My understanding of how people learn to design games was deeply shaped by
collaborating with IMGD students on various design projects, especially through working with
Olivia Peace, Claire Hu, and K.B. on Kai UnEarthed, the abolitionist game which we studied as
part of this dissertation research. I am immensely grateful for the joyful moments we
experienced creating the game, and their insights are featured prominently throughout this
dissertation text as well as related publications (e.g., Coopilton et al., in press). Tracy and
Andreas’ IMGD classes and Andreas’ mentoring during an independent study class supported
this design work.
My critical perspectives on games have also been sharpened through co-founding an
Abolitionist Gaming Network Discord sever with Brianna Mims, Olivia Peace, and Addie
Tinnell. This led to close collaboration with critical learning scientists and gamers Roberto S. de
viii
Roock and Joel Lovos who have been active in building the network and organizing spaces for
us to learn together; they provided crucial feedback and encouragement during the final stages of
the dissertation process and related writing efforts.
Finally, and most importantly, thanks to all of the participants, co-designers, co-
researchers, and co-facilitators in the Critical Game Jam, who are named and quoted throughout
this text, especially in chapters three, four, and five, and in Appendix P. It was such a joy to be
able to spend this much time thinking about their brilliant insights and narrating what we learned
through imagining, playing, and designing together.

ix
TABLE OF CONTENTS

EPIGRAPH………………………………………………………………………………………..ii
DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………………iii
ACKNOWELDGEMENTS.……………………………………………………………………...iv
LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………..xiv
ABSTRACT.……………………………………………………………………………………..xv
CHAPTER ONE: BACKGROUND, PURPOSE, AND OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY .......... 1
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM ......................................................................................... 1
PURPOSE OF THE STUDY ................................................................................................... 4
Research Questions ..................................................................................................... 7
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY .......................................................................................... 8
DEFINITIONS AND RELATED CONCEPTS USED IN THIS STUDY ......................................... 9
ORGANIZATION OF THIS DISSERTATION ......................................................................... 18

CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL LITERATURE ......... 19
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK .......................................................................................... 19
Sociocultural Learning Theory ................................................................................. 19
Games as Zones of Proximal Development. ......................................................... 20
Play and Development Among Emerging Adults. ................................................ 21
Scaffolding Connected Gaming. ........................................................................... 22
Learners as Historical Actors in the Production of Possible Futures. ................... 24
Abolitionist Critical Theories ................................................................................... 25
Afrofuturist Development: A Theory and Design Lens ........................................... 27
Thriving Black Futures and Afrofuturistic Selves. ............................................... 29
Critical Consciousness, Imagination, and Action. ................................................ 31
REVIEW OF EMPIRICAL LITERATURE .............................................................................. 32
Game Literacies Research ......................................................................................... 32
Research on Learning in Popular Gaming Cultures. ............................................ 32
Analyses of Commercial Games. ...................................................................... 33
Studies of Literacy Practices in Metagaming Spaces. ...................................... 34
Research on Game-Based Learning Environments. ............................................. 35
Constructionist and Connected Gaming Research on Game Design. ................... 36
Game Design and Computational Literacies. ................................................... 37
Game Design and Broader Game Literacy Learning Outcomes. ..................... 39
Sociocultural Contexts of Game Design Learning Environments. ................... 40
Game Design and Playtesting as Collaborative Practices. ................................ 42
Game Jams, STEAM, and Playful Production. ................................................ 43
x
Critical Game Literacies (CGL) Research ................................................................ 44
CGL: Playing and Analyzing Games Critically.................................................... 45
Play and Being a Historical Actor. ................................................................... 45
Racism, Intersectional Oppression, and Resistance in Digital Gaming. ........... 47
Gaming vs. Police Violence. ............................................................................. 48
Critical Pedagogies of Play. .............................................................................. 50
Critical Play Among Young Adults. ................................................................. 53
CGL: Critical Modding. ........................................................................................ 54
CGL: Building Liberatory Affinity Spaces........................................................... 56
CGL: Designing Critically. ................................................................................... 59
SYNTHESIS AND SUMMARY OF GAPS IN THE LITERATURE ............................................. 64

CHAPTER THREE: RESEARCH DESIGN ............................................................................. 66
METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH: DESIGN BASED RESEARCH .......................................... 66
Participatory Elements .............................................................................................. 67
Research in Non-Controlled Settings ........................................................................ 69
Research as Learning Experience Design and Professional Development ............... 71
Intertwined Roles ...................................................................................................... 71
Iterative Design ......................................................................................................... 74
Situated and Distributed Cognition ........................................................................... 76
Description of Kai UnEarthed .................................................................................. 77
Description of the Critical Game Jam (CGJ) ............................................................ 78
How We Applied What We Learned from Designing Kai UnEarthed .................... 81
Design Conjectures ................................................................................................... 84
The Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game (UAWG) ....................................... 86
SETTING AND CONTEXT ................................................................................................. 87
DATA COLLECTION ........................................................................................................ 89
Sampling Procedures ................................................................................................ 89
Building an Affinity Space. .................................................................................. 90
Sample Part One: Cohort of Young Adult Participants ........................................ 92
Sample Part Two: Composition of the Design Research Team. ........................... 93
Recruitment and Admittance Decisions .................................................................... 94
Informed Consent and Intellectual Property Agreements ......................................... 96
Recorded Curriculum Design Sessions, Discussions, and Trainings ....................... 97
Pre-and Post-Assessments ........................................................................................ 97
Pre-and Post-Self-Recorded Interviews .................................................................. 100
Shared Google Documents ..................................................................................... 102
Session Zoom Recordings with Post-Reflections and Chat Logs ........................... 102
Observation Field Notes ......................................................................................... 102
Kai UnEarthed Playtest ........................................................................................... 102
Conversations and Workshops Between Sessions .................................................. 103
Level Two Prompts and Protocols .......................................................................... 104
DATA ANALYSIS PROCEDURES .................................................................................... 104
Reflexive Thematic Analysis .................................................................................. 105
A Note About Further Assessment of Learning ..................................................... 110
xi
TRUSTWORTHINESS & CONTRIBUTION TO MOVEMENTS FOR LIBERATION ................... 111
POSITIONALITY ............................................................................................................ 114

CHAPTER FOUR: CRITICAL GAME LITERACIES IN THE CRITICAL GAME JAM ... 116
RQ 1.1. HOW PARTICIPANTS EXPERIENCED CRITICAL GAME LITERACY LEARNING .... 117
Theme 1.1.A. Deepening and Expanding Critical Consciousness .......................... 117
Theme 1.1.B. Learning Critical Game Design Skills ............................................. 119
Theme 1.1.C. Learning Through Worldbuilding .................................................... 122
Theme 1.1.D. Building an Affinity Space Around Black Liberation ..................... 124
RQ 1.2. HOW THE DESIGN OF THE GAME JAM SUPPORTED CGL LEARNING ............... 128
Theme 1.2.A. How it Supported Deepening & Expanding Critical Consciousness 128
Theme 1.2.B. How it Scaffolded Critical Game Design Learning ......................... 130
Critical Player Experience Goals. ....................................................................... 131
Critical Prototyping. ............................................................................................ 132
Critical Playtesting. ............................................................................................. 136
How Designers’ Positionality Shaped the Design Process. ................................ 139
Theme 1.2.C. How Worldbuilding Functioned as Scaffolding .............................. 141
Theme 1.2.D. How it Supported Building Affinity Around Black Liberation ....... 144
RQ 1.3. HOW FUTURE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS CAN BETTER SUPPORT CRITICAL
GAME LITERACIES ....................................................................................................... 148
Theme 1.3.A. How to Further Deepen and Expand Critical Consciousness .......... 148
Theme 1.3.B. How to Better Scaffold Critical Game Design Learning ................. 149
Theme 1.3.C. How Critical Worldbuilding Could Better Scaffold Learning ......... 150
Theme 1.3.D. How to Build Stronger Affinity Around Black Liberation .............. 151
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................ 151

CHAPTER FIVE: AFROFUTURIST DEVELOPMENT IN THE CRITICAL GAME JAM 153
RQ 2.1. HOW PARTICIPANTS EXPERIENCED AFROFUTURIST DEVELOPMENT ............... 153
Theme 2.1.A. Critical Speculative Imagination ...................................................... 154
Facing “The Wall”: Digital Media and Critical Speculative Imagination .......... 155
Afrofuturist “Swerving” Toward Revolution? .................................................... 157
Theme 2.1.B. Imagining Unpoliced Futures ........................................................... 160
Abolitionist Critical Speculative Imagination .................................................... 161
Theme 2.1.C. Imagining and Prototyping Climate Justice ..................................... 162
Theme 2.1.D. “Bending Spacetime” ....................................................................... 163
RQ 2.2. HOW THE DESIGN OF THE CRITICAL GAME JAM SUPPORTED AFROFUTURIST
DEVELOPMENT ............................................................................................................ 165
Theme 2.2.A. How it Supported Critical Speculative Imagination ........................ 165
Prototyping Liberated Futures ............................................................................ 166
Rehearsing For Revolution ................................................................................. 170
Theme 2.2.B. How it Supported Imagination of Unpoliced Futures ...................... 172
Abolitionist Playfield in Kai UnEarthed ............................................................. 173
Prototyping an Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game .............................................. 174
xii
Theme 2.2.C. How it Supported Afrofuturist Climate Justice Imagination ........... 175
Theme 2.2.D. How it Supported Experiences of Afrofuturistic Temporalities ...... 180
RQ 2.3. HOW FUTURE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS CAN BETTER SUPPORT
AFROFUTURIST DEVELOPMENT ................................................................................... 183
Theme 2.3.A. How to Better Support Critical Speculative Imagination ................ 183
Theme 2.3.B. How to Better Support Abolitionist Imagination ............................. 184
Theme 2.3.C. How to Better Support Afrofuturist Climate Justice Prototyping .... 185
Theme 2.3.D. How to Better Attune to Afrofuturistic Temporalities ..................... 185
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................ 187

CHAPTER SIX: DISCUSSION AND DESIGN PRINCIPLES ............................................. 189
DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS ON CRITICAL GAME LITERACIES LEARNING ....................... 189
Design Principle 1.1: Critical Consciousness Through Play and Design ............... 190
Design Principle 1.2: Scaffolding Critical Playcentric Game Design Learning ..... 194
Design Principle 1.3: Worldbuilding as Scaffolding .............................................. 197
Design Principle 1.4: Building Affinity Around Black liberation .......................... 202
DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS ON AFROFUTURIST DEVELOPMENT ..................................... 205
Design Principle 2.1: Prototyping and Rehearsing Worlds Free from Oppression 208
Design Principle 2.2: Prototyping and Rehearsing Unpoliced Futures .................. 210
Design Principle 2.3: Prototyping and Rehearsing Afrofuturist Climate Justice ... 211
Design Principle 2.4: Attuning to Afrofuturistic Temporalities ............................. 213
FUTURE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS FEATURING BOTH CRITICAL GAME LITERACIES AND
AFROFUTURIST DEVELOPMENT ................................................................................... 216
LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS NOT YET DISCUSSED .................................... 221

CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................ 224

REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................ 226

APPENDIX A: ADDITIONAL FIGURES REFERENCED...................................................243
APPENDIX B: FURTHER NOTES ON POSITIONALITY.................................................. 246
APPENDIX C: TEN PRINCIPLES OF AFROFUTURIST DEVELOPMENT THEORY.....250
APPENDIX D: IRB APPROVAL LETTER............................................................................251
APPENDIX E: GAME JAM INVITATION FLYER..............................................................255
APPENDIX F: APPLICATION FORM...................................................................................256
APPENDIX G: STUDY INFO SHEET....................................................................................258
APPENDIX H: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY FORMS.......................................................263
APPENDIX I: CURRICULUM CO-DESIGN PROTOCOL..................................................268
APPENDIX J: KAI UNEARTHED DESIGN PROCESS REFLECTION PROTOCOL........271
APPENDIX K: PRE- AND POST-ASSESSMENT.................................................................275
xiii
APPENDIX L: CRITICAL IMAGINATION QUESTIONS...................................................280
APPENDIX M: KAI UNEARTHED PLAYTEST PROTOCOLS..........................................284
APPENDIX N: TOWARD A CASE STUDY ON TEACHER EDUCATION.......................295
APPENDIX O: LEVEL TWO PROMPTS AND PROCESS...................................................298
APPENDIX P: PARTICIPANT PROFILES FOR THE COHORT OF YOUNG ADULTS...303
CAM WADE (THEY/THEM AND HE/HIM) ..........................................................304
CECILIA (THEY/THEM) .........................................................................................306
GABRIEL (HE/HIM) .................................................................................................307
JOMIH (THEY/THEM) .............................................................................................308
LIGHT BIRD (THEY/THEM) ...................................................................................310
MADU (THEY/THEM) .............................................................................................312
MIMS (SHE/HER) ….................................................................................................312
NATHANN (HE/HIM) ..............................................................................................314
REGINALD (HE/HIM) ..............................................................................................315
xiv
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Conjecture Map for This Study……………………………………………….....Page 86
Figure 2: Gabriel's Mood Board Prototyping……………………………………………..Page 133
Figure 3: Gabriel’s Character Prototype…………………………………………….........Page 134
Figure 4: Cecilia's South Central Worldbuilding…………………………………............Page 142
Figure 5: Light Bird’s Worldbuilding…………………………………………………….Page 179
Figure 6: Design Principles for Critical Game Literacies & Afrofuturist Development... Page 217
Figure A1: Simmers metagaming during the George Floyd Rebellion…………………..Page 243
Figure A2: The Critical Race Game Literacy Scale………………………………………Page 244
Figure A3: Tempest from Kai UnEarthed……………………………………………………...Page 245
Appendix E: Game Jam Invitation Flyer………………………………………………....Page 255
Figure M1: Zoom Settings for Playtesting………………………………………………..Page 284

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ABSTRACT

Gaming has expanded during the pandemic, adding urgency to educators’ efforts to implement
research on effective game-based learning experiences. However, researchers have also
documented racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression in gaming; educators
need to prepare young people to resist these systems of oppression, and game developers need to
challenge these systems in their designs. To contribute to these efforts, this study asks how one
might design learning spaces to support critical game literacies, defined as the literacy skills
needed to play, analyze, modify, and design games in ways that challenge systemic oppression.
The study also asks how one can design spaces to support aspects of Afrofuturist development
(Tynes et al., 2023), a process in which young Black people imagine and build futures where
they can thrive. The study answered these questions through design-based research on a critical
game jam where participants played, analyzed, and created games related to themes such as
Black liberation and abolitionism. During the game jam, participants playtested a prototype of
Kai UnEarthed, a videogame about young people learning in unpoliced futures. They also began
to design their own games in response to collective design prompts and activities. A reflexive
thematic analysis of participants’ learning experiences and their relationship to the design of the
game jam generated eight design principles such as “prototyping and rehearsing worlds free from
oppression,” “worldbuilding as scaffolding,” and “practicing critical playcentric design
methods.” These principles could inform future learning environments that support critical game
literacies and Afrofuturist development.

Keywords: Critical Literacies, Games, Game Design, Video Games, Game-Based Learning,
Critical Digital Literacies, Critical Game Literacies, Afrofuturism, Afrofuturist development,
Abolitionism, Design-Based-Research, Design Principles, Young Adult Learning,
Computational Media, Interactive Media, Media Literacy.

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Chapter One: Background, Purpose, and Overview of the Study
Digital gaming has expanded during the pandemic and is becoming a mainstream cultural
practice; a recent Ipsos survey of 4,000 adults found that two-thirds of Americans play video
games, 71% of parents reported that their children play them, and 59% said their kids play
educational games (Snider, 2021). This supports literacy scholar James Paul Gee’s argument that
game literacy is an important 21st century skill (Gee, 2013); it adds urgency to educators’ efforts
to implement decades of research on effective game literacies learning inside and outside of the
classroom (e.g. Garcia et al., 2020; Squire, 2011; Steinkuehler et al., 2012), including
constructionist and connected gaming research on how young people engage in collaborative
learning through making games and sharing them with each other (Kafai & Burke, 2016).
Statement of the Problem
At the same time, researchers have documented racism and related forms of oppression in
gaming, and have analyzed ways that players resist these intersecting oppressions (e.g., Gray,
2020; Gray & Leonard, 2018; Salen Tekinbaş, 2020). While this resistance is already happening
outside of schools, educators in schools and other learning environments can contribute to it by
supporting students’ development of critical game literacy skills. Students could hone their
critical consciousness so they can critique and analyze games as they play, possibly lessening the
impact of oppressive ideologies and interactions. They also could learn to modify games to
change, subvert, or disrupt oppressive dynamics enabled by their existing design features, and
they could learn to design their own games that challenge systemic oppression.
Game developers could also challenge oppression in the games industry, building on
existing organizing efforts such as walkouts against sexism at Activision-Blizzard, one of the

2
most prominent video game companies (Anguiano, 2021), and other emerging movements for
social change among game workers and players (Woodcock, 2019). Such efforts could be more
effective if more workers entering the games industry were equipped with the skills and critical
consciousness necessary to organize for change, plus the critical game literacy skills needed to
enact innovative design ideas that depart from the reproduction of oppressive status quo
assumptions about what games are and should be. These possibilities highlight the importance of
critical game design pedagogies in the schools and programs that prepare students for such
careers, at both the K-12 and postsecondary level, and in informal learning spaces such as online
game design platforms, game jams, etc.
Equipping women, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and LGBTQIA+ students to navigate such
conflicts in the workplace is especially important given the ongoing inequities in the industry,
where white people, Asians, and men are still disproportionately represented among professional
game designers, while everyone else is under-represented (Zippia, 2021). Critical game literacy
education could teach designers to be more aware of their positionalities and the ways their
design practices are situated within existing sociocultural contexts structured by tensions
between systemic oppression and movements for liberation. It could support designers in
recognizing and building on the strengths of non-dominant communities and the ways they
understand play and games.
There are also many good reasons for people to learn to design games beyond becoming
professional game workers. There has been an explosion of independent game production over
the past several decades, which is increasing as tools such as game engines become more and
more accessible in terms of cost and learning curves (Anthropy, 2012). Making games can be a
way that people can express themselves and their passions, building affinities and collaborative

3
relationships with other people who share these passions (Gee & Hayes, 2010); this can help
people overcome the alienation and loneliness of late capitalist society, especially in the wake of
the COVID19 pandemic. Hope for such connections is grounded in the promising results of
research on nurturing gaming affinity spaces, where relative strangers build trust with each other
over time through shared design activities (Gee & Hayes, 2010). Such critical design efforts are
especially important at a moment in history where the capitalist system is treating more and more
people as disposable, leaving them with extra capacities that cannot be expressed at work and
school (Clover, 2019; Gilmore, 2007; Saltman, 2016; Woodcock, 2019). There is already
evidence that gaming is a place where people express these extra capacities (Woodcock, 2019;
Steinkuehler, 2010), and a proliferation of critical game literacies could enable people to do this
more collaboratively and consciously.
Given findings about the prevalence and centrality of racism in contemporary gaming
(Gray, 2020), there is a need for game design affinity spaces specifically focused on making
games to contribute to anti-racist efforts. Critical race digital literacy education research (Tynes,
Stewart, et al., 2021; Garcia et al. 2021) has highlighted the importance of critical digital media
creation in challenging racism and intersecting forms of oppression, and creating digital games
can be one way to do this. For example, several collectives have begun to design abolitionist
games (both analog and digital). These games support the movement to abolish police and
prisons, and they prototype unpoliced futures where the anti-Blackness that fuels incarceration
has been overcome and peoples’ needs for safety, dignity, and belonging are met in creative
ways.
I want to make these kinds of critical game literacy experiences widely available to
fellow teachers and students. Research is needed to learn how to do this because the field of

4
education so far has not generated or studied many learning experience designs, pedagogies, and
practices to support critical game literacies learning. In fact, we know very little about how
people learn critical game literacy skills inside or outside of schools. There is ample research on
game literacies and game-based learning more broadly, including a small but substantial body of
work on how people learn through designing games (Kafai & Burke, 2015). There are also
strands of critical pedagogy and critical literacies praxis and research that have informed critical
digital literacies research (e.g., Garcia & de Roock, 2021; Garcia, et al., 2021) and critical studies
of game literacies (e.g., Gutiérrez, Becker, et al., 2019; Proctor & Blikstein, 2019; Storm &
Jones, 2021). However, there are gaps in these literatures that still need to be filled, especially
around critical game design practices among young adults and Black people, abolitionist gaming,
and studies that focus on using games to simulate liberated futures.
Purpose of the Study
To address these challenges, I conducted a study on how to design learning environments
where people develop critical game literacies, defined as the literacy skills needed to play,
analyze, modify, and design games in ways that challenge systemic oppression. The study also
seeks to understand how such learning environments might support people in imagining liberated
and unpoliced futures and worlds. The specificity of this second aim is merited for several
reasons:
1) Existing literature on play suggests it is future-oriented (Atkins, 2006, Gee, 2013).
Under certain conditions it can be a means for people to develop their capacities to become
historical actors producing possible futures (Gutiérrez, Higgs, et al., 2019).
2) Existing literature on games frames them as racialized pedagogical zones (Everett &
Watkins, 2008) and ideological worlds (Squire, 2011) that model, simulate, and critique existing

5
social systems (Gee, 2011). For that reason, existing critical studies of game design learning
environments have tended to involve young people creating games that simulate existing systems
of social oppression in order to critique or satirize them (e.g., Proctor & Blikstein, 2019). Critical
literacies scholars interested in gaming have begun to call for studying how critical literacies
might move beyond such critique towards also imagining futures free from systems such as
white supremacy and heterosexism (Storm & Jones, 2021); the modeling and simulation
affordances of games suggest they are equipped to support such a move.
3) Emerging conversations among abolitionist game designers have highlighted the role
of games in freedom dreaming (Kelley, 2002), curating visions of possible futures from within
actually existing liberation movements (Imarisha & brown, 2015) to expand our capacity to
imagine and rehearse the abolition of police and prisons. Mediated carceral infrastructure and
schooling limit our critical capacities to imagine worlds without these institutions (Love, 2019),
and given established connections in the research literature between play and imagination (e.g.,
Gutiérrez, Becker, et al., 2019), critical game literacies could be a way to resist these limits and
expand our capacities. This is the theoretical conjecture I embedded in the design of Kai
UnEarthed, a video game that emerged out of participatory design activities I did with former
students, colleagues, and fellow abolitionists during Seattle’s movement against youth
incarceration. The game is set in the world we imagined would replace the youth jail we were
trying to shut down, and in Kai UnEarthed the young adult characters fall in love in the
reclaimed ruins of the jail.
4) Such an approach is compatible with the Afrofuturist Development Theory, a theory
for supporting young Black people in learning and developing with technology in ways that
equip them to build futures where Black people thrive. The theory emphasizes the ways in which

6
Black people learn with technology through play and design, and it can be applied as a design
lens to create learning environments such as game jams (Tynes, et al., 2023).
Environments that support such learning and development are not currently widespread,
so design research (Barab & Squire, 2004) with participatory elements (Bang & Vossoughi,
2014) is needed to sketch the contours and possibilities of designing and studying them, possibly
informing future research in this area. This study accomplished that task through the design and
study of a Critical Game Jam in which young adults played, analyzed, and designed games about
liberated futures. The design of this learning environment was informed by existing theoretical
and empirical literature, particularly the Afrofuturist Development Theory (Tynes et al., 2023) as
well as by the already existing design activities that I have been involved in outside of academia,
consistent with the tenets of participatory design research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2014). For
example, the game jam incorporated Kai UnEarthed as a proleptic demonstration of what is
possible (Vossoughi et al., 2021), inspiring participants to create their own games about
unpoliced futures and worlds.
Our design process was informed by the playcentric design methodology (Fullerton,
2019) I have been trained in at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Drawing on practices of User
Experience (UX) research and human-centered design, this methodology involves setting goals
for what participants might experience. These goals are visually mapped in Chapter Three of this
paper as design conjectures (Sandoval, 2014). We attempted to design in ways that supported
these goals, and then studied participants’ experiences in the learning environment and the games
it incorporated, seeing if they resonated with our experience goals. This learner/player
experience research will allow us to improve the designs, creating new iterations of Kai
UnEarthed and of the Critical Game Jam curriculum that move closer toward our goals. While

7
actually developing these new iterations is beyond the scope of this dissertation, the empirical
research and its outcomes will support that work. It will also inform related abolitionist game
design and curriculum development efforts in the context of an ongoing participatory design
research process that will continue after I graduate. Given these aims, the study posed the
following questions:
Research Questions
RQ1) How can one design learning spaces, games, and game design activities that support
the development of critical game literacies?
1a) How, if at all, did participants experience critical game literacies learning during a
game jam and a game (Kai UnEarthed) designed to prototype such learning experiences?
1b) How, if at all, did the design of the game jam (including Kai UnEarthed) support
these learning experiences?
1c) What could be done differently in the future to iterate on these designs so that they
better support critical game literacy learning experiences?

RQ2) How can one design learning spaces, games, and game design activities that support
Afrofuturist development?
2a) How, if at all, did participants experience Afrofuturist development during a game
jam and a game (Kai UnEarthed) designed to prototype such learning experiences?
2b) How, if at all, did the design of the game jam (including Kai UnEarthed) support
these learning experiences?
2c) What could be done differently in the future to iterate on these designs so that they
better support Afrofuturist development learning experiences?

8

The findings for RQ1 are reported as Chapter Four of this dissertation, and the findings
for RQ2 are reported as Chapter Five.
Significance of the Study
Consistent with norms of design-based research (Barab & Squire, 2004), this study aims
to generate immediately useful products that also embody deeper theoretical and conceptual
questions about how people learn, contributing to the broader research literature. Answering
these research questions involved an analysis of themes in the learning environment, generating
design principles that could inform future critical game literacies and Afrofuturist development
learning spaces.
The discussion section of the dissertation (Chapter Six) links findings back to the
literature, filling several existing gaps: 1) a scarcity of game literacy studies with critical
approaches, 2) a lack of critical gaming studies that focus on modeling liberation, 3) a lack of
critical studies that involve both playing and making games and the relationship between these
activities, 4) a lack of game literacy studies that focus on anti-racism and Black liberation and 5)
a lack of game design studies involving young adults. In filling these gaps, the study also
deepens our understanding of Afrofuturist development, critical game literacies, and the
relationship between the two. These findings will likely be relevant to computer science,
language arts, and social studies education, with the potential to deepen critical practices in the
fields of educational game design and game-based learning.

9
Definitions and Related Concepts Used in This Study
Play is a transformative, process-oriented, unpredictable, consensual, self-regulated,
rhythmic, and episodic engagement with the world involving intensified meaning and revelation
of new capabilities (Henricks, 2015). Play is also slippage in a system, “free movement within a
more rigid structure,” the “interstitial spaces” between the components of a system otherwise
built for utilitarian purposes (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, cited in Fullerton, 2019, p. 39).
Building on this concept, educational game designer Tracy Fullerton (in Tierney et al., 2014)
argues that games are not efficient educational content delivery systems; they are intentionally
inefficient because play involves taking advantage of those imperfections. This makes games
good ways to develop critical literacies about systems and how to challenge them (Fullerton,
July, 2021, personal communication). In this sense, “play is a rebellion against the forms and
forces of the world.” (Henricks, 2015, loc 1451).
Games. In the literature, a game is most commonly defined as “a system in which players
engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (Salen &
Zimmerman, 2004, p. 3). This definition supports analyses of games as procedural systems
producing emergent interactive dynamics called procedural rhetoric; in this way, games convey
meaning differently than texts and other multimodal media (Garcia, 2017; Gee & Aguilera,
2021). As Bogost (2007) argues, only procedural systems like games “represent process with
process” (p. 14) rather than with images or texts. However, games are not just systems, they are
also worlds full of audiovisual signification and player imagination that interact with the worlds
players inhabit (Squire, 2011). Sicart (2011) warns that defining games as systems threatens to
instrumentalize play into rationalist procedures that can be measured quantitatively, stripping
them of these sociocultural contexts. Games are ergotic phenomena (Apperley and Beavis, 2013)

10
that are not complete until players add their own activity to them, so players function as design
apprentices who co-create the game (Aarseth, 1997). Thus, games cannot be fully understood
without analyzing players’ experiences playing them (Fullerton, 2019; Sicart, 2011; Upton,
2017). Moreover, the definition of a game is fluid and contested; Tracy Fullerton (2019), Brian
Upton (2017), and other experimental designers are pushing the limits of what games can be,
e.g., creating games with no win states (p. 49).
Modding means altering a game, e.g., by hacking its code to change the game’s rules and
interactivity, or altering the art to change characters’ representation.
Metagames and Metagaming. Metagames are everything that happens around, before,
after, during, between, on (or any other preposition) in relation to games (Garcia et al., 2020),
including activities like modding, streaming, finding glitches, etc. (Boluk & LeMieux, 2017).
The video game industry reifies games as closed, unalterable commodities (Boluk & LeMieux,
2017), conflating the act of play with consumption, and generating an ideological conflict
between play and production; metagaming challenges this reification and separation. Play
requires consensual agreement on the rules of the game (Henricks, 2015), where rules are
generative, freely chosen constraints that prompt creative and emergent behaviors rather than
legalistic governance. Bernard DeKoven (2013), founder of the New Games Movement, argued
that playing well is a process of consensually and dynamically altering the rules of play to suit
the evolving needs of a play community; in this perspective, the roles of player, game designer,
and facilitator/community organizer overlap. The industry undermines this consensus process by
conflating rules with unalterable and proprietary code regulated by intellectual property laws and
contracts (Boluk & LeMieux, 2017). Metagamers challenge this by hacking, modding,

11
recontextualizing, and breaking games, using them as equipment to make metagames (Boluk &
Lemieux, 2017).
Playcentric Game Design Methodology. A game design process that involves setting a
player experience goal, creating a prototype of the game, and then playtesting the game with
players to see if their experiences are consistent with the goal; then, a new iteration of the
prototype is created based on that research (Fullerton, 2019).
Literacies. Literacy is a “socially-situated and semiotic (sign-based) activity, focused on
the communication of meaning” (Gee & Aguilera, 2021, p. 173). Consistent with sociocultural
learning theories, literacies are changing and changeable social practices, so I use the term
literacies in the plural to signify this multiplicity (Street, 2003).
Critical Literacies. These are literacy practices that involve the “critique and
transformation of dominant ideologies, cultures and economies, institutions, and political
systems” (Luke, 2014, p. 22). The goal of critical literacies is to nurture critical consciousness.
Critical Consciousness includes “capacities to critically analyze the contradictions that
drive society (e.g., class struggles and struggles between white supremacist systems and anti-
racist/decolonial movements), and the ability to use this knowledge to take action to liberate
oneself and one's community from oppression” (Tynes, et al., 2023). It is not just cynical
criticism, it involves transformative potential, transformative action (Jemal, 2017), and
imagining liberated futures (Storm & Jones, 2021).
Critical Pedagogy. An approach to education that is:
Rooted in the experiences of marginalized peoples; that is centered in a critique of
structural, economic, and racial oppression; that is focused on dialogue instead of a one-
way transmission of knowledge; and that is structured to empower individuals and
collectives as agents of social change (Duncan Andrade & Morrell, p. 183).

12
Freire (1972) developed critical pedagogies in his critical literacy efforts among working class
people in Latin America, teaching them to read the word and the world. He used methods such as
codification, which involves discussing a theme, engaging with a piece of media that codifies
that theme, and then encouraging students to critically analyze the theme and the media; the goal
is for students to see themselves as shapers of a discourse and not passive objects of it (Crocco,
2011; Freire, 1972). This study codifies themes through games in a similar way. Freirean
pedagogy also involves the teacher becoming a student and the student becoming a teacher
(Freire, 1972).
Game Literacies. These are the literacies required to analyze, design, and play games.
This definition builds on Apperley & Beavis’ (2013) definition, but includes analog as well as
digital games. Modding or designing a game (playing like a designer) is analogous to learning to
read metacognitively like a writer (Gee, 2013). While games involve procedural rhetoric that
goes beyond textual semiotics (Bogost, 2007; Garcia, 2017; Gee & Aguilera, 2021), gaming is
also a “narrative, hewn out of the ‘verbs’ made available within a game design…in effect, games
are narrative spaces that the player inscribes with his or her own intent” (Steinkuehler, 2010, p.
61). For this reason, games can be situated in learning spaces in ways that are analogous to how
texts can be situated, e.g., as Freirean (1972) codification devices in critical media literacy
learning, or as mentor texts to support students in designing their own games (T. Fullerton, M.
Farber, and M. Hamilton, personal communication, 2021; this is how we positioned the game
Walden in a curriculum we designed).
Multimodal Literacies.
Game literacies can be understood through the broader concept of multimodal literacies,
which affords analyses of how “language, image, gesture, sound, and a variety of other modes”

13
communicate meaning (Garcia et al., 2020; Gee & Aguilera, 2021, p. 173; Mills & Unsworth,
2018; Mirra & Garcia, 2020). Games, like multimodal media more broadly, are both digital and
analog, and many have layers of digital and non-digital practices that interrelate in non-linear
ways (Garcia et al., 2020). I conceptualize digital gaming literacies as the intersection of
multimodal digital literacies broadly (which includes video game literacies) and multimodal
game literacies broadly, which occur in both digital and analog gaming practices (e.g., Garcia,
2017). Kai UnEarthed is intentionally multimodal, with digital audiovisual signification as well
as an accompanying analog game journal; its procedural rhetoric (what game designers would
call its game mechanics) are spread across both the analog and digital components, and its
worldbuilding thematizes critical reflection on the relationships between digital, analog, and
organic/ecological communication. However, because this is a study of an online game design
environment, and because we had to playtest Kai UnEarthed entirely virtually due to the
pandemic, the empirical literature I reviewed in Chapter Two focuses on the affordances of
digital technologies for the multimodal composition (Mirra and Garcia, 2020) of digital and
analog games. Future studies based on the outcomes of this one could focus more on the analog
components of Kai UnEarthed and how people learn with them, or on analog games informed by
the Critical Game Jam discussed in Chapters Four through Six.
Games as Ideological Worlds. Squire (2011) conceptualized games as “ideological
worlds” because they are “built according to theories of how the world operates…every game
makes value judgements about what is and is not important” (p. 29). Like ideologies, these
worlds are embedded with power-laden partial truths that help us analyze the real world in
consequential but flawed ways. For these reasons, when studying game literacies, researchers
should ask questions like: who decides what gets attention and what gets left out, and why?

14
Whose ideologies get to be modeled as game worlds, and what real world actions are they
simulating?
Critical Game Literacies (CGL). These are the literacies required to play, analyze,
modify, and design games in ways that challenge systemic oppression. This definition is
informed by existing pedagogical frameworks for critical game literacy teaching (e.g., Apperley
& Beavis, 2013; Crocco, 2011; De Albuquerque & Ainsworth, 2013), particularly the latter two
frameworks’ use of Freirean critical pedagogies. However, this study moves beyond the
separation some of these frameworks articulate between playing and designing games; these
activities have already begun to merge in metagaming cultures (Boluk & LeMieux, 2017) and
connected gaming research (Kafai & Burke, 2016). Moreover, young people need access to game
design learning opportunities where they can create their own ideological worlds (Squire, 2011)
to model liberation from systemic oppression. Since game design is like writing, students
deserve a chance to think like authors (Middaugh & Asato, 2020). Gee (2013) argues that writing
has always been the high end of print literacy and that game design is the high end of game
literacy; if students from non-dominant backgrounds are not taught how to do it, then schools
risk creating a situation similar to feudalism where high-end literacies are dominated by digital
priests who control the information received by a less literate digital laity.
Critical Race Game Literacies (CRGL). The literacies required to play, analyze,
modify, and design games in ways that challenge systemic racism/white supremacy/ anti-
Blackness. For example, they are forms of CGL that support movements for Black liberation and
abolitionism. Drawing from the Afrofuturist Development Theory’s grounding in Black
feminism (Tynes et al., 2023), CRGL skills also involve challenges to forms of oppression that
intersect with systemic racism, e.g., particular forms of racist heteropatriarchy that impact Black

15
women and LGBTQIA+ people. This study conceptualizes CRGL as a synthesis between critical
game literacies and critical race digital literacies.
Critical Race Digital Literacy (CRDL). Named as a priority in a recent National
Academy of Education report (Garcia et al., 2021), CRDL includes “creating digital media,
artifacts and processes in ways that embody a person’s interests and help to organize and liberate
communities” (Tynes, Stewart et al., 2021, p. 112). CRDL is compatible with critical pedagogies
because it goes beyond existing digital media literacy efforts that focus on individual skills and
protecting young people from threats online, emphasizing the need to prepare students to
“understand, recognize, and respond to structural factors, particularly racism, as they relate to
discourse and reasoning in the digital age" (Garcia et al., 2021, p. 320). CRDL informs how this
study conceptualizes critical race game literacies.
Racialized Pedagogical Zones (RPZ) are simulated environments in which players
practice and learn racism, e.g., racialized stereotypes that white players learn while playing
stereotypical Black characters in video games (Everett & Watkins, 2008). While some games
with racialized ideological worlds might be read as satires of racism in the broader media and
society (Darvasi, 2020; Devane & Squire, 2008), critical approaches are needed to question
whether a given game in a given setting is teaching people to simulate oppression or to critique
it. For example, Acosta and Denham (2018) criticize the use of history games about slavery; they
are right to caution that uncritically adopting such games in the classroom could be harmful to
Black students and could simulate oppression. Gray (2020) raises similar concerns about recent
games featuring police brutality.
Black liberation. The movement among Black people (and their collaborators) towards
freedom from systemic anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and institutionalized racism.

16
Historically, the Black liberation movement has included efforts towards reparations, self-
determination, abolitionism, and decolonization, and some wings of the movement are trying to
build liberated futures that are non-capitalistic, communal, or even communistic. Black liberation
often involves international solidarity with struggles across Africa and the African diaspora, and
sometimes involves solidarity with indigenous and working-class peoples globally. The
movement historically has included maroon communities of people who liberated themselves
from slavery, the Black Panther Party and anti-colonial movements of the 1960s, and the
movement for Black lives and rebellions against carceral infrastructure today (e.g., Cleaver &
Katsiaficas, 2014; Collins, 2002; Fanon, 2007; Gumbs, 2016; Hilliard, 1995; James, 1989;
James, et al., 2006; Kelley, 2002; Lorde, 2020; Robinson, 1983; Shakur, 2020; Shoatz, 2013;
Taylor, 2017).
Queer liberation. The movement to abolish heteropatriarchy, the gender binary, and the
carceral infrastructures that reproduce them (including police, prisons, and repressive psychiatric
institutions). This movement goes beyond securing rights and mainstream representation for
LGBTQIA+ people; it challenges the ways that capitalism reproduces itself through
heteropatriarchal family structures, the devaluation of love and care, and imposition of Western
colonial codes of gender on indigenous societies. Queer liberation necessarily includes trans
liberation, the liberation of non-binary people, and feminism. As I argue in Appendix B, queer
liberation is necessarily abolitionist and should remain aligned with the Black liberation
movement, which gave birth to it in the 1970s during the Stonewall Rebellion (e.g., DeFilippis,
2018; Gumbs, 2016; Lorde, 2020; Mulé, 2018; Stanley & Spade, 2012).
Abolitionism. The movement to abolish police, prisons, and related carceral
infrastructures, and to build worlds where collective safety, dignity, and belonging do not rely on

17
such institutions (e.g., Davis, 2003; Davis & Rodriguez, 2000; Garcia & de Roock, 2021; Kaba,
2020; Love, 2019; Salam & Castillon, 2021).
Critical Speculative Imagination. “The capacity to conjure, enact, and rehearse future
worlds free from oppression” (Tynes, et al., 2023). The theoretical framework of this study
conceptualizes this by synthesizing theories of play-based imagination, critical consciousness,
and speculative worldbuilding, i.e., Afrofuturist development (Tynes, et al., 2023).
Proleptic Design Demonstrations. These are moments when a facilitator or more
experienced peer demonstrates a design activity, showing what is possible, and then invites
learners to participate in it on their own terms (Vossoughi et al., 2021). Such pedagogical moves
are consistent with Gee’s (2013) grounding of game literacies within broader practices of
embodied learning through participation in well-designed problem-solving spaces; he
distinguishes this from conservative drill-based practice for tests on the one hand and extreme
liberal individualism on the other, where students are left alone to teach themselves, wasting
their time without adequate support (Gee, 2013).
Affinity Spaces are mixed-ability groups where people learn and produce shared
knowledge together based on shared passions and interests; they feature reciprocal roles,
multiple routes to participation, honoring of tacit knowledge and naming of knowledge to make
it explicit, support/scaffolding, porous leadership, and feedback from an authentic community
(Gee & Hayes, 2010; Gee, 2013). In these spaces, trust among relative strangers is built through
joint activity (Squire, 2011; Steinkuehler, 2006).
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy are practices which support academic achievement,
promote critical consciousness, and build upon cultural assets from communities of color
(Ladson-Billings, 1995). Culturally relevant game design pedagogies invite students to create

18
games based in multimodal literacies (digital and analog), gameplay practices, and creativity
already present within their communities, building on these in ways that make their games
relevant to their peers.
Organization of this Dissertation
Chapter Two weaves together theories for approaching this study, and then engages the
existing empirical literature on game literacies, identifying gaps where critical approaches are
needed; it concludes with a synthesis of literature on core components of critical game literacies:
critical play, critical modding, and critical design. Chapter Three outlines the design-based
research methodology used to answer this study’s research questions, as well as details on
sampling procedures, setting, and methods of data collection and analysis. Chapters Four and
Five report results of the study that answer each of the research questions; Chapter Four
describes and thematizes critical game literacy learning during the Critical Game Jam, and
Chapter Five describes and thematizes Afrofuturist development during the game jam. Chapter
Six discusses these findings, connecting them to existing literature, generating design principles
that can inform future learning environments featuring critical game literacies and Afrofuturist
development; it also covers limitations of the study and future directions for research not yet
covered by previous chapters.

19
Chapter Two: Review of Theoretical and Empirical Literature
While critical game literacies learning and Afrofuturist development are new topics of
research, attention to them is justified by a range of existing theoretical and empirical literature
grounded in decades of research on how people learn by playing, analyzing, modifying, and
designing games. This chapter engages with this literature in the following ways: a) it
synthesizes theoretical literature on critical sociocultural learning, connected gaming, abolitionist
critical theories, and key principles of the Afrofuturist Development Theory; b) it reviews and
synthesizes empirical research on game literacies broadly and on the component activities within
critical game literacies (playing, modding, and designing games to challenge systemic
oppression); c) it identifies gaps in the existing literature and ways they can be filled.
Theoretical Framework
Theoretical literature on how people learn through socioculturally-situated playful design
practices suggests that critical game literacies could support learners in prototyping worlds free
from systemic oppression. This section traces this theoretical conjecture by reviewing and
synthesizing literature on critical sociocultural learning - including future-oriented theories of
play and gaming - with abolitionist critical theories and key principles of the Afrofuturist
Development Theory.
Sociocultural Learning Theory
Sociocultural theory is a theory of how people learn and develop through historically
situated activities mediated by their culture, participation in activities with people around them,
and tools/ artifacts such as language and other technologies (Göncü & Gauvain, 2012). One form
of sociocultural theory, Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), focuses on how people

20
learn and develop through modifying objects to interact with each other and the world; in this
perspective, tools, including games and digital technologies, are not ideologically neutral
(Tettegah, et al., 2005; Roberts-Mahoney et al., 2016; Gray, 2020), they embody histories that
“both enable and constrain the types of agentive moves young people can make in their everyday
meaning-making and action-taking” (Gutiérrez , Higgs, et al., 2019, p. 73). Sociocultural theory
has informed research on play (e.g., Göncü & Gauvain, 2012; Henricks, 2015), games (e.g.,
Garcia, 2017), critical approaches to multimodal literacies (e.g., Mirra & Garcia, 2020), and
connected learning for liberated futures (e.g., Gutiérrez, Higgs, et al., 2019), demonstrating its
relevance to the current study.
Games as Zones of Proximal Development.
Sociocultural theory supports analyses of games as lived experiences, not just formal
systems; the creators of a game and its players collaborate to co-create socioculturally-situated
acts of play (Fullerton, 2019; Gutiérrez, Higgs, et al., 2019; Sicart, 2011). Play is central to
sociocultural theorist Lev Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD),
which he defines as “the distance between [a learner’s] actual development level as determined
by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through
problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Vygotsky,
1978, p. 86). Vygotsky argued that play creates this zone in children:
Play provides a background for changes in needs and in consciousness of a much wider
nature. Play is the source of development and creates the zone of proximal development.
Action in the imaginative sphere, in an imaginary situation, the creation of voluntary
intentions, and the formation of real-life plans and volitional motives – all appear in play
and make it the highest level of preschool development. The child moves forward
essentially through play activity (Vygotsky, 1967, p. 16).
Building on this insight, researchers have theorized play as a leading activity: interactions
optimized to support currently developing cognitive capacities while at the same time laying the

21
groundwork for capacities that can develop next (Leont’ev, 1981; Griffin & Cole, 1984;
Gutiérrez, Higgs, et al., 2019).
Play and Development Among Emerging Adults.
Sociocultural theory offers a developmental perspective that is relevant to studying
learning among emerging adults. Theorists of leading activities often claim that each
developmental phase of life involves a different leading activity: imaginative play in early
childhood, followed by school-based learning during middle childhood, peer social interactions
during adolescence, and work during adulthood (Gutiérrez, Higgs, et al., 2019). Because of the
emphasis on work among adults, Henricks (2015) critiques the Vygotskian theoretical tradition
for underestimating the power of play in adolescent and adult development. However, Gutiérrez,
Higgs, and colleagues (2019) argue that play remains a potential leading activity throughout the
lifespan, building on a range of sociocultural research they cite (p. 71-72). They also theorize
that already-experienced leading activities do not disappear; they become “part of the foundation
of everyday activities upon which new forms of activity are built” (p. 71).
Children play partially because they do not control their situation and they get frustrated
with it so they develop imaginative capacities to act out desires that cannot (yet) be fulfilled
materially; this becomes a leading activity, a zone of proximal development for learning
symbolic thinking (Vygotsky and Sutton-Smith, cited and analyzed in Henricks, 2015; Flanagan,
2009). If play remains a leading activity into adulthood, it is possible that it might form zones for
proximally developing imagination among adolescents and adults as well, making it relevant for
educators who aim to encourage critical imagination. Marxist game studies scholar Jamie
Woodcock (2019) suggested that the content of adult ludic imagination might be shaped by
adults’ frustrations with work and/or unemployment. He theorized videogame play as a

22
psychological refusal of alienated capitalist labor and a potential space for imagining worlds
outside of it. To describe this refusal phenomenologically, he quoted Jane McGonigal, who said:
Games provide a sense of waking in the morning with one goal: I’m trying to improve
this skill, teammates are counting on me, and my online community is relying on me.
There is a routine and daily progress that does a good job at replacing traditional work.

From this perspective, gaming and game design activities could be spaces where adolescents and
adults learn together, where they experience the joy of seeing what they are capable of
(Henricks, 2015) in ways that might be blocked or underdeveloped inside capitalist schools and
workplaces.
This developmental perspective challenges commonplace biases against adolescent and
adult gameplay that can be characterized as anti-ludic adultism, the idea that games are an
unproductive waste of time that should be left behind when childhood ends. Some game
designers internalize these biases, thinking that what happens inside a game does not matter in
the real world, underestimating and refusing to take responsibility for their real power as creators
of a growing and influential media ecosystem (Gray & Leonard, 2018). Understanding this
power is crucial for designing games that can support the development of critical game literacies
among adolescents and adults.
Scaffolding Connected Gaming.
While sociocultural theory focuses on learning through play, some versions of it have
conceptualized playing and designing games as part of a combined and coherent learning
ecology rather than as separate domains (e.g., Gutiérrez, Becker, et al., 2019; Gutiérrez, Higgs,
et. al 2019). This approach is compatible with the theory of Connected Gaming (Kafai and
Burke, 2016) which argues that the roles of player and game designer are already merging in
metagaming cultures (Gee, 2013; developed further by Boluk & LeMieux, 2016), so educators

23
should build on this trend. Connected Gaming combines instructionist approaches (using games
to teach skills) with constructionist practices that invite students to create their own games for
learning, sharing these with their peers (Kafai & Burke, 2016) as an authentic audience for
multimodal composition (Mirra & Garcia, 2020). Kafai and Burke (2016) ground this approach
in the framework of constructionism, associated with Seymour Papert, which values making
personally meaningful artifacts as a core learning activity. They argue that creating for a peer
audience boosts both engagement and subject-matter learning - even when the games students
create are not as complex as commercial video games (Kafai & Burke, 2015).
This study embraces Connected Gaming’s constructionist emphasis on discovery
through design, but it takes a sociocultural approach to design thinking, arguing that its
development is mediated by tools, mentors, and more experienced peers (e.g., Gee, 2013;
Vossoughi, 2021). For example, the games learners create might be scaffolded by game engines
and templates like Scratch or Twine that provide low barriers of entry by facilitating technical
processes and allowing for remixability (Kafai & Burke, 2015). Also, mentors might provide
proleptic design demonstrations (Vossoughi, 2021) to show learners what is possible. Such an
approach is consistent with Connected Gaming’s foundations in Connected Learning (e.g.,
Gutiérrez, Higgs, et. al 2019, Squire, 2011, Gee, 2013) a framework that involves connecting
students’ personal interests with networks of supportive relationships, tools, and resources (Ito et
al., 2013). It also draws from the concept of participatory cultures (Jenkins,2006), where artistic
expression and civic engagement are supported by informal mentorship that can scaffold
collaborative creativity.

24
Learners as Historical Actors in the Production of Possible Futures.
Sociocultural theory offers a way to make sense of the future-oriented aspects of
gameplay and game design, especially through a strand of sociocultural theory called historical
actor theory (Gutiérrez, Higgs, et al., 2019). Gutiérrez, Higgs, and colleagues analyzed how
young people modified and repurposed technologies in an afterschool makerspace, e.g., how they
used their new video game coding knowledge to discover and manipulate glitches in commercial
games. From this, they generated a theory of how people become historical actors in the
production of possible futures. They theorized this process as follows: first, there is a double-
bind or contradiction between the person’s activity and the normative order (e.g., the code of a
game), people then breach that order through tinkering, then they cycle through wider social
experimentation to support this tinkering, e.g., discussions or finding YouTube resources; finally,
the object of their activity expands and consolidates into a larger learning ecology involving
literacy activities across multiple media (Gutiérrez, Becker, et al., 2019).
This theory is consistent with the sociocultural epistemologies theorized by game literacy
scholars, who recognize this futurity in the acts of designing and playing games. For example,
Gee (2013) argues that humans think best when they can imagine and simulate meaningful
experiences that prepare them for action in the world, so his criteria for good video games are
“action-and-goal-directed preparations for, and simulations of, embodied experience” (p. 7). He
describes a “circuit of reflective action” (Gee, 2013, p. 52), where humans explore the
constraints and affordances of a world to predict future actions, then they take action to check if
their prediction came true, and they adjust their understanding of the world’s constraints and
affordances based on feedback that informs future action. Through this process, people tend to
tell “identity stories” about how the world responds to them (p. 54) and when they play

25
characters in video games, this allows them to explore multiple possible selves that are projective
identities, composites of their own experiences and the characters. Gee says this process involves
thinking like a game designer. Squire (2011) builds on this epistemology, but he more clearly
differentiates games from simulations; he says games do simulate and model worlds and
identities, but that's not the only thing they can do, they also allow for speculation beyond
realism, imagining alternative past and present worlds, or future worlds that do not yet exist.
For these reasons, gameplay itself involves designing possible future worlds and lives;
players are constantly asking the question “what happens next if…” (Atkins, 2006). This
epistemology of ludic futurity suggests that critical gaming might support the goals of critical
speculative education projects focused on supporting young people in imagining, building, and
fighting for liberated futures (e.g., Garcia & Mirra, 2021; Love, 2019; Truman, 2019; Tynes, et
al., 2023; Tolliver, 2021). When combined with critical consciousness-raising, the player’s
question “what happens next if” could conceptualize the potentials of real-life embodied
movements for liberation. Games could prompt players to ask questions like “what happens next
if we walk out of school to protest police brutality” or “what happens 200 years in the future if
our generation makes a revolution to stop fossil fuel production.” To support such potentials,
sociocultural game literacies research needs to engage with critical theories.
Abolitionist Critical Theories
Critical theories analyze social conflicts over how people use technology to produce
things and relationships; the goal of such analysis is to challenge oppressive systems and develop
strategies for liberation (Au, 2018). Sociocultural theory has critical - e.g., Marxist - roots in
Vygotsky’s participation in the 1917 Soviet revolution, but its potential as a critical theory has
been ignored or underdeveloped in mainstream research (Au, 2018). Critical sociocultural

26
theorists study social contradictions at the level of learning environments and ecologies (e.g.
Gutiérrez, Becker, et al., 2019) while recognizing that these, in turn, are shaped by macro-level
systemic contradictions.
A key systemic contradiction that shapes learning today is the conflict between capitalism
and the human capacities it renders extra, manifested politically as a conflict between carceral
infrastructures and movements that aim to abolish them. As neoliberal capitalism refines its
technological control over labor, it renders larger and larger numbers of people disposable,
treating them like a surplus population (Saltman, 2016). As Gilmore (2007) theorizes, capitalism
has left communities with extra capacities that it cannot absorb through work and school, and in
the US (Gilmore studied California), the prison system has grown to control these capacities. The
carceral capitalist system targets Black people in particular, through police brutality, mass
incarceration, and classroom practices that mirror their logics of control and discipline
(Alexander, 2010; Love, 2019). Clover (2019) theorizes 21
st
century riots against police violence
as conscious expressions of repressed human capacities, breaking out of these carceral control
schemes set up to contain them. These theoretical insights help make sense of the 2020 George
Floyd Rebellion against police violence.
In the wake of the rebellion, abolitionism has re-emerged as a core part of the Black
liberation movement, calling for the destruction and dismantling of carceral infrastructures and a
proliferation of forms of communal life that they currently suppress (e.g. Kaba, 2020; Salam &
Castillon, 2021). However, this movement faces formidable challenges. Benjamin (2019) has
documented how capitalism is co-opting calls for equity that have emerged in the wake of earlier
waves of rebellion (e.g., Ferguson in 2014); it is doing so by morphing into new forms of digital
surveillance, decentralized incarceration, and racist algorithmic control that she calls the New

27
Jim Code. Critical digital literacy education today needs to focus on abolishing these oppressive
carceral systems and technological platforms inside and outside the classroom, preparing
students for the fact that digital media has become a battleground (Garcia & de Roock, 2021).
Relatedly, critical educators such as Bettina Love are designing abolitionist pedagogies
that involve freedom dreaming (Kelley, 2002), imagining future worlds free from anti-Black
institutions such as police, prisons, and prison-like schooling (Love, 2019). Building on the
already-existing forms of sophisticated play in Black cultures, Love (2019) asserts that freedom
dreaming can be realized through art and design-based learning experiences where Black
students can express joy; she argues such learning is not just an extra-curricular activity, it is a
key part of imagining and building liberated learning spaces and future worlds.
To contribute to these critical efforts, educators can develop learning environments that
support critical game literacies, defined as the literacies needed to play, analyze, modify, and
design games that challenge systemic oppression. Such an approach can build on the work of
scholars who have conceptualized game literacies as ways young people can assert that they
matter beyond market logics, forming new social relationships that can help them live
meaningful lives (Croco, 2011; Gee, 2013). In particular, they could be ways that young Black
people can assert that their lives matter in the face of a carceral capitalist system that tries to treat
them as extra and disposable. In doing so, young people could use games as a medium to
imagine, build, and defend worlds where Black people thrive, enacting a process of Afrofuturist
development (Tynes, et al., 2023).
Afrofuturist Development: A Theory and Design Lens
Based on the critical theories just reviewed, focusing studies on Black liberation is
necessary and timely; not only does carceral capitalist schooling target Black people in particular

28
ways, but the most potent and transformative movements of our times have been Black liberation
struggles against carceral infrastructures (Salam & Castillon, 2019). From a critical sociocultural
learning perspective, we can expect these movements to shape contexts of learning and
development well into the future, so studies that ignore what Black people do are missing a core
aspect of social reality
1
. To make sense of these real potentials, one needs a comprehensive
theory of how young Black people learn within technology-enhanced environments, with an
emphasis on possible futures; Afrofuturist development offers this, as a “theory, design lens, and
praxis for Black child, adolescent and emerging adult thrival” (Tynes, et al., 2023).
This theory combines frameworks from Black liberation and developmental psychology
literature with interdisciplinary insights from Afrofuturism, a pan-African cultural movement
focused on race and technology that involves challenging anti-Black notions of the future and
imagining pro-Black ones (e.g., Anderson & Jones, 2016; Eshun, 2003). Combining perspectives
on mental health, critical consciousness, and Afrodiasporic ontologies of spirit and technology,
“Afrofuturist Developmental uses of technology include, but go beyond, the transformational to
experiences that are spirit-feeding and promotive of wellbeing” (Tynes, et al., 2023). The theory
outlines ten core principles which focus on “Black and/or Africana learning and development in
homes, schools, communities, online, and at work across developmental stages” (Tynes, et al.,
2023). These are included in Appendix C.
The Afrofuturist Development Theory has informed the design of the game jam in this
study, and the paper publishing the framework included initial case study data from it: “Findings
show how researchers were able to examine the creative talents, intellect, and practices of Black

1
Appendix B explains further why my conception of critical speculative imagination focuses on Black
liberation, including critical reflections on my positionality and how my research contributes to broader movement
strategies.

29
emerging adults using media and technology to project their visions of a liberated Black possible
future” (Tynes, et al., 2023). This case study did not, however, analyze Afrofuturist development
across the entire body of data from the game jam, nor did it involve studying critical game
literacy learning and possible connections between the two forms of learning; this study does
both.
Afrofuturist development’s emphasis on Black futures is compatible with the theories of
futurity in critical game literacies reviewed earlier, especially historical actor theory (Gutiérrez,
Becker, et al., 2019). When combined together, these theories reveal how young Black people
can use their critical game literacies to design future worlds where Black people thrive, and they
equip researchers and educators to design learning spaces that can support them in doing that.
Several of the ten Afrofuturist development principles are particularly relevant to these tasks.
Thriving Black Futures and Afrofuturistic Selves.
Principle Ten states that “Black children and young people, often powered by their
Afrofuturistic selves, imagine, build, and reinvent liberated, pro-Black futures and technologies”
(Tynes, et. al, 2023). Afrofuturistic selves are:
Multidimensional self-concepts that center a) the individual within the context of Black
history; b) Black community, organization, and movement involvement; c) redefining
notions of success; and d) the iterative design of an (Afro)future self that may be
immediate or long-term, five seconds away or ten years (Schuschke & Tynes, in
preparation).
In the context of critical game literacy learning, when young Black people generate
Afrofuturistic selves they are able to imagine “critically, beyond existing constraints of the game
industry, intertwining their vocational paths with larger community struggles for liberation”
(Tynes, et. al, 2023). Such self-concepts resonate with the enlarged sense of purpose that Gee
(2013) and Crocco (2011) describe as a goal for critical game literacies learning, beyond the

30
current limits of vocational training and STEM-based game literacy programs. Afrofuturistic
selves might support young people in resisting disposability and expressing capacities that have
been rendered extra by grounding these capacities within Black histories and possible futures.
Moreover, in addition to new self-concepts, this principle involves a different
conceptualization of time, informed by Black Quantum Futurism (Phillips, 2015), which, in turn,
is informed by quantum physics and Black/African ontologies of consciousness, time and space
(Tynes, et.al, 2023) where the past, present, and future are not separate from each other as they
are in Western ontologies. As the framework puts it, “African descended people should be made
aware of their power to see, create or choose a desired future”; they can “bend spacetime” by
imagining such futures and then making them happen through socially organizing the necessary
capacities and resources (Tynes, et.al, 2023).
Similarly, Principle Two of the framework argues that Afrofuturist development requires
that “contexts in which children and young people learn, play, and work center their full
humanity, as well as foster Black aliveness and innovations of speculative futures void of
oppressions.” This principle further develops Love’s (2019) emphasis on Black joy, and prompts
researchers and designers to attune ourselves to the ways in which critical play and design
thinking are already present within Black cultures:
When developing interventions, programs and curricula, scholars/educators might
consider intersectionality along with their rich cultures, including the expansive spiritual
lives of Black young people and the innovative use of technology for the purposes of
liberation and world-building in the face of systemic oppression (Tynes, et.al, 2023).
This principle’s emphasis on intersectionality means supporting all Black young people,
including LGBTQIA+ people. This framing grounds my understanding of queer liberation as a
part of the Black liberation and abolitionist movements (see Appendix B for details), and it
warrants further attempts to develop anti-racist queer futurities within critical game literacies

31
research (Storm & Jones, 2021). The emphasis on spirituality supports educational games such
as Kai UnEarthed that intentionally incorporate aspects of ritual, meditation, and mindfulness
with themes of ancestral spiritual connection. The emphasis on worldbuilding supports critical
game literacy learning spaces where young people can create game-worlds to model possible
futures free from systemic oppression.
Critical Consciousness, Imagination, and Action.
Afrofuturist development does not deploy spiritual concepts to bypass necessary and
immediate sociopolitical action against oppressive institutions; it deploys them to supplement,
inspire, and ground such action, while recognizing that Blackness cannot be reduced to anti-
racist resistance alone (Brock, 2020; Love, 2019). Principle five of the theory states that “Critical
consciousness and action are competencies taught in developmentally appropriate ways to
support Black people as they navigate and resist oppressive media, technology, institutions and
social practices.” This principle draws on Black liberation psychology (e.g., Fanon, 1967),
critical pedagogies (e.g., Freire, 1972), Black feminism (e.g., Collins, 2002; Crenshaw, 2017;
Morris, 2012, 2016; Taylor, 2017), and critical race digital literacy research (Tynes, Stewart, et
al., 2021). From an Afrofuturist perspective, critical consciousness is not simply a negation of
existing oppression, it also involves imagining other ways of living and thriving that could
replace it; critical literacies researchers have begun to identify a need for learning spaces that
foster this kind of thinking (Storm & Jones, 2021). For this reason, Afrofuturist development
also involves critical speculative imagination, and argues it can be taught, developed, and studied
by educators and researchers (Tynes, et.al, 2023).
When synthesized, these theories motivate research and design efforts to enhance the
tendencies toward critical speculative imagination in critical game literacies learning

32
environments, challenging capitalist disposability and carceral infrastructures. Such efforts can
be part of Afrofuturist development, supporting young people in prototyping, rehearsing, and
inhabiting worlds where Black people are free. In order to relate such efforts to existing
educational practice, I will now review empirical literature on (critical) game literacies.
Review of Empirical Literature
In this section I will review and synthesize existing literature on game literacies, with a
focus on studies that include learning through game design. Then I will review and synthesize
existing research on the core activities of critical game literacies: how people play, modify, and
design games in ways that challenge systemic oppression. Throughout, I will identify gaps in the
empirical literature and emergent threads of research that could be developed further.
Game Literacies Research
Researchers have studied game literacies in a variety of ways. They have studied learning
in popular gaming cultures in order to distill design principles that can be implemented in game-
based learning research in schools and other environments. While such approaches have often
focused on teaching through games rather than supporting students in designing their own
games, a smaller body of literature on student game design has found that it can support
computational literacies, broader literacies learning (e.g., writing and systems thinking), respect
for intergenerational indigenous storytelling practices, and collaborative skills. These forms of
learning sometimes happen through design challenges such as game jams.
Research on Learning in Popular Gaming Cultures.
Reporting her research on disconnects between the in-school literacies vs. the game
literacies of teenage boys, Constance Steinkuehler (2010) provided a case study of a boy named

33
Julio who tested three grade levels below his current grade in reading but when given the chance
to choose a specific topic to read about, he selected a text four grades above his grade-level and
was able to read it effectively with a high self-correction rate. Steinkuehler (2010) associates this
with his regular practice of reading and writing complex texts related to his gaming interests and
sharing these with his friends. Based on these findings and her broader study, she argues that two
different and related kinds of digital game literacies exist. On the one hand, playing video games
involves reading the game’s meanings and writing ones’ own meanings into the game. On the
other hand, complex literacies are evident in activities that are now called metagaming (Boluk &
LeMieux, 2017). Game literacies research has tended to focus on these two forms of literacy.
Analyses of Commercial Games.
Multimodal literacies scholar James Paul Gee catalyzed research on the first set of
literacy practices. He argued that game design is an applied science of learning because
successful commercial game designers need to teach people to play games that are often long
and complex, while maintaining engagement throughout (Gee, 2011). Gee applied literacy and
learning sciences theories to conduct detailed analyses of how they do this, synthesizing 36
principles of learning he found embedded in games’ designs. For example, he found that
designers build tutorial processes that function like sandboxes. These are safer spaces that feel
like the broader world but with less risk, limiting the consequences of failure, making it more
possible for people to learn through playfully trying things out and persisting past their mistakes.
He also found that designers build what he calls fish-tanks: simplified models of the world that
display interactions between key variables that would otherwise be obscured by the real world’s
complexity (Gee, 2013).

34
However, Everett and Watkins’ (2008) discourse analyses of urban street games like
Grand Theft Auto (GTA) shows that these pedagogical features of commercial games are not
ideologically neutral. They found that these games market their immersive, culturally specific
worldbuilding (e.g., language, music, gang politics, etc.) as an authentic representation of urban
neighborhoods, obscuring how these are actually design choices curated from existing racist
scripts about Black people and the places they live. For that reason, they argued that succeeding
at these games requires enacting and practicing existing racist ideologies, performing “digital
blackface” (p. 149). They conclude that such games are “racialized pedagogical zones” (RPZs)
that tie the pleasurable aspects of game-based learning to the reproduction of stereotypes (p.
150). These findings are complicated by studies of how adolescents play these games, which
have found that white participants either read GTA as a satire of mass media and were able to
critique its racial stereotypes (Devane & Squire, 2008), or they naturalized these stereotypes but
became more critically self-aware they were doing so through the support of critical media
literacy interventions (Darvasi, 2020). Black adolescents were able to compare and contrast the
game-world with their own experiences, opening up discussions about police racism and housing
discrimination in the game and in their lives (Devane & Squire, 2008). These findings suggest
that differentiated critical game literacy learning environments are needed to support people who
play these games in doing so more critically; if students already know how to do this, they can
use the games to critique racism in the broader society.
Studies of Literacy Practices in Metagaming Spaces.
The second major thread in game literacies research has involved studying learning and
literacies in metagaming activities such as discussion forums. For example, Steinkuehler and
Duncan (2008) studied scientific habits of mind in the massively multiplayer online (MMO)

35
game World of Warcraft. They found that 86% of discussions on the forum demonstrated social
knowledge construction, and over half showed systems-based reasoning. Also, an ethnographic
study of MMO chat dynamics found that participants communally sought information about the
game and shared it, challenging previous literature that had conceptualized digital media literacy
as an individual activity (Martin & Steinkuehler, 2010, p. 363).
Research on Game-Based Learning Environments.
These currents of game literacies research on popular gaming cultures have contributed to
broader currents of research on Game-Based Learning (GBL); the game literacies and GBL
literatures would overlap on a Venn diagram. Kurt Squire (2011) and others have strengthened
the connection between the two by applying the principles of learning and literacy discovered in
commercial games in design research efforts focused on the creation of game-based learning
environments, the study of students’ learning processes within them, and their improvement
through new cycles of iteration (Barab & Squire, 2004). The GBL research is too vast to
thoroughly review here, but I will highlight a few trends in the literature relevant for critical
game literacies learning research.
Metanalyses and reviews of the learning benefits of serious and educational games have
shown mixed results (e.g., Girard, 2012; Hodent, 2020), suggesting that specific contextual
details involving the design of games and learning environments matter; game-based learning is
not a one-sized-fits-all solution to problems in educational practice. Synthesizing early trends in
this literature, an MIT Education Arcade Report (Klopfer et al., 2009) concluded that learning
outcomes depend on how well the games themselves engage learners. Through design-based
research and research-based design efforts, Kurt Squire (2011) and Tracy Fullerton (in Tierney et
al., 2014) have found that games for learning need to include both effective pedagogical

36
practices and the actual aesthetic properties that make games engaging experiences for young
people, such as well-designed narratives, game mechanics, and audio-visual communication, and
these must be aligned well with each other.
For example, Tracy Fullerton’s game Walden uses techniques of engagement also used in
commercial games to teach canonical English-Language Arts subject matter as part of a
curriculum with carefully designed pedagogical activities. In creating the game, she also
experimented with new forms of interactivity design that involve finding the game within the
subject matter itself (Squire, 2011) rather than attempting to motivate people to learn the content
through extrinsic rewards. For example, Walden does not gamify mindfulness practice though
game mechanics such as points, streaks, and competitive leaderboards; instead, it digitizes the
already-existing game-like elements within Henry David Thoreau’s historical mindfulness
practice. A user-experience (UX) research study found this approach engaged participants who
were otherwise skeptical of gamified mindfulness apps (Hamilton, et al., 2021). The relevant
questions guiding playcentric research and design cycles (Fullerton, 2019) around educational
gaming do not involve asking how to use games as content delivery vehicles for traditional
learning goals; instead, researchers aim to better understand how people learn experientially,
creating game-worlds that enhance such experiences (Tierney et al., 2014). Such methods can
also be taught to young people so that they can use them to design games to support learning
among their peers.
Constructionist and Connected Gaming Research on Game Design.
While early experiments (e.g., Kafai, 1995) showed that learning through game design is
effective, studies on it have not proliferated as widely as game-based learning during the past
few decades of expanding video game production and consumption (Kafai & Burke, 2016).

37
Instructionist approaches to content delivery through games have overshadowed constructionist
approaches to learning through designing games; this stems from a market for games as complete
teaching products that can be implemented in classrooms (analogous to textbooks), educators
viewing game design as too technically demanding, and the video game industry’s worries about
piracy and intellectual property (Kafai & Burke, 2016).
Nevertheless, there is a smaller but growing literature on how young people learn through
designing games, mirroring the increasing popularity of game design among young people inside
of sandbox games like Minecraft (Kafai & Burke, 2015, 2016), the influence of the Maker/
DIY/Makerspace movement (e.g., Martin, 2015; Vossoughi et al, 2021; Vossoughi, Hooper, &
Escudé, 2016; Wyld, 2020), and efforts by the tech industry to encourage coding skills (Kafai &
Burke, 2016). One of the most comprehensive reviews of constructionist approaches to learning
through game design (Kafai & Burke, 2015) found 55 studies involving over 9,000 students at
the K-12 level; half occurred in classroom environments and the other half occurred in structured
environments outside of school such as after-school programs and summer workshops. These
studies measured various learning outcomes using a range of methods including pre-and post-
assessments, interviews, and project analyses.
Game Design and Computational Literacies.
Most of the studies focused on outcomes associated with computer science, but some of
them combined this focus with broader literacy skills like narrative design (Kafai, 1995). Several
studies have found that students use more computational concepts when making games vs. when
they write digital stories; Kafai and Burke (2015) attribute this to the fact that established
narratives allow for less variability and conditional logic, whereas narrative design in games can
involve branching storylines and procedural rhetoric. Several more recent studies have built on

38
this insight by examining the unique literacy affordances of games as procedural media (Gee &
Aguilera, 2021), including hybrid attempts to support students generating narratives and games
using the same authoring software (Proctor & Blikstein, 2019). Researchers have also attempted
to address gender equity issues in computer science through inviting girls to code interactive
stories, with participants reporting feeling empowered, and 61% transitioning an initial story
project into an open-ended game (Werner & Denner, 2009). The low barrier of entry to authoring
conditional logic in narrative game engines like Twine affords this opportunity to more and more
people, including women and LGBTQIA+ designers (Anthropy, 2012), though some feminist
scholars have questioned whether such approaches can actually increase women’s participation
in game design without a more thorough challenge to patriarchy in the games industry (Orme,
2018). Further research could invite students to write visionary (Imarisha & brown, 2015) and
Afrofuturistic interactive fiction and storytelling games drawing from their sociocultural contexts
(Toliver, 2021). The open-ended plurality of procedural narrative design might afford
opportunities to imagine multiple possible selves and multiple possible future worlds (Schuschke
& Tynes, in preparation; Tynes, et al., 2023), skills that might become more and more relevant if
social media, Virtual/Augmented reality, and gaming end up consolidating into a metaverse or
multiverse. This is a key narrative theme of Kai UnEarthed, which we released as a Twine
prototype with a branching narrative to provide a proleptic design demonstration (Vossoughi,
2021) of such possibilities.
Moreover, participants in studies of game design programs – including African -
American students - have shown increased interest in computing and awareness of possible
career pathways related to it (Kafai & Burke, 2015). Further research could be done to see
whether learning game design supports Black students in developing Afrofuturistic selves

39
involving notions of computational participation (Kafai & Burke, 2015, 2016) that go beyond
career aspirations to also include community solidarity and visions of liberated futures
(Schuschke & Tynes, in preparation; Tynes, et al., 2023).
Game Design and Broader Game Literacy Learning Outcomes.
Besides learning computer science skills and dispositions, existing studies have shown
students learn a range of other academic content through designing games, including studies
where game design was part of schools’ content area curricula. Academic domains studied have
included language arts / literacy and the fine arts (Kafai & Burke, 2015). One study found that
students in an experimental game design group showed significantly better content retention,
sentence construction skills, ability to contrast and compare information sources, and better
integration of digital sources (Owston et al., 2009). Numerous studies have also examined cross-
domain learning processes, such as metacognition, with several experimental studies showing
that designing games leads to increased use of learning strategies, decision making,
troubleshooting, systems analysis, and systems design (Kafai & Burke, 2015). Some of these
studies have focused particularly on systems thinking as part of design thinking more broadly
(Kafai & Burke, 2015) and Salen (2007) created the GameStar Mechanic software to support
students in thinking systemically like game designers without necessarily having to code. Further
research could build on this work by inviting students to recognize and critically analyze the
already game-like elements within existing systems, such as schooling, dating, social media, etc.,
inviting them to modify, queer, subvert, or redesign such systems in order to challenge their
oppressive features (Ruberg & Fullerton, 2019, personal communication).

40
Sociocultural Contexts of Game Design Learning Environments.
Very few studies on young people designing games have focused on race, ethnicity, or
culture. Fifty-two of the studies reviewed by Kafai and Burke (2015) did not report any
information about participants’ racial-ethnic backgrounds, making it difficult to assess which
groups have access to game design learning opportunities. However, several were contextualized
within specific racial-ethnic groups such as African American young men (DiSalvo, Guzdial, et
al. 2014), Latina girls (Denner et al., 2012) or indigenous youth (Lameman et al., 2011;
Repenning et al., 2015). Two studies in particular demonstrate the strengths and challenges of
inviting young people to design games based on their communities’ cultural contexts.
Lameman and colleagues (2011) studied the Skins program by the Aboriginal Territories
in Cyberspace research group, which integrates North American indigenous cultural frameworks
into the process of designing video games and virtual worlds. Kahnawake Mohawk youth used
Second Life and the 3D game engine Unreal to create video games based on stories from their
communities. They did this in conversation with elders, while respecting community protocols
around storytelling (Lameman et al., 2011; LaPensée & Lewis, 2011), reflecting on how they had
learned these stories and which ones were appropriate to turn into games (Lameman et. al., 2011,
p.105). The goal was to contribute to efforts toward their community’s survival, self-
determination, recovery, and development, and to challenge stereotypical representations of
indigenous people in games. Linking analog and digital aspects of game literacies, the
curriculum emphasized that game play and storytelling are both important parts of indigenous
cultures, with communities using games to teach, train hunters, and solve conflict. Students’
engagement in the workshop was high, and they were able to collectively produce a game about
an Iroquois hunter encountering various characters from Mohawk stories as he travels across a

41
3D digital landscape; demonstrating significant technical skill, they modified Unreal’s first
person shooter mechanics to build this world and journey.
The outcomes of this project contrast with another study of youth game design, among
young people in South Africa (Walton & Pallitt’s, 2012). When they asked 11–13-year-old
students in Cape Town to imagine a South African game, participants tended to localize
internationally popular digital games like Grand Theft Auto rather than digitize a game based on
their own community’s practices of gameplay or storytelling; they did this to satirize corrupt
politicians and to narrate themes such gang violence, imagining national electoral politics as
Grand Theft South Africa. While this satire is creative and critical, it also tended to present a
cynical critique without any vision for liberation or community self-determination. This could
stem from the questions the researchers asked, which centered the design process on imagining a
game based on the abstraction of national identity (Walton & Pallitt, 2012) rather than designing
speculatively from within participants’ immediate sociocultural contexts.
In contrast, the Skins program prompted students to pay close attention to their
communal context before prompting them to imagine a game (LaPensée & Lewis, 2011). They
invited students to do what educational game designers like Kurt Squire (2011) and Tracy
Fullerton (Hamilton et al., 2021) do when they search for existing games within traditional
academic content, but in this case, students drew instead from existing multimodal literacies
(digital and analog), gameplay practices, and creativity already present within their communities,
attempting to share this knowledge with their peers. In contexts involving Black students, such
practices could enact principles three and four of the Afrofuturist Development Theory, drawing
from “Black history knowledge, literacies, and historical consciousness,” with the assumption

42
that “technological ingenuity and power are a part of every Black person’s heritage” (Tynes, et
al., 2023).
Game Design and Playtesting as Collaborative Practices.
In addition to such sociocultural contextualization, very few studies of game design
learning have focused on the interpersonal and relational aspects of video game design,
illustrating a need for further research in this area; Kafai and Burke (2015) argue this is because
researchers so far have been attempting to validate game-making in the eyes of schools by
focusing on traditional academic outcomes. Exceptions to this trend include studies of students
taking turns creating games and playtesting each other’s games; for example, Owston and
colleagues (2009) found that children were motivated to create video games to support their
peers’ learning, and this finding was related to the literacy benefits of game design because the
game’s creators focused on clear communication so as to make their games legible to their peer
playtesters.
Further research could be done to see if this kind of learning also happens among young
adults. Leading activity theories (Gutiérrez, Becker, et al., 2019) would suggest it might,
considering the centrality of social life for adolescents and work for adults; sharing produced
game artifacts bridges these activities, and could be the basis for building affinity spaces (Gee,
2013; Gee & Hayes, 2010) around shared interests. Design challenges could be a way to
facilitate such interactions. K-12 students’ motivation to receive feedback on their design
projects has been a major factor in the success of various game design challenges in facilitating
learning, e.g., the White House STEM National Video Game Challenge where middle and high
school students designed their own educational games, or various challenges involving the
Scratch programming tool (Kafai & Burke, 2016).

43
Game Jams, STEAM, and Playful Production.
More recent studies of game jams (e.g., Meriläinen, 2019, Meriläinen et al., 2020;
Contreras-Espinosa et al., 2022) built on these findings. Game jams are a kind of design
challenge that involve people creating games within the constraints of a specific time period, and
sharing their work (Preston et al., 2012; Meriläinen, 2019; Meriläinen et al., 2020). They have
grown rapidly in popularity and visibility in recent years, and are increasingly viewed as a way
to develop STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) skills as well as
collaboration and communication skills (Meriläinen, 2020) that are considered important 21
st

century literacies (Contreras-Espinosa et al., 2022). Contreras-Espinosa and colleagues (2022)
designed and studied game jams for Mexican students aged 12-16, focused on these skills, and
studied learning within them using observations, pre-and post-surveys, analysis of student
prototypes, and interviews; participants reported increased creativity, critical thinking, and
collaboration. Another study of the learning experiences of four first-time game jam participants
also found they exhibited a heightened sense of creativity, as well as an increased sense of
competence (Meriläinen, 2019).
The learning experiences of game jam participants go beyond traditional academic
objectives. A survey of Global Game Jam participants found they did not show significant
learning of technical skills during the game jam, but they did express learning about the game
development process, teamwork skills, and access to new tools (Arya et al., 2013). Many of them
attended the jam out of a desire to have fun, learn, network, and meet a challenge (Arya et al.,
2013). This study of the Global Game Jam is significant because it is one of the few studies on
game design learning I could find that includes young adults within a context of intergenerational
learning. Given that, the fact that fun was the top goal for participants has implication for higher

44
education game design spaces as well. Playful game production has been theorized by game
design educators at the USC school of Cinematic Arts (Fullerton, 2019; Lemarchand, 2021), who
created a game-based design challenge called Reality Ends Here to encourage an attitude of
playful design and to counter tendencies toward careerist perfectionism among game design
students (Tierney et al., 2014).
Research on game jams sits at the intersections of education/learning sciences, design
research, and game studies, and Meriläinen and colleagues (2020) argue that studying game jams
provides a way to combine these disciplines to better understand learning. Kafai & Burke (2015)
highlight a need for studies on online game design spaces and how they might cultivate
collaborative social relationships in ways that are analogous to Gee and Hayes’ (2010) research
on affinity spaces discussed below. Designing and studying online game jams focused on shared
passions and interests might be a way to accomplish this. Game jams often have themes that
structure their challenges, and research can be done on game jams with shared passions around
critical themes, e.g., making games to imagine unpoliced Afrofutures (Tynes, et al., 2023); this
can support studies of critical game literacies learning within game jams and related game design
challenge environments. In this way, critical game jams can contribute to attempts to transform
the game industry and the educational institutions that prepare people to work in it.
Critical Game Literacies (CGL) Research
In this section, I review the empirical literature on critical playing/metagaming, critical
modding, and critical game design. Each of these is a core component of CGL learning, and they
are closely connected with each other. Because there has been very little education research
literature on these topics, I draw on literature from other fields, especially game studies and
communications/internet studies. Throughout, I identify places where the literature is

45
underdeveloped, especially places where it is necessary to move from simulating oppression
through games towards simulating liberated futures.
CGL: Playing and Analyzing Games Critically.
In this section, I review research on practices of critical play that challenge racism and
intersecting oppressions in dominant gaming cultures as well as broader systemic oppression in
society (Gray, 2020). These challenges can be deepened through critical pedagogies of play
(Boal, 2000; Crocco, 2011; Squire, 2011).
Play and Being a Historical Actor.
While critical play has been theorized (Flanagan, 2009) and empirically studied recently
(Gutiérrez, Higgs, et. al., 2019), it is not a new phenomenon. In the mid 20
th
century, Grace Lee
Boggs, Black Marxists Jimmy Boggs and CLR James, and their comrades did consciousness -
raising study groups with Detroit autoworkers, helping them to theorize their own self-activity as
historical actors (this was at a time where Detroit was a high-tech hub, the Bay Area or Shenzhen
of its time). They documented how they collectively played with -i.e., hacked- the machinery of
the factory assembly lines to overcome boredom and resist the ways that the technology imposed
itself on their bodies; they theorized that this was actually a possible future, a new socialistic
society erupting out of the contradictions of capitalism (James et al., 2006; Romano & Stone,
1972). As Woodcock (2019) documents in Marx at the Arcade, white collar workers did
something similar a few decades later, hacking and repurposing computers originally built to
maintain US military dominance, and through that process they invented video games.
Gutiérrez, Becker, and colleagues (2019) noticed the same process occurring yet again
among working class Latinx children, their families, and their peers at an afterschool maker

46
space, in a large-scale Connected Learning study (see also Gutiérrez, Higgs, et al., 2019). They
observed how young people modified and repurposed technologies, e.g., how they used their
new video game coding knowledge to discover and manipulate glitches in commercial games
they play, using YouTube tutorials to support this learning. From this research, the authors
generated the historical actor theory that grounds this current study.
Building on this research, as well as Garcia’s (2017) critical analyses of analog gaming
literacies, scholars have begun to examine queer critical literacies and futurities in the context of
collaborative play activities (Jones et al., 2021; Storm & Jones, 2021). In a youth participatory
action research project in a queer afterschool space, 11
th
and 12
th
graders conducted a discourse
analysis of their Dungeons and Dragons gameplay practices. They identified ways they could
revamp their gameplay to challenge racism and heterosexism in society and in the worldbuilding
and mechanics of the game. This process involved simultaneous subversive play, resistance,
hope, and imagination as they engaged in queer utopian world-building; they acknowledged
existing oppression while radically envisioning utopian futures (Storm & Jones, 2021). For
example, several participants created gender-fluid characters who use they/them pronouns; at
times these pronouns indexed no proscribed genders, and at times they indexed all possible
genders, and the conversation among participants included complex back-and-forth language
play around these possibilities. One participant imagined her character as a “theythemsbian,” a
lesbian who uses they/them pronouns; she had wanted to identify as such herself but was not
supported in doing this socially, even in queer spaces, and she said she liked how the game
allowed her to encounter such non-binary and queer potentials. The authors conclude that
queering critical literacies might mean moving beyond deconstructive critique, opening spaces
for imagination and world-building to supplement resistance (Storm & Jones, 2021, n.p.).

47
However, this study found that when it came to race, the participants chose to critique
the game for its racist elements without necessarily envisioning utopian anti-racist futures, and
instead chose to simulate racial oppression through the game’s mechanics in order to raise
critical consciousness (Storm & Jones, 2021). As the authors note, future research is needed to
examine why youth of various identities choose to center critique, futurity, or both in relation to
different social categories (Storm & Jones, 2021, n.p.). Such research can build on the
intersectional elements of the Afrofuturist Development Theory (Tynes, et. al., 2023), as well as
intersectional research on racism and anti-racism in digital gaming (Gray, 2020).
Racism, Intersectional Oppression, and Resistance in Digital Gaming.
Sim’s (2017) ethnographic study of a school informed by game-based and connected
learning frameworks found that the school reproduced hierarchies it aimed to undo, including
racialized class divisions. These findings demonstrate a need to focus critical game literacy
research on how to challenge racialized capitalism. However, anti-racist research around digital
gaming is still fairly new. While the field of game studies has produced critical studies of
patriarchy and feminist politics in gaming, as Gray (2020) summarizes, that scholarship has
mostly studied experiences of white women and the white men who harass them, leaving a gap
that intersectional Black feminist scholars are currently working to fill (Gray, 2020, p. 3; Richard
& Gray, 2018). Based on extensive ethnographic research, Gray (2020) concluded that the
“default operating system” of contemporary gaming culture still reinforces white cultural
dominance (p. 31). Not enough empirical education research studies on critical game literacy
have explicitly named or challenged this dominance, but Gray’s (2000) research documents
learning and literacy practices outside of formal educational spaces that can inform such
education research moving forward.

48
Gray (2020) found that Black gamers face intersecting oppressions (e.g., queer Black
women face anti-Black, homophobic, and sexist harassment in multiplayer games). She also
analyzed how these same gamers organize themselves to resist this oppression through collective
critical gameplay in affinity spaces and metagaming media production (Gray 2020). Through
interviews, group discussions, participant observation, and informal conversations, her study
generated counternarratives, where gamers metacognitively analyzed their own experiences of
critical play. This research provides rich empirical validation of the Racialized Pedagogical Zone
(RPZ) concept (Everett & Watkins, 2008), and participants in Gray’s studies, who she calls
narrators, demonstrate complex skills that could be considered critical game literacies (CGL).
For example, one narrator criticizes “white boys” who play the Black character Cole Train in
Gears of War because "they start mocking how he talk... they be doing that over-the-top black
cooning. And it's the game's fault” (p. 50). This narrator is able to identify how the projective
identity (Gee, 2013) that the designers and these players co-create is a RPZ (Everett & Watkins,
2008) used to disrespect African American Vernacular English (AAVE). As Gray (2020) points
out, AAVE is a sophisticated literacy practice in the Black community, and narrators in her study
use it to “clap back” against white supremacy and heteropatriarchy in games and in society
broadly (p. 50 and 170).
Gaming vs. Police Violence.
In particular, Black gamers have used games to challenge police violence and its
enforcement of systemic anti-Blackness (Cortez et al., 2022; Gray, 2020), at a moment in history
where resistance to such violence included large-scale protests and uprisings in response to viral
social media videos of police murdering Black people. Black gamers have created online spaces
where they can take a break from these videos (Gray, 2020) while they critique the systemic

49
forces that generate them. For example, while playing Warframe and voice-chatting together,
one narrator in Gray’s (2020) study told another to “get ya algorithms right” to stop seeing these
videos (p. 61), and another said, “All the stuff from Black Lives Matter. Learning about
Cointelpro. Hoping white folks don't call the police on me. And other stuff. It's just hard. It's a
lot. I'm glad I got the game” (p. 61). These findings suggests that narrators experienced these
gaming spaces as important collective self-care practices in the face of racialized and digitally-
mediated trauma.
However, these choices should not be read as unconscious escapism, since the
conversation just mentioned also included narrators reflecting on what they liked about
#BlackLivesMatter and related activist social media efforts; Gray (2020) situates this within a
series of transmedia “counterpublics” that Black creators have produced since the 2014 Ferguson
protests, including politicized, pro-Black metagaming and streaming spaces (p. 2). For example,
she describes how some narrators defended the protest slogan “Black Lives Matter”- and riots
against police - when other gamers criticized them. Similarly, in 2020, young Black people
developed speculative, abolitionist, and Afrofuturist worldmaking practices inside sandbox
games during the protests against the police murder of George Floyd (Cortez et al., 2022)
2
. Far
from being an escapist diversion, this evidence suggests gaming might play a role in the
development of critical consciousness and action.

2
In addition to the evidence provided by Cortez and colleagues (2022), Appendix A includes a tweet that a
Sims modding and metagaming site posted on June 1st, 2020, during the middle of the uprising (Figure A1); the post
impersonated a leak of much-awaited Sims 4 expansion packs, but was actually a series of protest resources and
ways to get involved in actions. I heard about this from my partner Camella Coopilton, who is an avid Sims player
and is also Black; while the video of George Floyd’s death was circulating two days earlier, she posted in the Black
Simmer forum “In my Sims world, there are no police to shoot people” (Coopilton, 2020, personal communication).

50
Such a conjecture is supported by a survey of over 9,0000 League of Legends players
administered in 2010; players reported higher than average rates of protest activity (Stokes &
Williams, 2018, p. 327). While similar large-scale quantitative research has not been done on
Black gamers’ participation in recent protests against police violence, Stokes and Williams’
(2010) findings challenge common assumptions about apathy and political disengagement
among gamers in general. And Gray’s (2020) and Cortez and colleagues’ (2022) studies suggest
that there is interest among some Black gamers in playful practices that challenge police and
carceral violence. Given a lack of existing game titles that intentionally address issues of
policing and abolitionism from a pro-Black perspective, exploratory design research is needed,
where teams create prototypes of such games and research how Black players engage with them.
Research is also needed to support Black gamers in designing such games themselves, studying
the learning processes involved so they can proliferate among broader critical game literacy
learning spaces.
Critical Pedagogies of Play.
These critical play practices can be supported and developed further though critical
pedagogies of play in schools and other learning environments. Such pedagogies pre-date digital
gaming and educators and researchers have begun to apply them in digital contexts. Boal (2000)
engaged in socialist critical literacy education in Latin America in the mid-20
th
century using
critical pedagogy techniques. His methods might be considered design research given their focus
on iterative creation and incorporating player feedback, though his work predated the academic
formalization of such methods. Through this process, he developed and documented a series of
theater games that could be considered an early critical game literacy curriculum, as well as a
theoretical framework called Theater of the Oppressed, and he provided rich qualitative narrative

51
descriptions of how the games played out in various sociocultural contexts across Latin America.
His playful theater practice broke the immersion of capitalism’s ideological spectacles through a
kind of metagaming that merged play and game design. By inviting spectators to become actors
themselves, he prompted them to experience what the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht called
an alienation effect: seeing media as something that can be analyzed and modded (Boal 2000).
For Boal, these activities also involved enacting visions of a new society and actively
rehearsing for revolution (Boal 2000). To retroactively apply the concepts used in this current
study, he used the future-oriented nature of play and the ideological world-modeling properties
of games to cultivate critical speculative imagination. Revolution is fundamentally dangerous,
and the risks of failure are extremely high; rehearsing for it beforehand in the lower-stakes
environment of a game is consistent with broader literacy research on games as safer spaces to
learn through failure (Gee, 2013). Theater of the Oppressed informed the learning spaces in the
research that generated historical actor theory (Gutiérrez, Higgs, et al., 2019), part of the
theoretical framework for this current study. Frasca (2001) built on Theater of the Oppressed in a
master’s thesis called Videogames of the Oppressed, and Rowlands and colleagues (2018) built
on that thesis to critically mod Grand Theft Auto, as discussed below.
Though he did not explicitly draw from Boal, Squire (2011) used similar methods when
he taught Black students to challenge the colonial ideologies embedded in the game Civilization
through metacognition and modding practices, studying how they learned through the process.
Recognizing the game is an ideological world, he attempted to prompt students to name and
challenge its ideologies and to use it against the grain to question dominant historical narratives.
He asked students questions like “what happens in the game if we make Africa colonize the
world instead of Europe?” (p. 109-138) and he studied students’ learning outcomes and

52
experiences as they used the software to simulate answers to them. He found that this approach
increased students’ engagement and historical inquiry skills, with some deepening in critical
thinking about colonialism.
However, such an approach only went so far given the core model of the game used for
the class was itself still colonial, biased towards Eurocentric notions of linear history,
civilization, and barbarism (Ford, 2016; Vrtačič, 2014). To fully answer the questions Squire was
posing would require creating and teaching with games that are ideological worlds modeling
liberation from colonialism and anti-Blackness, rooted in African, Afrodiasporic, and indigenous
ontologies, epistemologies, play aesthetics, and liberation movement strategies. Such games have
not been designed yet. The Afrofuturist Development Theory (Tynes, et al., 2023) could inform
their development and could shape studies of how people engage with them in learning
environments. Roberto (2020) is conducting design research that moves in a similar direction;
she designed an anti-colonial digital narrative game set in Guam where players make strategic
choices about whether and how to resist U.S. military occupation; these involve double-binds
(Gutiérrez, Becker, et al 2019) that prompt participants to mod the game through hacking its
source code, achieving the kind of critical distance from the game world’s model that Squire
(2001) and Boal (2011) were attempting to provoke. The goal is not to impose any particular
model of cultural identity and liberation on students (Freire, 1972); it is to offer them generative
models to play with, add to, critique, and mod as they attempt to build their own strategies for
liberation. Such activities might prepare students to design their own ideological game-worlds to
model their own liberation strategies and freedom dreams (Kelley, 2002).

53
Critical Play Among Young Adults.
As far as I can tell, there has been barely any empirical research on how games could be
used to challenge oppression in higher education, at work, or in informal learning environments
among young adults. None of the studies reviewed in this section so far have featured young
adults over 18 (Gray’s 2020 study might have included young adults, but she did not report her
narrators’ ages, possibly to protect their anonymity). Crocco (2011) developed a critical gaming
pedagogy at an urban community college serving Black, Latinx, and immigrant working class
students; he modified the game Monopoly to support students in challenging internalized
oppression, but he did not include formal research methods to study their experiences playing the
game, reporting only his description of the process. There is a literature on game-based learning
in higher education, including perspectives on how games can be used to increase equity in
access, retention, digital literacies, and digital citizenship (Tierney, et al., 2014). This literature
includes feminist perspectives on gaming among college students and critiques of existing
university practices (Tierney, et al., 2014). However, I am not aware of empirical higher
education studies on how students might use games to challenge systemic oppression in society
more broadly, or how universities might teach such skills.
I could only find two articles on game literacy learning among young adults that use
critical perspectives. Themistokleous & Avraamidou (2016) argued that games can promote civic
engagement in this population, but they did this based on a literature review that synthesized
empirical research on other age groups and conceptual pieces, without empirical research or a
review of empirical literature on young adult game literacies. Walton and Pallitt’s (2012) studied
gameplay practices in South Africa among people aged 16-21, finding that participants played
games on their mobile phones but often had to delete them to save storage space for competing

54
economic and social priorities. They criticize game literacy’s applicability to South African
education, arguing that large numbers of people there do not have access to commodified
gaming, whereas existing play practices there involve analog multiliteracies such as music,
dance, and gesture that do not fit within existing definitions of game literacies focused on digital
gaming. This is a valid critique of the dominant ways that game literacies have been associated
with expensive video game commodities in global educational discourses dominated by the
Global North. However, digital technologies (e.g., phones with more storage capacity) may have
proliferated in new ways in South Africa in the decade since the study was published, and further
research is needed on critical game literacies among young adults in contexts such as the US
where digital gaming is a widespread daily practice among many young adults (Snider, 2021).
CGL: Critical Modding.
Many of the critical play processes in the literature reviewed above have included some
level of modifying (“modding”) games. This is promising since a broader research literature has
found modding to be a link between playing and designing games. However, this process is
contradictory; modding practices simultaneously challenge and reinforce racism, sexism, and
capitalist exploitation.
Based on auto-ethnographic research with the modding and metagaming community
Apolyton.net, Squire (2011) found that modding served as a gateway between playing games and
designing them (and/or becoming an organizer of play and metagaming communities). This was
possible because this community allowed people to learn how to mod and redesign the game in
mixed-ability groups, including access to expert game designers. Also, tutorial sites often teach
introductory coding skills to modders (Kafai & Burke, 2016). However, there is evidence that
women and Black people do not engage in modding as much as white men (interview with

55
Hayes in Gee 2013; Gee & Hayes, 2010; DiSalvo & Bruckman, 2010), raising concerns about
equity of access to the technical skills learned through it (Kafai & Burke, 2016). Further research
is needed to ask whether critical modding in particular might be a more viable learning process
among Black people and women; researchers could ask if they engage more in modding when
the goal is to mod games specifically to challenge racism and sexism and to envision pro-Black
and pro-feminist futures.
There has been some initial research on modding as critical design. For example,
Rowlands and colleagues (2018) applied Theater of the Oppressed techniques to mod Grand
Theft Auto, creating a scenario where tenants rioted against a gentrifying contractor who was
trying to displace them by raising rent. Gee and Hayes (2010) found that players of the Sims
engaged in a metagame challenge where they simulated the life of a single mother with a low-
income job and compared notes about it. In both cases, findings revealed the contours of the
games’ ideological worlds, such as the capitalist mythology of upward mobility in The Sims that
made it hard to actually model poverty (Gee, 2013). Also, modding is not always socially
beneficial even if it does lead to increased skills. Woodcock (2019) found that modding is often a
form of exploited, unpaid labor even when it also expresses transformative agency. And Gray’s
(2020) findings suggest modding can be a contested, racialized practice. On the one hand, white
supremacist players modded the game Friday the 13
th
Part 2 to play the character Jason as a
KKK member, redefining the game objective to involve killing all the non-white characters and
keeping the white ones alive. On the other hand, Black lesbians repurposed Xbox Live’s private
party chat function to support each other in the face of heteropatriarchal harassment (Gray,
2020).

56
CGL: Building Liberatory Affinity Spaces.
Through research on women’s modding practices in The Sims, Elizabeth Hayes Gee and
James Paul Gee documented and analyzed social learning formations in modding communities
that they call passionate and nurturing affinity spaces (Gee & Hayes, 2010; Gee, 2013); they
observed how these spaces facilitated participants moving from being players to becoming
designers. Affinity spaces are similar to communities of practice (Wenger et al., 2002), but they
do not presume the sense of belonging, defined borders, membership standards, and warmth
associated with the word community. They are mixed-ability groups where people learn and
produce shared knowledge together based on shared passions and interests; they feature
reciprocal roles, multiple routes to participation, honoring of tacit knowledge and naming of
knowledge to make it explicit, support/scaffolding, porous leadership, and feedback from an
authentic community (Gee & Hayes, 2010; Gee, 2013). In these spaces, trust among relative
strangers is built through joint activity (Squire, 2011).
These characteristics of good learning spaces were not recently invented by video game
modders; they are also present in longer traditions of play-based learning within Afro-diasporic
settings. For example, Seymour Papert (1980) observed similar dynamics at samba schools in
Brazil:
These are not schools as we know them; they are social clubs with memberships that may
range from a few hundred to many thousands. Each club owns a building, a place for
dancing and getting together…During the year each samba school chooses its theme for
the next carnival, the stars are selected, the lyrics are written and rewritten, and the dance
is choreographed and practiced. Members of the school range in age from children to
grandparents and in ability from novice to professional. But they dance together and as
they dance everyone is learning and teaching as well as dancing. Even the stars are there
to learn their difficult parts (p. 178).

57
Affinity spaces are part of a larger phenomenon of mixed-ability learning in informal learning
environments outside of traditional classrooms, which has been a major theme in broader
sociocultural research (e.g., Vossoughi et al., 2021).
Gee (2013) argues that because passionate affinity spaces cohere around shared interests,
identities such as class, race, gender, and disability are backgrounded and are secondary to the
shared interests of the space. Empirically, this identity-transcendent analysis is simultaneously
supported and challenged by Gray’s (2020) research on metagaming. On the one hand, she found
that Black lesbians who participated in affinity groups over Xbox live were able to be out of the
closet because they were chatting with strangers rather than a tight knit local community that
might judge them; they also gravitated to Xbox rather than Black identity-based Facebook
groups because the later tended to impose a narrow and non-inclusive definition of Black
identity. On the other hand, Gray (2020) also found that some Black lesbians could not put their
identities in the background in Xbox Live because they were linguistically profiled based on how
they talk, which often lead to racist, sexist, and/or homophobic harassment. As one narrator said,
“ain't no closets in the ghetto, and none online- at least not for me" (p. 154). These realities
challenge Gee’s argument.
Also, Gee and Hayes’ research misses more recent developments of explicitly pro-Black
modding practices in The Sims such as the group formerly known as the Black Simmer, various
Black Lives Matter mods, and other work by XmiraMira and Ebonix. There are modding affinity
spaces open to people of any identity who share a passion for creating pro-Black cultural
simulations in The Sims, and they exist as their own spaces because people with these interests
have been pushed out of the larger affinity spaces Gee and Hayes (2010) studied due to anti-
Black responses to their interests (Coopilton, 2020, personal communication).

58
Gee (2011) argues that his notion of backgrounding sociocultural identities is an ideal or
utopian extrapolation from the studies he and Hayes conducted, not an empirical description of
actually existing practice; he imagines a utopian future where Black kids can identify first and
foremost as Pokémon fanatics, expert modders, or whatever other identities they want to create
through affinity spaces, rather than being confined to a narrow definition of Blackness imposed
by society (Gee, 2011). From an Afrofuturist development standpoint (Tynes, et al., 2023), such
utopian claims need to be grounded in an insistence that there are Black people in the future, that
Black people will not only survive but will thrive. This insistence does not imply a linear
reproduction of a monolithic Black identity unadorned with nerdy interests, but it does require
fighting for Black children to live and rooting for Black people to win (Love, 2019), without
having to leave their Blackness behind. It is possible to imagine revolutions that destroy the
reproduction of anti-blackness, white supremacy, and racialization, opening up multidimensional
futures, passionate interests, and complex forms of life among people of African descent, as we
imagine in Kai UnEarthed. It may also be possible to build affinity spaces now where the shared
passion is this kind of imagination. But such a praxis of critical imagination requires anticipating
how the descendants of people who are currently racialized as Black persist as a community and
culture through co-creating those futures and those spaces in complex ways. The revolution will
not be colorblind sci-fi.
To ground such imaginative discussions empirically, there is a need for participatory
action and design research around critical game literacy affinity spaces. Gamers, educators,
researchers, and activists can organize and study gaming affinity spaces where the shared passion
is Black liberation and queer liberation. Like the pro-Black Sims modding communities, these
spaces could be open to people of any identity but could center Black and queer people and the

59
sociocultural practices they bring to generate shared passionate creativity. Such spaces can
contribute to an emerging research literature on how people learn through critical game design
processes.
CGL: Designing Critically.
Learning through critical game design is an under-researched area; however, there have
been four relatively recent studies on it (Cook, 2016; Gee & Aguilera, 2021; Proctor & Blikstein,
2019; Robinson, 2020), suggesting it is an emerging topic of inquiry. These are empirical design
studies in which researchers organized game-creation spaces, participants created games with
critical themes, and researchers studied the process. Here, I will analyze the strengths and
weaknesses of these studies in order to inform further research in this area.
All of these studies involved designing new learning spaces, suggesting that this
phenomenon is not a topic that is easily studied inside of existing classroom instructional
practices; if it is happening in classrooms without researcher interventions, it has not yet been
documented in the research literature, and the constructionist gaming literature suggests if it is
happening it is likely rare. However, it is happening in structured learning environments outside
of schools. Gee and Aguilera (2021) designed a library-based board-game making workshop
focused on addressing social issues like pollution. Cooke (2016) developed workshops at a high
school, and after-school programs, where students designed social-justice-oriented video games.
Proctor & Blikstein (2019) developed a web application that combines writing and coding, and
incorporated it into a high school classroom and summer program where students used it to write
interactive stories and games. Robinson (2020) lead a game creation camp involving a mix of in-
person learning and interaction over the multimodal digital chat platform Discord.

60
Most of these studies are case studies drawn from larger research projects with children
and adolescents. In Gee and Aguilera’s (2021) study, there were eight participants, and their
paper focuses on four boys aged 13-17. In Cooke’s (2016) study there were 34 participants, but
she focuses on four Black girls and one Black boy in the 6
th
and 7
th
grades. Proctor and
Blikstein’s study involved three different workshops at an urban private school, with 12, 16, and
23 students respectively; the second workshop was with 11–12-year-olds and the third was with
high school seniors, and the authors also focused in on one participant in their paper. For these
three studies, the authors’ choice to focus on a few participants’ engagement in the workshops
afforded thick descriptions of the game design process that supports conceptual clarification, but
the lack of a broader thematic analysis of the workshops as a whole limited how much this
research can inform the design of new learning environments. Robinson’s (2020) study was an
exception to this trend; he analyzed interactions among participants rather than case studies
among individuals, focusing in on key moments of interactivity and situating these within the
context of the learning environment. Again, none of these studies are with young adults over 18,
further demonstrating a gap in the literature around critical game literacies among this age group.
These studies used a range of methods to analyze processes of learning and discourse in
the environments they created. Cooke (2016) analyzed how participants learned through pre-and
post-assessment tests and questionnaires, recordings of sessions, post-interviews, and analyses of
design artifacts. In Proctor & Blikstein’s (2019) study, researchers collected field notes, logged
interactions with the application, analyzed stories participants wrote, and asked participants to
engage in reflective writing and discussions that shaped participatory design of the learning
space. In both cases, these methods supported the researchers in analyzing participants’ learning
over time. Cooke (2016) notes that the multiple data points helped her analyze how people

61
learned, not just what they learned, and compensated for the fact that the pre/post assessments
did not accurately assess the full scope of learning. Gee and Aguilera (2021) took field notes and
video recordings and collected participant-generated artifacts, but their paper focused only on a
discourse analysis of the transcripts from the recordings, not the finished games; this supported
an analysis of participants’ conversations while designing, but not of their learning over time.
Robinson (2020) wore a GoPro camera as he taught and he also positioned cameras throughout
the space, recording the learning process; he cross-referenced this video data with the Discord
chat log to analyze moments when activity online spilled into the physical learning space and
vice-versa.
Findings from two of these studies further developed game literacy perspectives in a
critical direction. Gee and Aguilera (2021) describe how students iteratively aligned their social
justice goals with their game mechanics (procedural rhetoric). Proctor & Blikstein (2019) found
that participants generated critical discourse models which cannot be conveyed by
representational texts; for example, they used the interactivity of the technology to model how
their social realities change while speaking English vs. Spanish.
Findings from the other two studies involved the creation of new concepts that could
function as design principles, informing the creation of future game design learning spaces.
Cooke (2016) analyzed how a participant made a game challenging racism and other forms of
oppression in health care. By analyzing how she supported this student through multiple design
iterations, she generated design principles for recursively redesigning game creation learning
spaces to nurture both technical skills and social justice goals. Robinson (2020) analyzed how his
decision to teach at the edge of chaos kept open space for emergent student self-organization;

62
among other impressive design outcomes, this resulted in Black students helping each other
develop a game character called Black Mannn with Black Power aesthetics.
While this emerging thread of critical game literacies research is promising, it also has its
limitations. The lack of racial-ethnic demographics in Gee and Aguilera’s (2021) paper and the
limited reporting in Proctor and Blikstein’s (2019) makes it hard to assess the authors’ critical
claims around identity and sociocultural learning. In fact, Gee and Aguilera’s (2021) study did
not mention race at all. In contrast, Cooke (2016) focused hers on racial equity in STEM, but her
conceptualization of equity narrowly focused on preparing students for tech industry jobs, and
her disciplinary focus on computational thinking limited the relevance of her study to
interdisciplinary critical literacies-oriented game-design research. Proctor and Blikstein (2019)
focused on race in their discussion, and they explicitly linked computer science and critical
literacies research through their study, positioning their paper as one of the best examples of
CGL learning currently published.
Unfortunately, the conclusions Proctor and Blikstein (2019) draw from their data seem
unsupported and problematic in some ways. They note how a teacher who co-facilitated the
workshops mocked the way Black girls at the school talked and how this affected the participant
they highlight in the paper, who is Black; while she did not challenge this teacher, the experience
informed the interactive story she created. It positions the player as a white student at a private
school observing a Black student who is being bullied, and no matter what choice the player
makes, they are unable to act in solidarity with the girl, who eventually attempts suicide. The
researchers claim other students developed greater empathy while playing this game, but they do
not provide any evidence that this increased empathy lead to critical consciousness around anti-
Blackness or action against it among students in their study. Without such evidence, they suggest

63
that this sort of game could be played by white pre-service teachers to help them develop
empathy for people with less privilege.
From a critical race digital literacy perspective (Tynes, Stewart, et al, 2021), one has to
consider the possibility that this situation may have involved a young Black person narrating
Black trauma without any change coming from it, which Acosta and Denham (2018) criticize as
simulating oppression. Dumas (Issi, 2015) highlights the limits of appeals to white empathy,
observing that non-Black people often focus on spectacular moments of Black suffering, like the
character’s attempted suicide, and ignore everyday anti-Blackness, like the co-teacher mocking
Black students’ oral literacies. Similarly, Gray (2020) notes that games since 2016 have made a
spectacle of Black suffering, comparing these to hashtags that share Black death without any
contextualization in the larger lives of the Black people who have been killed. Given this
sociocultural context, it is possible that readers of Proctor and Blikstein’s study might conclude
they need to write narratives of spectacular Black suffering in order to be taken seriously by
white teachers, researchers, or classmates, which could be harmful. A CGL lens requires
attention to this sociocultural context, and strategies for change that do not rely on trying to make
white people empathize with Black trauma.
The student’s choice to simulate oppression rather than liberation may also have stemmed
from the design prompts the researchers chose, which focused on critiquing oppressive
discourses without necessarily imagining alternatives (Proctor & Blikstein 2019). These
limitations show the need for CGL research focused on critical speculative imagination and
Afrofuturist development (Tynes, et al., 2023), using games and game design to simulate
liberation rather than oppression.

64
Synthesis and Summary of Gaps in the Literature
Critical sociocultural theories of play and games suggest they are future-oriented and can
be mediums for young people to become historical actors producing possible futures. The
Afrofuturist Development Theory outlines ways to support Black students in doing this.
However, empirical game literacy research on such critical, future-oriented approaches to
gaming and speculative imagination has only just begun, with studies on play as a leading
activity (Gutiérrez, Higgs, et al., 2019), queer futurities in gaming (Storm & Jones, 2021), and
the four initial studies on critical design (Cook, 2016; Gee & Aguilera, 2021; Proctor &
Blikstein, 2019; Robinson, 2020) leading the way. The broader game literacy and connected
gaming literatures suggest ways this could be developed further: supporting students in creating
their own ideological game-worlds that simulate liberation, and inviting them to share these with
each other and with their communities through design challenges such as game jams, building on
the constructionist literature that shows such creativity and sharing supports engagement and
learning. Moreover, initial efforts towards abolitionist game design could serve as proleptic
demonstrations in game design learning contexts (Vossoughi et al., 2021), demonstrating what
might be possible, especially given the literature showing some Black gamers’ support for
movements against police brutality (Gray, 2020). The research on learning through game design
suggests that designing critical games might support non-dominant students in imagining
possible futures for themselves and their communities that involve critically reappropriating
technologies for their own purposes, whether this means organizing for change inside the game
industry or building futures outside of it; in either case, the literature suggests designing games
can help people to critically model systems they want to change and to prototype their visions for
collective liberation.

65
The literature on oppression and resistance in gaming cultures shows the pervasiveness
of racism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness, and ways that Black gamers are challenging
them; however, education research on how to support people in doing that through game
literacies learning is underdeveloped. In particular, the relative lack of socioculturally situated
studies within the research on game design learning – especially among Black people – shows
the need for game literacies research on playing and making games that is informed by
Afrofuturist development, grounded in Black history and current ecological contexts of culture
and critical consciousness. Moreover, synthesizing this framework with the literature on
computational participation, affinity spaces, and metagaming suggests these kinds of critical
game literacies are likely to be communal, shared passions and practices. Such phenomena are
better studied through analyses of collective learning environments, not simply individual
experiences.
This kind of research can build on the existing research on the component practices of
critical game literacies: how people play (and analyze), mod, and design games together in ways
that challenge systemic oppression, as well as the existing critical pedagogies studied in that
literature. It can fill the literature’s gaps, supplementing its tendencies to use games to critique
oppression by exploring ways they could also be used to prototype liberation. Finally, studies
could focus on young adult critical game literacies, a topic that has barely been addressed at all
in the empirical literature despite the theoretical literature suggesting that gaming might be
particularly important for people this age who might have excess capacities the capitalist system
cannot absorb through work. The following chapters describe research on the Critical Game Jam
that begins to fill these gaps.

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Chapter Three: Research Design
This chapter provides a description of the research methods that informed data collection
and analysis in regards to this design research study of the Critical Game Jam. The game jam
consisted of two levels; Level One was a week-long series of online workshops in July 2021 and
Level Two was a blended (digital and analog, synchronous and asynchronous) series of game
playtests and feedback sessions in 2023. In this section, I first provide a rationale for the use of
design research with participatory elements. Next, I describe the game jam learning environment
and context, data collection methods for studying it, and data analysis procedures. I conclude by
explaining why the study should be considered trustworthy. Limitations of the study are covered
in Chapter Six, informed by answers to RQ 1.3 and 2.3 in Chapters Four and Five (addressing
what could be done better in future learning environments).
The curriculum design, facilitation, and design process during the game jam were
collaborative and participatory, which is why I use the pronoun “we” during this chapter,
referring to the team of participant-researchers described in the Sampling Procedures section. I
chose the research methods, decided on the research design, and conducted the data analysis, so I
use the pronoun “I” to document these decisions throughout this chapter; the one exception to
that was the group decision to replace semi-structured interviews with post-videos, which Olivia
Peace advocated for reasons noted below.
Methodological Approach: Design Based Research
This study deployed a design-based research (DBR) methodological approach with
participatory elements to ask how one can design learning environments, games, and game
design activities that support critical game literacies and Afrofuturist development. DBR is a

67
methodology developed by and for educators; it has grown significantly since its founding in the
1990s, especially in the learning sciences (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; Crippen & Brown, 2018;
Reeves & McKenney, 2015). It seeks to “test and build theories of teaching and learning, and
produce instructional tools that survive the challenges of everyday practice" (Shavelson, et al.,
2003, p. 25). It has been used to study educational games and game-based learning curricula
(e.g., Squire, 2011), and critical game design learning spaces (Proctor & Blikstein, 2019).
The following sections discuss how DBR informed this study, including its participatory
elements, research in a non-controlled setting, research as curriculum theory and development,
porosity between roles, iterative design processes, and epistemologies of situated and distributed
cognition. Then, following conventions of design-based research papers, I describe the two
artifacts that I am iteratively designing through this study: Kai UnEarthed, a video game about
young people learning and loving in unpoliced futures, and the Critical Game Jam curriculum. I
also provide a map of the design conjectures (Sandoval, 2014) that informed the design and
study of these two interrelated artifacts, including the desired learning outcomes that we
designed the learning environment to support.
Participatory Elements
DBR in general is somewhat participatory because collaboration is necessary to ensure
that a designed intervention is a plausible solution in a given learning context; participants are
not subjects assigned to treatments, but are co-designers (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; Barab &
Squire, 2004; Crippen & Brown; 2018). Participatory design research (PDR) deepens this
dynamic, inviting collaborative and non-hierarchical relationships between researchers and
participants, attention to positionality, and the cultivation of transformational agency for the sake
of meaningful social change (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). It has its roots in participatory action

68
research, research-practice partnerships, community-based design experiments, and other
participatory research traditions (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016).
Bang and Vossoughi (2016) argue that researcher positionality has not been given enough
attention in broader DBR research, with hierarchies of power and privilege often masked by
rhetoric of objectivity and neutrality. To address this, Vakil and colleagues (2016) argue that
studies must attend to the personal and theoretical histories and values of researchers and
participants in ways that go beyond treating positionality as a checklist for the sake of
representational diversity. Accordingly, I discuss my positionality briefly at the end of this
chapter, and Appendix B includes a more through theorization and contextualization of it within
historical and contemporary contexts of white supremacy, heterosexism, and Black and queer
liberation movements. Co-researchers and I also attended to interpersonal power dynamics in
this study by openly reflecting on and discussing our positionalities with participants, and
inviting them to actively shape (even re-design) the learning space and the research process; we
also engaged in frequent formative collective self-assessments of how the process was going,
including reflections on our positionalities, and those reflections were included in the study data
to be analyzed. During data analysis, I also coded data related to my positionality and how it
shaped the space, and memo-ed about it.
Given the constraints of conducting doctoral dissertation research during the COVID19
pandemic, not all participants have been involved in this proposed design of the research study
itself. I invited participants to be involved in data analysis and co-writing, which are also
considered important aspects of participatory design research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016);
however, only two people expressed interest in this, and neither of them followed up with me
when I tried to set up times to meet to work on it together. For those reasons, I understand this

69
study to be design-based research with participatory elements, rather than fully participatory
design research.
That being said, an upcoming chapter of the book Speculative Pedagogies (edited by
Antero Garcia and Nicole Mirra) describes how this study is only one aspect of a larger
participatory design process that began before the study, in the abolitionist participatory
worldbuilding activities that I did with former students and colleagues as part of a campaign to
abolish youth incarceration (Coopilton et al., in press). As described below, this informed the
design of Kai UnEarthed. The study is also informing ongoing participatory design activities
around abolitionist gaming, but those are outside the scope of the study’s research questions, the
formal dissertation process, and IRB agreements.
Research in Non-Controlled Settings
For design-based researchers, context is a key part of the research process, not a set of
endogenous variables that need to be controlled; DBR is conducted in the “buzzing, blooming
confusion of real-life settings where most learning actually occurs" (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012;
Barab & Squire, 2004, p. 4). In this sense, it is incommensurate with positivist paradigms,
because it assumes that all contexts are always already agential so it is impossible to generate
context-free objective knowledge (Barab & Squire, 2004). DBR was created partially out of the
concern that the results of more traditional education psychology lab experiments might not
transfer into such real-world learning environments. So instead of deductively posing a
hypothesis based on a literature review and then testing it in an experiment, design-based
researchers develop a research question as an “emergent phenomena, emanating from the
sociocultural context from which it is situated,” as well as the theoretical and empirical literature
(Crippen & Brown, 2018, p. 2). Then, they generate conjectures about how learning might

70
happen in that context; these are more flexible than hypotheses, and are subject to revision as the
study proceeds (Barab & Squire, 2004; Crippen & Brown, 2018). My understanding of this
process has been shaped by participating in the Political and Ethical Learning Lab’s critical
learning sciences discussions, where researchers emphasized the need to move beyond design-
based research’s focus on innovation toward pre-determined outcomes; we discussed how
dreaming up new futures requires playful open-ended improvisation rather than a search for a
foolproof design.
This emphasis on learning in context does not imply that the researcher should merely
engage in naturalistic interpretation without intervening in the learning process. Many design-
based researchers carry critical or transformative agendas, and even in more mainstream work
the goal is not simply to interpret education but to change it (Barab & Squire, 2004). One way
that researchers do this by creating artifacts that embody theories about learning, which they then
place in real-world settings to see what happens. This step in the research design is both
prescriptive and descriptive; the artifact is simultaneously an object being studied and a vehicle
for studying larger questions through the influence of its intervention in the learning context
(Barab & Squire, 2004; Crippen & Brown, 2018; Joseph, 2004; Reeves & McKenney, 2015). In
the case of this study, the artifacts include a prototype of the abolitionist videogame Kai
UnEarthed, and the curriculum of the Critical Game Jam we built around it, which are both
described below. We intentionally designed these artifacts to pose a range of conceptual and
theoretical questions including questions about critical game literacies and Afrofuturist
development, the basis for the research questions of this current study. This study seeks
descriptions of how people experience these artifacts as well as a deepening and intertwining of

71
the concepts embedded within them, generating critical design principles for future learning
environments.
Research as Learning Experience Design and Professional Development
Because DBR involves creating and studying interventions, it positions design-based
researchers as curriculum theorists and developers, and dissolves hard disciplinary borders
between education researchers, educators, learning experience designers, and technology
designers. In my experience in the doctoral program, these borders have been porous, especially
with the expansion of remote learning during the COVID19 pandemic. Because this study
focuses on designing a virtual game jam, it could contribute to broader efforts to design critical
digital pedagogies and online learning spaces (Cortez & Lizárraga, n.d.). In this sense, this
study’s approach to DBR is related to Human -Computer Interaction research, especially User
experience (UX), learner experience (LX), and player experience research (Dodero, et al., 2015;
Fullerton, 2019; Hanington & Martin, 2019; Hodent, 2020). In these approaches – and in DBR-
interactions and interfaces are designed for particular technologically mediated settings with
human experience goals in mind, putting the users/learners/players at the center of the design
process and positioning the researcher as an empathic advocate for them (Fullerton, 2019;
Hodent, 2020). Because DBR aims to overcome practical challenges through prototyping, it can
be a process of professional development for both researchers and practitioners (Joseph, 2004;
Reeves & McKenney, 2015). For example, this study involved me training a team of graduate
student researchers to design, facilitate, and study the virtual Critical Game Jam; this included
teaching them how to conduct playtests as part of the playcentric design methodology (Fullerton,
2019) used in the USC Games program and many game design studios.
Intertwined Roles

72
DBR projects almost always involve collaborative teams of teachers, designers, and
researchers, with these roles being more defined or more flexible and porous depending on the
context of the project (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; Barab & Squire, 2004; Crippen & Brown,
2018; Joseph, 2004; Reeves & McKenney, 2015). In PDR, these roles are intentionally porous
and are open to the ways these activities are conducted historically and at present in the
communities where the research is happening (Zavala, 2016). Accordingly, this current study
embraces the porosity between the role of player, game designer, and researcher in contemporary
metagaming cultures (Boluk & LeMieux, 2017; Gray, 2020), a move that is warranted by the
connected gaming literature showing the learning potentials of such porosity (e.g., Kafai &
Burke, 2016). In this sense, the research itself could be considered a form of metagaming; for
example, it explores the possibility of constructing metagaming learning ecologies around Kai
UnEarthed.
Several members of the research team cycled through roles of facilitator,
participant/learner, player, designer, and researcher (i.e., observer or interviewer). Some of us
(Olivia, KB, and I) are also co-designers of Kai UnEarthed, and we positioned ourselves as more
experienced peers in relation to participants who playtested the game as they learned how to
conduct their own playtests as part of a playcentric design methodology (Fullerton, 2019). In
other words, we invited participants to go from being playtesters giving feedback on Kai
UnEarthed to designing their own games which those of us who designed Kai UnEarthed then
playtested, creating a reciprocal learning dynamic.
3
This design of the research process builds on
already-existing collaborative efforts with similar reciprocities. For example, my relationship

3
This approach was informed by conversations with Amanda Latasha Armstrong from the Learning Games
lab at New Mexico State University.

73
with two participants – Mims and Cecilia- began when they playtested the Twine-based narrative
prototype of Kai UnEarthed and gave feedback on it. Inspired by that experience, I decided to
help them with some design work on the Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game they are
developing (described further below), and as we built relationships through that work, I invited
them to facilitate a playtest of this new game during this study. In these collaborative
relationships we aimed to nurture a broader critical gaming affinity space where expertise is
distributed (Gee, 2013).
Related to this goal, participatory design researchers expand the contextual domain of
“the researched” to include the researchers themselves, in our relational, pedagogical, and design
activity (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016, p. 174). In this study, we included all of the notes, memos,
and video recordings from our researcher trainings, design meetings, and post-workshop debrief
reflections as data that I analyzed, and we conceptualized our roles as participant-researchers,
recognizing our expertise as emergent and distributed. In particular, the design of the Critical
Game Jam was informed by a recorded Zoom discussion where Olivia and I reflected on our
design process around Kai UnEarthed; this conversation drew from a semi-structured protocol of
questions about how we related to each other and how we nurtured a sociocultural context
capable of supporting critical speculative design work informed by Afrofuturism and
abolitionism (see Appendix J). Because the study’s research questions focus on design, this
conversation served a dual role: it was data that contributed to the findings reported in Chapters
Four and Five, but it was also part of the discussions on methods and setting/context elaborated
in this chapter.
These participatory elements of the study are grounded in DBR and PDRs’ departures
from positivist epistemological assumptions such as separation between a knowing subject and a

74
researched object. More specifically, Bang and Vossoughi (2016) argue that the interventions
participatory design researchers pose to study a learning context might involve a new axiology,
e.g., a new way of learning through relationships, not simply a technological artifact or
pedagogical technique. In this sense, PDR methodology is not only distinct from other forms of
DBR, but it is also distinct from other participatory approaches. The goal is not primarily to
“give voice” to underrepresented peoples as part of a formal democratic process (Bang &
Vossoughi, 2016, p. 182); the ability of researchers to give voice in such ways has been
questioned and deconstructed by critical qualitative researchers (e.g., Jackson & Mazzei, 2009).
Instead, the goal is to cultivate quality relationships where researchers and participants can be
collaborators, co-theorists, and co-designers; such standards of relationality are important
because a narrow focus on formal representation can sometimes foster tokenism and paternalism
(Bang & Vossoughi, 2016, p. 182).
Iterative Design
Like prototyping in software development and user experience (UX) research, and
playcentric methodologies in game design (Fullerton, 2019), DBR and PDR involve an iterative
design process (Barab and Squire, 2004; Joseph, 2004). After the research questions, conjectures,
and artifact/intervention are generated, the researchers study how the prototypical intervention
works, for whom, and under what conditions; they then redesign it based on this outcome and
repeat the cycle, usually several times (Crippen & Brown, 2018). This process often uses mixed
methods, with both qualitative and quantitative data informing the re-design process (Anderson
& Shattuck, 2012; Crippen & Brown, 2018).
Consistent with this approach to DBR, the answers to this study’s research questions -
and design principles those answers informed - will eventually orient the production of improved

75
versions of Kai UnEarthed and the Critical Game Jam curriculum. Given limits of time and
funding during the PhD program, that re-design phase of this DBR trajectory lies beyond the
scope of this proposed dissertation, though I aim to engage in it as soon as possible in order to
contribute to emerging abolitionist gaming organizing I am helping facilitate. The re-design
process will be a key feature of my ongoing research trajectory as well as my teaching praxis
after graduation.
In addition to the design of the learning environment, the research design for studying it
was also iterative, conducted in two levels (in 2021 and 2023) as described later in this chapter.
The study design, methods, and protocols for the second level were informed by what I learned
conducting the first level. I chose methods and developed protocols for the initial study design
for Level One in 2021 before Dr. Tynes, colleagues, and I had completed and published the
Afrofuturist Development Theory and design lens that informs this overall dissertation study.
However, the process of composing the theory was also iterative; we had been discussing and
prototyping it for several years before publishing, and those conversations informed my research
questions for this study and my choices of methods to answer them, even for the early stages of
the study in 2021. This is reflected in the fact that preliminary findings from this study are
included in the published version of the theory, as a case study of how it can be applied. I went
back through all of the methods and protocols, as well as my study memos, to ask whether the
study’s methods aligned with the study’s theoretical framework reported in Chapter One,
including the version of the Afrofuturist Development Theory we published in 2023. I found that
they mostly did, which is why I am characterizing this as an iterative design-based research study
rather than a study asking a new research question about a previous dataset gathered under
different circumstances. As discussed below, the only methods that I thought might be

76
misaligned or not critical enough were the pre- and post- assessments, but those are not central to
answering the research questions for this current study. The research design for Level Two of the
Critical Game Jam directly drew from the published version of the Afrofuturist Development
Theory; as shown below, I asked participants to read the manuscript pre-print and use it to
analyze each-others’ game designs. The process for Level Two also afforded me chances to
follow up with four participants about themes I had begun to analyze in their Level One data that
required further elaboration (e.g., the tension I noticed around how to conceptualize pro-Black
representation reported in Chapter Four); this also helped compensate for limitations in the Level
One protocols.
Situated and Distributed Cognition
Many learning scientists and design-based researchers are epistemologically committed
to the idea that “cognition is not a thing located within the individual thinker but is a process that
is distributed across the knower, the environment in which knowing occurs, and the activity in
which the learner participates” (Barab & Squire, 2004, p. 2). DBR offers a way to study learning
processes beyond the individualizing assumptions of other qualitative psychology methodologies
such as phenomenology, which tend to focus on essential individual experiences (Braun &
Clarke, 2006). More specifically, participatory design researchers emphasize that the cognitive
activity of design itself is widely distributed and is not simply the property of professional
designers: “design and design decisions are already present within human activity" (Bang &
Vossoughi, 2016, p. 182). This epistemology recognizes that important design work is done both
inside and outside of university and industry settings. This does not mean that critical researchers
can never critique these ubiquitous practices of community design; however, they ought to
“assume their presence and seek to understand their theoretical principles, values, and histories

77
as a necessary starting point for new forms of joint activity and cycles of design" (Bang &
Vossoughi, 2016, p. 183). The curriculum and game that are the vehicle for this current study
began as everyday activities I engaged in as a teacher and abolitionist organizer, and the Critical
Game Jam prompted participants to find the games inherent in their already existing worlds
while imagining future worlds.

Description of Kai UnEarthed
Kai UnEarthed is a video game about young people learning, growing, and healing in an
unpoliced future as they encounter artifacts left behind by us, their ancestors. I co-designed it
with Olivia Peace, an academy-award-winning filmmaker, and Claire Hu, a professional game
designer, when we were students in USC MFA game design classes. A video trailer, text-based
prototype, and screenshots are available on the game’s website. The game is a work of
interactive, young-adult visionary fiction (Imarisha & brown, 2015) designed for use in CGL and
abolitionist (Love, 2019) learning environments and movements against police and prisons. It
involves an analog journal with accompanying writing and design prompts.
It is one of several emerging games featuring abolitionist and Afrofuturistic themes, e.g.
Brooks’ and Kosminsky’s Afrorithms from the Future game. As far as I know, Kai UnEarthed is
the first game of this kind to be proposed for inclusion in an academic research study. It
prototypes a game-based abolitionist pedagogy (Love, 2019) as part of a participatory design
research process (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016).
As described in our Speculative Pedagogies chapter (Coopilton et al., in press) the game
began with worldbuilding I did with students, colleagues, and community members when I was a
high school teacher involved in movements against youth incarceration (see here for details). Co-
designers and I then developed the world into a video game through iterative cycles of

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prototyping, playtesting, and refinement based on players’ feedback, informed by the playcentric
design methodology that we learned in the USC Games program (Fullerton, 2019). As Bang and
Vossoughi (2016) suggest, we are attempting to create an immediately useful product that also
prototypes new ideas, e.g., new game design practices and speculative expressions of future
liberatory learning environments. In this sense, the game rehearses (Boal, 2014) liberated pro-
Black futures inspired by speculative theories in the (post)humanities, including Afrofuturism.
Description of the Critical Game Jam (CGJ)
The goal of the Critical Game Jam was to begin building an affinity space (Gee, 2013)
around a shared passion for Black liberation, queer liberation, and speculative imagination about
unpoliced futures. In curriculum co-design sessions with Olivia, Jaymon, Mims, Christina, and
Michelle, we decided to emphasize the creative arts side of game design (especially
worldbuilding), building on the USC School of Cinematic Art’s Interactive Media and Game
Design curriculum, which teaches narrative, character design and storytelling, not just game
software development. This choice was also influenced by conversations in the critical learning
sciences Political and Ethical Learning Virtual Lab and the Speculative Education colloquia
about designing learning environments as a form of worldmaking. We departed from a
competitive game jam model; for example, every participant was compensated for completing
the game jam because we positioned participants as paid collaborative co-designers rather than
individual designers competing for prize money and attention.
Level One of the game jam was a week-long series of workshops where participants:
• Imagined liberated futures and reflected on their own capacities to create these
futures
• Critically analyzed existing games they play
• Reflected on how and why they play these games
• Imagined what kinds of games they would like to play and design based on their
sociocultural contexts and desires

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• Engaged in collective design prompts, discussions, presentations, and prototyping
activities informed by playcentric design methodologies (Fullerton, 2019)
• Engaged in an interactive workshop on critical character design and
worldbuilding facilitated by Michelle Ma, a technical artist at a AAA game
studio. The workshop is based on Michelle’s MFA thesis project where she
prototyped a process for inclusive character creation (Ma et al., 2022).
• Playtested prototypes of abolitionist games, including an abolitionist
worldbuilding game and a prototype of the full audiovisual version of Kai
UnEarthed not yet released on our website. We positioned these prototypes as
proleptic demonstrations (Vossoughi et al., 2021) to show what kind of
abolitionist (Love, 2019) and playcentric (Fullerton, 2019) design processes are
possible as participants work on their own games.
• Began to design their own games that could help challenge systemic oppression
• Gave feedback on each other’s game ideas
• Reflected on their learning process and gave feedback on the learning activities
These activities were designed to provide imaginative inspiration and scaffolding to support
participants in working on their games asynchronously so that they can present them later on
during Level Two.
Between Level One and Level Two, four participants (Madu, Mims, Reginald, and
Gabriel) developed ideas they had brainstormed into game prototypes which they shared during
the Level Two sessions. Reginald made a digital prototype of a video game in Unity, and
everyone else made paper prototypes of analog games; their prototypes are discussed further in
other sections of this dissertation. The differentiation in acceptable summative outcomes to the
learning process is consistent with Brad Robinson’s (2020) dissertation research; he found that
the game design learning process is more important than the product, and not requiring
deliverables that involve coding (e.g., playable digital prototypes) can result in more engagement
and emergent design innovations.
During Level Two, I matched designers with each other in pairs to give each other
feedback and gave people the option to do this synchronously or asynchronously, and online or
in person. Mims and Madu playtested each other’s’ games and gave each other feedback in
person at the USC Rossier School of Education. Reginald and Gabriel shared digital design

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documentation about their prototypes (e.g., Reginald shared a gameplay video recorded in Unity)
and they gave each other asynchronous written and video feedback. Most of the other
participants had intended to prototype the game ideas they pitched at the end of Level One and
share them in Level Two, but were not able to due to illness, workload from college classes, or
the pressures of applying for jobs or graduate school. During Level Two, I also prompted
participants to create pitches to their communities presenting their games and reflecting on what
social changes would be necessary for these games to be fully produced and widely played. This
replaced the pitches to game industry executives that often culminate existing game design
learning curricula, providing a more expansive critical and speculative alternative that invites
participants to think beyond the current limits of the game industry.
I also asked participants to read the Afrofuturist Development Theory (Tynes et al., 2023)
and to note ways that each other’s’ games embodied aspects of the theory, and ways that they
could do this better in future iterations. This grounded the feedback process in shared affinities
and commitments to Black liberation, which was appropriate since all four games related to
Black liberation in their themes and player experience goals. Because I had already begun to use
Afrofuturist Development Theory to thematize the data from Level One, asking participants to
notice themes related to it in each other’s work allowed me to attune my analysis with their
assessments and my follow up questions to them as I completed the full thematic data analysis
process described below. This compensated to some degree for the lack of desired participatory
data analysis in the study. It also compensated for the fact that the Level One protocols were
based on earlier versions of the theory, supplementing the Level One data with more in-depth
data that helped answer RQ2 more robustly. At the end of Level Two, the four participants

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produced final video reflections on the overall game jam process similar to the ones they did at
the end of Level One.
How We Applied What We Learned from Designing Kai UnEarthed as We Designed the
Critical Game Jam
Our Speculative Pedagogies book chapter (Coopilton et al., in press) describes how
Olivia and my experiences designing Kai UnEarthed informed the design of the Critical Game
Jam and this study on it. This section adds to that narrative by providing reflections on my design
memos and conversations with co-designers as we created the curriculum for the game jam.
(Chapters Four and Five share participants’ experiences with these design choices.)
Looking back at my memos, there was a tension in my design vision for the game jam
which co-designers helped me resolve. On the one hand, I saw it as a scaffolded critical game
literacy learning environment that we were testing out in this pilot study, similar to playtesting a
game, in order to build a larger curriculum or set of critical pedagogies based on learners’
feedback. On the other hand, I saw it as akin to game jams where people come and create their
own games and share them, where the main scaffolding is the performance and studio-style
feedback process; I wanted it to feel less like a class or workshop and more like self-directed
learning through informal discovery inside of an affinity space. Over the course of the design
process, the game jam ended up taking shape more as a scaffolded critical game literacy learning
environment, partially through the influence of co-designers, especially Olivia and Jaymon.
Olivia and I studied our own process of learning critical game design through making Kai
UnEarthed together, and designed the Critical Game Jam with the intention of facilitating similar
learning processes at a larger scale; as we reflected together, we realized that critical scaffolding
was essential to our learning. Olivia said that the two of us “make a good team” because the

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worldbuilding I had done with my communities in Seattle provided scaffolding for their creative
expression as a co-designer. They said:
I think it's really helpful to give people a world to start with. Um, like that was really
helpful for me and Claire, just having you be like, ‘Oh, I had already started this world
where, um, these are the things that are happening in it.’ 'Cause then we can just kind of
go off to the races with, like, oh, these are the characters that we wanna make, and this is
the particular story we're gonna focus on.
They said teachers are often hesitant to provide this kind of scaffolding because they want to be
co-learners, prioritizing the voices of their co-designers and students. But what ends up
happening is only the people who are already comfortable speaking up end up doing so. Olivia
said, “there are other people, for whatever reason—and I'm, like, one of these people—where
they will not participate unless, like, the, um, the environment is, like, set for them basically.”
They argued that the Critical Game Jam also needs this kind of scaffolding to encourage
engagement.
In particular, we discussed how to encourage people to overcome internalized oppression
and imposter syndrome. We brainstormed design prompts that would encourage participants to
see their lives as full of stories worth telling and games worth playing, e.g., prompts that ask
people to set player experience goals based on experiences they have had in their communities.
We discussed how this could also help challenge the idea that being a game designer requires
advanced computer engineering skills. Olivia said: “I remember having, like, a game that was
basically like an infinite side-scroller game that I would play in my mind of, like, someone
running alongside the car as my parents would drive”; we agreed we would prompt participants
to recognize the ways they already design and modify games like this in everyday life. I
imagined the game jam’s scaffolding as similar to the generative constraints in games that
interrupt taken-for granted courses of human action in order to prompt other, more interesting
ones, i.e., play. Based on this initial conversation, Olivia, Jaymon, Mims, Michelle, Christina,

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and I co-designed the scaffolding of the game gam as a loose set of conceptual tools that people
can build on and play with.
The game jam also prompted critical design that challenges reified notions of reality,
drawing on Olivia’s experiences making their academy-award-winning Afrofuturistic MFA
thesis project Against Reality, an interactive film they were co-creating with AI at the time of the
game jam level one. Olivia and I conceptualized the game design prompts, constraints, and
challenges as a way to interrupt the ideologies that structure everyday life, with the goal of
facilitating learning around critical consciousness, design, and speculative imagination. Olivia
reflected on their art school and filmmaking experiences, and said that most artists from
oppressed backgrounds are pressured to uncritically repeat “their own traumas or, like, things
that they've heard about and not really thinking about, like, oh, this is how future generations are,
like, seeing our time, um, and how we're, like, teaching people how to view one another.” As a
result, the “same four stories” end up being told over and over again.
Similarly, Tracy Fullerton and computer science educator Betsy DiSalvo had warned me
that in their experiences with game jams and participatory game design research, participants
will often re-create worse versions of mainstream popular games. When I shard this warning
with Olivia, they said they think that happens because people end up performing what they think
being a game designer is supposed to mean, and that critical pedagogical interventions are
needed to interrupt that dynamic. We agreed we need to prompt developing designers to realize
that they can create game and story-worlds that model their own liberation instead of just
narrating oppression, and that this can infuse choices they make in terms of worldbuilding and
character design. As Olivia put it, “you can choose differently. Like you can choose to have
people be kind. Um, to have people have tough conversations, to have people be brave, even if

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that's not what you've seen in your real reality.” We agreed that this notion of un-reifying reality
was the core premise of Kai UnEarthed. Building on our experiences making the game together,
we wanted the game jam prompts to frame the “future as an open-source design challenge”
rather than a “technocratic problem.”
As described further in Chapter Four, we realized worldbuilding is especially important
for scaffolding critical game design because right now most designers are trying to iterate on the
default shared assumptions of racialized capitalism’s worldbuilding, which Olivia characterized
as “lack and stinginess and, um, honestly like a little bit of absurdity, like-like hatred, um, and
fear.” Starting with a world that broke out of these values helped the Kai UnEarthed team learn
to design a critical (i.e., abolitionist) game, and we aimed to invite the Critical Game Jam cohort
to experience the same process. As Olivia put it, “we created this foundational world, like, with
so much care, um, with all these ideas embedded in it and then give it to other people to iterate
on.” In this sense, the critical scaffolding we offered together to the game jam was a new
iteration of what I had offered Olivia and our team several years earlier.
As I designed the research process around the Critical Game Jam, I formalized aspects of
these reflections on our praxis into design conjectures, discussed next.
Design Conjectures
To increase the trustworthiness and rigor of design-based research, Sandoval (2014)
recommends conjecture mapping, “a means of specifying theoretically salient features of a
learning environment design and mapping out how they are predicted to work together to
produce desired outcomes” (p. 19). Even in an exploratory pilot study like this one, all design
work is informed by some ideas about how learning might happen, so Sandoval (2014) argues
that researchers have an obligation to state these as explicitly as possible in advance. Conjecture

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maps include descriptions of how a high-level conjecture is embodied
4
in the elements of a
designed learning environment. Design conjectures anticipate how this embodiment might
generate mediating processes, and theoretical conjectures anticipate how these processes might
produce desired outcomes. Figure One is a conjecture map for this study, illustrating how I
expected the results of the inquiry might answer my research questions.
The desired CGL learning outcomes support an answer to RQ1A: “How, if at all, did
participants experience critical game literacies learning during a game jam and a game (Kai
UnEarthed) designed to prototype such learning experiences?” Similarly, the desired
Afrofuturist development outcomes support an answer to RQ2A: “How, if at all, did participants
experience Afrofuturist development during a game jam and a game (Kai UnEarthed) designed
to prototype such learning experiences?” Analysis and discussion of how the design and
theoretical conjectures actually ended up playing out in the study support answers to the rest of
the RQ sub-questions about how, if at all, design elements of the game jam end up supporting
CGL and Afrofuturist development learning experiences, and what can be done differently in the
future to support them better. Answers to those questions can, in turn, help generate the other
desired outcome of the study: design principles for future learning spaces and games. These
questions and conjectures shaped the procedures for data collection and analysis.

4
This use of the term embodiment is not referring to psychological uses of the term, e.g., embodied affect;
it is simply referring to the elements of the learning environment such as tools and roles.

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Figure 1
Conjecture Map for This Study

The Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game (UAWG)
The Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game also served as a design-research artifact
supporting learning during the study. Brianna Mims and Cecilia Sweet-Coll designed this game
and playtested a prototype of it during Level One. In this capacity it also served as scaffolding to

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support game jam participants with critical worldbuilding practices as described in Chapter Four,
and as a proleptic demonstration of abolitionist playcentric design practices alongside Kai
UnEarthed. Then Mims and I collaborated on refining and playtesting new iterations of the game
between the two levels. Based on this process, Mims presented a nearly-complete prototype in
Level Two, which Madu playtested. She is also working on larger high school curriculum
incorporating the game, as described in Appendix N, and I am helping her with that.
The UAWG is a tabletop card game that brings players together to build liberated
communities without police or prisons. The game walks players through sections of decision-
making, resource distribution, responses to harm, and community rituals and practices. It asks
players to generate new possibilities and allows them a space to grapple and reflect on past and
current structures through conversation and art-making. The game uses biomimicry and cross-
cultural exchange to open players' minds to new possibilities for strategies, systems, and
relations within their communities. It prompts players to ask: how do we create the conditions to
be in healthy relationship with ourselves, each other, the land, and the natural world? The game
is designed to exercise players’ imaginations so that they can build in their existing communities
from a place of experimentation. Mims has playtested it across communities in the United States,
Ghana, Senegal, inside NORCO Prison, and online with youth across the African continent.
Setting and Context
With the exception of Madu and Mims’ Level Two playtest, the study occurred over
Zoom (synchronous video and text chat with occasional breakout rooms). We conducted the
study virtually due to safety concerns around meeting in person during the COVID19 pandemic;
this also allowed participants from different cities to join. We used Zoom because researchers
and participants were relatively familiar with its interface and affordances since it was used

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widely for online education and recreational activities during the pandemic. This choice also
allowed for some of the activities prototyped during the Critical Game Jam to be rapidly iterated
upon and deployed in other online learning and organizing settings that also use Zoom. Because
of concerns about Zoom fatigue (Bailenson, 2021) and general stress from the pandemic, we
attempted to optimize for engagement by limiting the Level One synchronous virtual activities to
two hours per day over five days (Monday-Friday), supplementing these activities with
asynchronous design practices that participants did at their own convenience.
Zoom’s affordances of simultaneous audiovisual and text chat interaction offered some
level of accessibility and differentiation, providing multiple routes to participate in interactive
activities. This aligns with the AbleGamers Accessible Player Experience design pattern called
“Second Channel” (Beeston et al., 2018; Cairns et al., 2019); to increase accessibility, we asked
participants about their access needs before the start of the game jam. Through designing
activities that use both chat and video, we drew on literacies research literature on the use of
multimodal chat software to facilitate discussions about shared texts, gameplay, and design
processes (e.g., Robinson, 2020; Seglem & Percel, 2019). USC provides access to free
professional Zoom accounts with enhanced security features, which met research ethics/IRB
standards for data privacy. This also prevented disruptions or possible online racial
discrimination associated with Zoom bombing. Zoom sessions were recorded not just as data
collection but also to make the content of each session available to all participants to review
before the following session, e.g., in case internet access problems or illness prevented full
involvement. Participants were informed this would happen before the study started, and our
decision to do this was approved by the IRB.

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The study also involved activity in shared Google Drive files, which served as an
interactive Multimodal Community Journal (Lewis Ellison, Robinson, & Qiu, 2018; Robinson,
2020). I created a shared file (including Jamboards for image creation) with daily schedules,
collaboratively generated group agreements, and design and discussion prompts, which
participants collectively annotated. This annotation occurred during synchronous Zoom
activities, allowing for continuity in the organization and accumulation of information and
learning across Zoom sessions, and it served as a means of formative assessment of how the
game jam was going, allowing the team to make mid-course adjustments to the curriculum as
needed. Annotation also occurred asynchronously between and after sessions, and facilitators
referenced asynchronous participant contributions in future synchronous sessions to demonstrate
their relevance and encourage engagement. We also provided each participant with their own
Google Drive folder containing a journal document that only that participant and the research
team could see. They were invited to use this to sketch ideas they may not want to share with the
whole group, and they copied and pasted these from it into the Multimodal Community Journal
later if they wanted to. I was available throughout the week to support participants with any
technical challenges or access needs regarding these virtual settings.
Data Collection
Sampling Procedures
Maxwell (2013) defines sampling as the decisions researchers make about where to
conduct research and which people to include in a study. Within qualitative research, each
sampling strategy has its own distinct purposes, strengths, and weaknesses, but the general
approach is to sample in a way that builds rich, detailed knowledge around a topic of interest
rather than attempting to make statistical inferences about population-level phenomena (See:

90
Johnson & Christensen, 2014). This is an exploratory pilot study on a topic that has not been
widely studied and is not widely discussed among the general population; accordingly, I
employed purposive sampling to locate participants whose interests and sociocultural contexts
were helpful to the study (Johnson & Christensen, 2014), particularly people who are interested
in games and game design who are also interested in challenging systemic oppression and
imagining liberated futures. Such a strategy invited perspectives that are important in answering
the study’s research questions. Mixing sampling strategies can result in more nuances within the
data (Patton, 1987), so I also conducted snowball sampling (Johnson & Christensen, 2014),
inviting participants who are part of key organizations and networks to invite people from these
contexts to participate as well.
Building an Affinity Space.
Since this DBR study involved designing a learning environment, sampling decisions
were also questions of pedagogy and design with ethical and political implications. After
extensive discussion among co-researchers and consultation with several prospective
participants, we agreed that we needed to design a space where participants’ zones of proximal
development could overlap, consistent with literature on affinity spaces (Gee, 2011; Gee &
Hayes, 2010) and sociocultural learning theory. Building on Robinson’s (2020) findings from a
game design summer camp, we wanted a group with various levels of technical skills regarding
game design, where some participants could be more experienced peers sharing their skills with
others. For analogous reasons, we wanted a group with various levels of critical consciousness,
including experiences with activism and critical media literacy learning. But along these two
axes, the variation in prior knowledge could not be so great that differentiation would an
impossible challenge for the facilitation team, which was operating on a volunteer basis during a

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pandemic. Given these competing challenges, we decided to seek a group where every
participant had a baseline familiarity with both critical consciousness and gaming, and a range of
experience beyond that baseline.
For example, we decided that not every participant needed to be an abolitionist, partially
because we wanted to see how people who do not identify as abolitionists engage with the
abolitionist games in the playtests (one of the strategic goals of the games is to engage people
who are not already part of the movement). However, we sought people who are interested in
Black liberation broadly who would not be hostile toward abolitionist participants. Connecting
this concern back to the literature, our goal was to compose an affinity space (Gee, 2011; Gee &
Hayes, 2010) where the shared passion is Black liberation, including abolitionism and queer
liberation. The space was open to people of any identity but we prioritized creating an
environment where Black people could bring their full selves, consistent with principles two and
seven of the Afrofuturist Development Theory (see Appendix C); this included welcoming the
sociocultural practices they bring to generate shared passionate creativity. We invited non-Black
participants to respectfully engage with these dynamics and add to them.
In addition, we decided to include only young adults aged 18-26 for several reasons.
First, the theoretical literature reviewed in Chapter Two suggests that critical game literacies
could be important for young adult development, but young adult learning experiences are
understudied in the empirical literature on critical game literacy learning that includes game
design. Secondly, I am interested in designing practical interventions that could be used with
learners this age, e.g., in university classes like the ones I hope to teach in the future. Third,
research ethics and IRB oversight require that studies with adolescents have a defined
intervention that can be reviewed by the IRB before fieldwork begins, and the purpose of this

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exploratory DBR study was to iteratively develop such an intervention in ways that have not
been done before, so such an intervention could not be shown to the IRB beforehand. Future
iterations of an ongoing research agenda might build on the outcomes of this study, testing the
Critical Game Jam curriculum with adolescents after altering it to be developmentally
appropriate. In contrast, this first iteration required real-time collaborative changes in the design
of the game jam curriculum, and requesting IRB amendments for every change was not practical,
especially with long processing times due to the pandemic. As a result, I decided to exclude
people under 18 to keep the study in exempt status so that rapid iteration remained possible
within federal regulations.
Sample Part One: Cohort of Young Adult Participants
The resulting sample included a cohort of nine young adult participants. Eight were part
of Level One, with an age range of 21-26 (mean age 22.3, standard deviation of 1.69 years). We
asked participants to share their race/ethnicity; six self-identified as Black or African American,
one as Latino (Brazilian), and one as Mexican and white. We also asked them to share their
gender; four self-identified as non-binary or gender non-conforming, and four self-identified as
men. Most participants were undergraduate students at the time. The ninth participant, Mims, is a
Black woman in her late 20s at the time; she had planned to participate in Level One but could
not because she was playtesting the UAWG in Morocco, and the time zone difference made it
hard to attend the workshops. Instead, she co-facilitated a playtest of the game during one of the
workshops, and then participated in Level Two of the game jam. She is the only participant in
Level Two who was not present through all of the Level One workshops. Profiles of each
participant with additional demographic and sociocultural context can be found in Appendix P

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Sample Part Two: Composition of the Design Research Team.
Because of the study’s participatory and reflexive dimensions and its research questions
about design, the team of participant-researcher-designers who co-organized this project can also
be considered part of the sample, even though they did not participate in all of the data
generating activities (e.g., pre-and post-videos) for reasons discussed below. Consistent with
principle six of the Afrofuturist Development Theory, everyone on this team had training in
young Black people’s histories, technocultures, and development (Tynes, et al., 2023). The team
included Jaymon Ortega, who co-facilitated the workshops with me; he engaged as a participant
when I was facilitating and I engaged as a participant when he was facilitating. It also included
Kirsten Elliott and De’Andra Johnson, who rotated between conducting observations and
participating in the learning activities. All three were graduate student researchers at the Center
for Empowered Learning and Development with Technology (CELDTech); they are all Black,
with extensive experiences engaging with Black technocultures, and Jaymon and Kirsten have
also taught Black students. Jaymon also studies gaming and play (e-sports and athletics),
De’Andra studies fandoms and representation, and Kirsten conducts critical research on
educational technologies in relation to race, racism, and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. I also
have extensive training in supporting Black students learning and developing with technology
through my coursework, activist work, Dr. Tynes’ mentorship, and my RA work. Please refer to
my positionality statement and Appendix B for further details.
In addition, two co-designers on Kai UnEarthed also participated in the study as
participant-researchers; both were MFA students at the USC School of Cinematic Arts
Interactive Media and Games Division. Olivia Peace is a queer Black interdisciplinary artist and
academy-award-winning filmmaker interested in critical imagination and radical optimism in the

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face of loss and change. KB is a white educator and interactive media designer interested in
educational equity, narrative design, and sound design. Olivia helped Jaymon and I design the
curriculum for the game jam as discussed above, and Olivia and KB helped me train the entire
team to conduct playtests of Kai UnEarthed; they also engaged in the learning activities
alongside other participants. Michelle Ma participated for one session only, facilitating the
critical character design workshop discussed above.
Unfortunately, I did not make it clear enough to this team that I was inviting them to
engage in all of the game jam activities, including the pre-and post-videos and assessments, so
most of them did not complete these. And because they each had to miss game jam sessions to
facilitate design and/or research activities (like taking field notes), the design work they were
able to do in sessions alongside other participants was limited in scope (though expansive in
imagination and depth). For these reasons, it is harder to reflect on, assess, and analyze this
team’s learning during the study with the same level of coherence and precision as the learning
of the cohort of young adult participants, and it is not within our capacity to re-convene the team
to do a collective self-assessment. For that reason, data the organizers’ team generated tends to
answer RQ 1.2 and 2.2 more than the other sub-questions; while I cannot say as much about this
team’s learning experiences, I do aim to narrate how they shaped the design of the game jam and
the experiences of the cohort of young adults.
Recruitment and Admittance Decisions
Our recruitment strategy embodied all of the sampling and design decisions outlined
above. Before recruiting participants to the study, I gained approval for exempt status through
the Institutional Review Board (IRB); this allowed for iterative changes in recruitment materials
in consultation with participants who helped with snowball sampling. Examples of recruitment

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materials are included in Appendix E. They outline the purpose of the study, an overview of the
activities involved in the Critical Game Jam, and criteria for compensation. Materials made clear
that no coding experience was necessary to participate and that people oppressed by the video
game industry were particularly welcome (e.g., Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ people).
Prospective participants were directed to a longer description of the study housed on the
CELDTech website: https://empoweredtech.usc.edu/game-literacy-project/. This page included
more information about the research team, mentioning some of us are game design students
working on Kai UnEarthed and that many of us are queer and/or Black. It reiterated that the
game jam is for anyone who “is willing to try things out without being perfect” and that “anyone
who can play can learn to make a game.” Further details about compensation and benefits were
also provided, as well as a link to the application from. Participants were encouraged to email me
if they would like more information.
These materials were shared widely through our social networks. They were also shared
through the social media accounts of CELDTech and USC Games, and Kishonna Gray, a
prominent Black critical gaming scholar shared it on her Twitter. I shared it with teachers at
several high schools (including the one where I began to design Kai UnEarthed) and a college
access program, and they shared it with graduating seniors. Finally, I shared it with Afrofuturist
artists I know who mentor young adults as well as with professors I know who teach college-
level game design classes.
We created an application form linked from the website (also included in Appendix F).
This form asked about participants’ age, race, school /job (if applicable), and gender (open-ended
short answer, not a binary variable). It invited applicants to share anything they wanted us to
know about themselves or their cultural background so we could connect with them better, and

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asked them about their gameplay and game design experiences, their intentions for participating
in the workshop, their experiences with past critical media literacy classes, their parents’
educational levels, and their email/phone contact info. The purpose of this form was threefold: a)
to help compose a cohort for the game jam based on the sampling criteria, b) to gather
information about possible participants that could be used to make design decisions to better
support their learning, and c) to better understand participants’ sociocultural contexts as we
analyzed their experiences in the study. Jaymon and I made admissions decisions together based
on the aforementioned sampling criteria.
Informed Consent and Intellectual Property Agreements
Because the study is exempt under federal regulations, assent and consent forms were not
required by the IRB, but I provided a study information sheet to all participants, participant-
researchers, and guest facilitators, and asked them to review it and to email me confirming their
consent to participate before the study began. This document outlined the purposes and data
collection methods of the study, as well as possible benefits and risks, and procedures for data
security and anonymization. A copy is included in Appendix G. In addition, I used Adobe Forms
to request that participants sign a series of agreements related to intellectual property and media
release rights in the game jam; these are included in Appendix H. These forms make it clear that
participants retain ownership over any ideas they created and brought to the game jam, while
they authorized me and the research team to share their ideas in publications and public
presentations.
This agreement is important for building trustworthiness given widespread issues of
cultural appropriation in media development. Consistent with other critical studies on media
creation among BIPOC young people (e.g., Stanton, et al., 2020; Van Steenis, 2020), I made it

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clear that I do not own participants’ work, and I have gathered it not to take credit for it but
rather to answer the research questions of the study. In doing so, I made every possible effort to
credit participants for their work. My agreement with the IRB allowed participants to decide
whether they wanted to be credited by name or by pseudonym. If they opted for using their real
names, these remained attached to their data throughout the study, including in any quotes
reported in this dissertation or possible publications; otherwise, they were credited with a
pseudonym of their choice, which they used in the game jam as well so that their real name was
not associated with their videos and other data. These forms also made clear that publication and
public credit are not guaranteed, recognizing that I will not have control over editorial and
conference curation decisions.
Recorded Curriculum Design Sessions, Discussions, and Trainings
Consistent with the participatory elements of this study (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), our
discussions and decision making as participant-researchers was collected as data so that I can
reflect on them and include them in data analysis. I engaged in Zoom discussions with Jaymon,
with Olivia, and with Mims and Christina, asking for their input in designing the curriculum for
the Critical Game Jam. I recorded these sessions, and discussions loosely followed the semi-
structured protocol listed in Appendix I. The protocol for the conversation with Olivia mentioned
above is in Appendix J. I recorded the Zoom conversation where Jaymon and I made decisions
about sampling and composing the cohort for the game jam. Finally, I facilitated trainings over
Zoom with the team of participant-researchers on how to conduct interviews and playtests, and
recorded those.
Pre-and Post-Assessments

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Informed by Cooke (2016)’s study of a critical game design program, I assessed
participants’ critical game literacy skills before and after the Critical Game Jam using the mixed-
methods assessment provided in Appendix K, provided to participants as a Google form. This
assessment includes all of the items from the Critical Race Game Literacy (CRGL) Scale, a
quantitative measurement tool that I created for inclusion in the National Survey of Critical
Digital Literacy (NSCDL), a nationally representative survey that I am working on with Dr.
Tynes and colleagues. This scale can be found in Appendix A. The assessments also include
qualitative open-ended follow up questions for each scale item, inviting participants to say more
about the item in their own words. The scale is based on the literature about critical game
literacies learning reviewed in Chapter Two, especially Gray’s (2020) documentation of
extensive racism in contemporary videogames and the ways that Black gamers resist this through
activities that this study has conceptualized as critical game literacies. The CRGL scale includes
statements about participants’ experiences doing these activities in order to challenge racism, and
asks participants to state their agreement or disagreement with each statement on a six-point
Likert scale. The broader assessment also includes items from the Liberatory Media Literacy
Inventory (LMLI) Content Creation and Social Action subscale (Volpe et al., 2021) which also
uses a 6-point Likert scale to assess participants’ ability to create digital media to challenge
racism and serve their communities.
The scale items are focused particularly on anti-racist aspects of critical game literacies
because of the NSCDL’s theoretical framework of critical race digital literacy, developed in a
previous pilot study (Tynes, Stewart et al., 2021, p. 112) and a national academy of education
paper (Garcia et al., 2021). This focus on anti-racism is also consistent with the centrality of
Black liberation to the Critical Game Jam affinity space (Gee, 2013) and to the theoretical

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frameworks informing this study. Moreover, the assessment focused on race in order to help
answer the study’s research question about how, if at all, the game jam will support Afrofuturist
development. Principle five of the Afrofuturist Development Theory (Tynes, et al., 2023)
involves young Black people developing critical consciousness in order to navigate and resist
oppressive media and technology practices; in this case, the scale assessed their ability to
challenge racist gaming practices before and after participating in the game jam, helping me to
answer RQ2 while also helping to answer how, if at all, they learn critical race game literacies
(part of RQ1).
The assessment concluded with two open-ended questions asking participants to describe
an aspect of a game they have played that supports any form of oppression (e.g., racism,
heterosexism, patriarchy, ableism, etc.), and to analyze how the game supports this form of
oppression. A follow up question asked them to describe steps they could take to make their own
game that could challenge this form of oppression. Along with the CRGL scale, these items
helped me answer RQ1. Assessing participants’ critical game literacy skills in such ways also
allowed us to make design decisions about the critical game literacy learning space, giving us a
better sense of participants’ prior knowledge so we could scaffold and support participants in
learning skills they may not already have while engaging participants who do have these skills as
more experienced peers to expand the zones of proximal development of other participants
(Vygotsky,1978).
However, Cooke (2016) found that pre-and post-assessments did not adequately assess
the rich details of the critical game design learning process, so I included a wider range of
qualitative means to help analyze participants’ learning as a process, not just a summative
outcome. Gutiérrez, Becker, and colleagues (2019) argue that DBR tends to focus too much on

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the trajectory toward final deliverables and not enough on the design process itself as a learning
experience, so I included a wider range of measures to be able to study both. Afrofuturist
development research can remix traditional education psychology methods like pre- and post-
assessments, with critical constructs and contexts. However, Chapter Five does note an inductive
Afrofuturist development thematic finding around “bending spacetime” that made me question
the epistemologies and ontologies underlying pre- and post- evaluations, particularly the notion
of learning as growth over linear time. Because that is a finding, it is described in the findings in
Chapter Five, not in this chapter. It could inform new directions for Afrofuturist development
research discussed in Chapter Six but does not call into question the trustworthiness of this
current study because there were so many other data points besides the pre-and post-assessments
that allowed me to assess and analyze learning in more holistic and less linear ways. Also, as
Chapter Six describes, some participants repurposed the pre-and post-assessments as
metacognitive and meditative self-reflection tools.
Pre-and Post-Self-Recorded Interviews
I also recorded and analyzed participants’ capacities for critical consciousness and critical
speculative imagination before and after the workshops. Instead of doing this through semi-
structured interviews, I invited participants to video record their answers to the questions in the
protocol located in Appendix L. Questions prompted them to imagine futures for themselves and
their descendants, and to reflect on their agency to change society (“Can you imagine a future
where Black, Latinx, Native, and LGBTQ people are thriving? If so, what would it be like? If
not, why not?”). In retrospect, I should have asked participants to imagine their communities in
the future instead of their descendants because some participants said they are not planning on
having children, which made these questions more challenging to answer; most of them still

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answered in terms of imagining their communities, but this should be framed better in future
studies. The post-workshop questions also prompted participants to reflect on their learning
experiences, group dynamics, their contributions to the design activities, and their feedback on
the workshop activities and what could be improved or used in future learning environments. In
particular, they asked about how, if at all, participating in the workshop changed how they think
and feel about the possibility of acting to change society.
We did self-interview videos instead of traditional interviews to reduce possible Zoom
fatigue and to leave more time during the synchronous sessions for peer-to-peer feedback and
group relationship building. Jaymon and I had decided to do the pre-videos for this reason, but
we had still planned to do post-interviews so that researchers could ask questions tailored to each
participant, following up on their participation in the workshops. However, in a formative
curriculum co-design session during Level One, Olivia advocated for doing the post-videos
instead of interviews so that we would not need to pull participants out of the final group session
to interview them, ensuring that they would be present as other participants shared their game
ideas. While this decision may have slightly limited our ability to precisely document
participants’ learning, it is likely that it also facilitated some of the learning we did document
because the peer-to-peer feedback on the final session was rich and meaningful. This is
consistent with Robinson’s (2020) emphasis that because participants have joined the space in
order to learn and design games, it is ethically important that research methods not take too much
time away from the synchronous time available for that purpose. Also, doing pre- and post-
videos asynchronously afforded participants a chance to reflect on their learning at their own
pace in their daily life settings. Several of them produced videos that were meditative reflections
and/or video essays, drawing from their familiarity and appreciation for long-form video as a

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medium (e.g., Nathann is a video essayist and Madu has training in documentary film
production). The overall high quality of the videos was consistent with a study showing a
growing preference for long-form video among Generation Z (Zeitoune & Pettie, 2022).
Shared Google Documents
We downloaded and saved all of the google docs that composed the shared learning space
and imported them into Nvivo for analysis.
Session Zoom Recordings with Post-Reflections and Chat Logs
We locally saved Zoom recordings of all of the workshop sessions onto a secure hard
drive. At the end of the sessions, the research team met and reflected on what happened during
the session, and this was also recorded and included in the data.
Observation Field Notes
Every day at least one participant-researcher took field notes observing what happened in
the learning environment. They filled in these notes with details from memory within 24 hours.
The purpose of this was to note dynamics that may not be evident in the video alone, e.g.,
rhythms of conversation moving from video to Zoom chat to Google Drive and back. These logs
also helped organize the large volume of video data and drew my attention to key moments in it
during the coding process.
Kai UnEarthed Playtest
One day of the game jam was devoted to a playtest of Kai UnEarthed. Every member of
the design-research team (including Kai UnEarthed co-designers KB and Oliva) conducted a 1:1
playtest with a participant in a Zoom breakout room. I gave out detailed instructions for
downloading and setting up the game beforehand, and I checked in with participants before to
make sure they are able to access it, and all of them could. I asked several people to give me

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feedback on the instructions beforehand to make sure the user experience flow was clear.
Because the playtest was virtual, we could not observe people writing in the game’s analog
journal, so instead we asked them to write in a digital version in Adobe Acrobat. Participants
shared their screens and Zoom recorded their gameplay and journal annotation as well as their
facial expressions and audio as they played. I coded multi-channel volume controls into the game
to help tune an appropriate mix to ensure audio quality. This worked for everyone’s playtests
except for Cam and Reginald’s, which included parts that were difficult for humans to transcribe
due to static and low volume for their Zoom audio channels. Otter.AI’s artificial intelligence
algorithm was able to transcribe these parts, and a human transcriber then checked and refined
the transcripts.
Consistent with a playcentric design methodology (Fullerton, 2019), researchers
prompted playtesters to think out loud as they played, describing what they thought and felt in
real time; in UX research, this is called a think-aloud protocol (Hanington & Martin, 2019) and is
often used to identify problems with user interfaces. Researchers also took notes observing
players’ behaviors, expressions, and reactions as they played, using the semi-structured protocol
in Appendix M. When the allotted time was complete, they immediately conducted semi-
structured interviews with each playtester (also in Appendix M); the interview protocol included
questions about their experience playing, about how they interacted with the game’s journal,
about how playing affected their critical imagination of the future, and about how they think we
should improve the game moving forward.
Conversations and Workshops Between Sessions
I was available to help participants work on their projects between Level One and Level
Two, offering to meet one on one or in small groups. I gave participants the option of recording

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these sessions to include in the data if they wanted to; if so, we met over Zoom and I recorded
after verbally asking for consent. Madu and Mims took me up on this offer; I recorded the
sessions with Madu, but not with Mims. I also helped Mims conduct playtests of her game
between sessions, but we did not include these as study data; the focus was on improving the
game, not answering the study’s research questions, and it would have been cumbersome to go
through the IRB processes required to do both.
Level Two Prompts and Protocols
The overall process and prompts for Level Two were described above; the specific
prompts are included in Appendix O. At the end of Level Two, participants did a new version of
the post-assessment questionnaire (Appendix K) and a new post-video answering the same
questions listed in Appendix L. I considered updating these questions based on what I had
learned in Level One, but decided not to because they seemed adequate and consistent with the
most recent version of Afrofuturist Development Theory, and they had already generated rich
and meaningful data during Level One; for these reasons, I optimized for parsimony. This
decision facilitated my longitudinal analysis of the four Level Two participants’ learning
journeys; I was able to compare and contrast their answers to the same questions across three
points in time – the beginning of Level One, the end of Level One, and the end of Level Two.
Data Analysis Procedures
I organized and archived all of the data and imported it into Nvivo for qualitative
analysis. I was awarded the USC Rossier Dean’s Research Grant and the Internal Research
Grant, which allowed me to pay people to transcribe the data with as much fidelity as possible to
the participants’ original expressions. Camella Coopilton, who is fluent in AAVE and gaming
jargon, transcribed the Kai UnEarthed playtests and some of the pre-videos. Landmark

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transcribed most of the rest of it, and I transcribed some passages myself. I analyzed the
transcriptions alongside the textual data (e.g., field notes and written responses to prompts). In
initial rounds of analysis, I often cross-referenced the transcripts with aspects of the videos,
noting gesture, body language, and other contextual details. In Nvivo, I created structural and
descriptive codes (Saldaña, 2021) to indicate what aspect of the learning environment each piece
of data indicated, e.g., codes for game design prompts, for moments of play, for context/channel
switching between Zoom and other platforms, and for all of the tools, participation structures and
roles, task structures and processes shown in the design conjecture map in Chapter Three.
Reflexive Thematic Analysis
I did a thematic analysis (TA) (Braun & Clarke, 2006) on the full body of the data,
including the Kai UnEarthed playtest, analyzing themes in the data on the game jam as a whole.
Thematic analysis is a “method for identifying, analyzing and reporting patterns (themes) within
data” (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 79). It has been used to study game jams recently (Contreras-
Espinosa & Eguia-Gomez, 2022). My process of coding and writing involved the steps outlined
in Braun and Clarke’s (2006) article on thematic analysis:
1. Familiarizing myself with the data
2. Generating initial codes
3. Searching for themes
4. Reviewing themes
5. Defining and naming themes
6. Producing the report
This process generated themes over time; I treated themes as the outcome of the analysis rather
than as the basis for creating a coding scheme beforehand to apply to the data.
Themes did not just emerge from the data, they were the result of a conscious interpretive
process (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Consistent with qualitative methods more broadly, this
approach situated me as a research instrument, and required me to pay close attention to my own

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positionality, assumptions, and context, noticing how these might shape my understanding and
interpretations of the data (Braun, et al., 2019). This is especially true in this study because I –
and the other members of the research team – positioned ourselves as participant-researchers,
taking turns collecting data, facilitating, and learning with participants. As a result, I had data on
my own learning and participation that I analyzed as part of the overall learning environment.
Given these factors, I used a reflexive form of thematic analysis (Braun, et al., 2019; Braun &
Clarke, 2006). In this approach, coding was an “organic and open iterative process; it is not
‘fixed’ at the start of the process (e.g., through the use of a codebook of coding frame)” (Braun,
et al., 2019, p. 848). This approach also did not involve attempting to achieve inter-rater
reliability. Reflexive TA approaches have been used recently in education psychology studies of
teaching and learning during the pandemic (e.g., Kim & Asbury, 2020; Kim et al., 2021) as well
as a study on students with disabilities’ experiences playing in school games that also used
participant-generated video-logging methods (Sharpe, et al., 2022).
Analysis consisted of a mix of deductive and inductive approaches (Braun & Clarke,
2006). I created deductive codes based on the existing literature and research questions for the
study (Braun & Clarke, 2006), such as a code for each principle of the Afrofuturist Development
Theory. I also created deductive codes for evidence of each of the seven constructs listed as a
desired outcome in the conjecture map: critical play, critical modding, critical design, critical
game analysis, critical consciousness, critical speculative imagination, and Afrofuturistic selves.
While the overall codes pointed to any evidence of these skills and activities, I also created
subcodes for evidence of participants learning and developing these capacities in the game jam
and applied this code to relevant passages in the workshop session transcripts, post-videos, and
post-assessments. In addition to coding these in Nvivo, I also created a participant journeys chart

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where I summarized and recorded excerpts of evidence of each participants’ skills in these seven
constructs before, during, and at the end of the Level One workshops, and where relevant during
and at the end of the Level Two workshops. Working parallel in Nvivo and this chart allowed me
to track the collective thematic presence of these constructs across the dataset while
simultaneously assessing each participant’s learning journey. I also created inductive codes
based on phenomena that I noticed in the data which are not yet represented in the research
literature. For example, given that there has never been a study on abolitionist game literacies, I
generated inductive codes about imagining unpoliced futures. I also coded for various themes
that were not part of the literature reviewed for the study but were widely prevalent in the game
jam, e.g., climate justice, ecology, and Solarpunk aesthetics.
DBR tends to assume an epistemology of distributed cognition, and so does the critical
sociocultural theoretical framework that informs this study. My RQs are intentionally broad,
focusing on thematic patterns of participant learning experiences, measured in multiple data
points reflecting different components of the learning space’s design. Accordingly, the unit of
analysis was the game jam itself; I analyzed experiential phenomena that existed at the
transpersonal level within this learning environment, such as the circulation of affect and ideas
among participants and interactive media. This approach is similar to what Robinson (2020) did
in his dissertation, but with more structured analytic procedures. Given my theoretical
framework and RQs, my analytic approach was contextualist, which meant I chose to
“acknowledge the ways individuals make meaning of their experience, and, in turn, the ways the
broader social context impinges on those meanings, while retaining focus on the material and

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other limits of ‘reality’”(Braun and Clarke, 2006, p. 81).
5
In this sense, my approach still
provided space to analyze individual experiences (e.g., in the participant journeys charts descried
above), and to link individual experiences to the shared themes. For that reason, the findings in
Chapters Four and Five are presented by theme, but I then narrate aspects of particular
participants’ learning journeys as exemplars of each theme. This is consistent with Saldaña’s
(2021) approach to thematic analysis, which is looser about specifying the unit of analysis than
Braun and Clarke’s.
Braun and Clarke (2006) say that coding across the entire body of data is useful when one
is studying an under-researched topic or working with participants whose views on the topic are
not yet known, and both of these are true for this study. The downside is depth and complexity
are necessarily lost because each theme needs to represent the data as a whole (see p. 83). To
address this challenge, I also treated the Kai UnEarthed playtest data as a specific dataset within
the full body of the data (Braun & Clarke, 2006), and generated codes that expressed themes that
were present only in that dataset but not across the data as a whole (e.g., codes about players’
experiences with specific features of our prototype that we were testing as described above and
in Chapter Four). This distinction was shaped by the need to generate insights from the playtests
to inform ongoing collective development of the game while I simultaneously analyzed the rest
of the data in ways that also included it in the larger study. While I may eventually write case
studies on this bounded dataset or other bounded segments of the data (e.g., a study of teacher

5
The invocation of “reality” in this quote just means that I paid attention to material and sociocultural
dynamics like race, class, gender, and the relational constraints and affordances of the gam jam scaffolding and the
digital platforms we used. The study was critically realist in that sense, but was speculative in the design prompts
we used, which challenged reified notions of “reality” as described above. I did not make judgments about whether
participants’ imagination was realistic or not, I just applied a realist epistemology as I analyzed their speculative
thinking (and mine) and the ways that it is implicated within actually existing sociocultural and technical contexts.

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education during the game jam that is sketched in Appendix N), that is beyond the scope of the
RQS for this study proposal, which focuses on the learning environment of the game jam as a
whole. This focus on the learning environment fills a gap noted around critical game design
studies which have tended to narrate individuals’ design processes rather than features of
collective learning and distributed cognition in the learning space. However, since Kai
UnEarthed was situated as a core part of the overall learning environment, I included themes
related just to the playtest in the results of this study, but I presented and discussed them in
relation to the overall RQs rather than as a separate bounded inquiry. For example, in Chapter
Four I narrated what Olivia, KB, and I learned from the playtest of Kai UnEarthed during the
game jam; because we were participant-researchers, our own game design learning through the
playtest answers RQ1.
Given my RQs, my goal of generating design principles, and DBR’s emphasis on
studying concepts and theories embedded in the designed artifacts (Barab & Squire, 2004), I
engaged in both latent and semantic analysis, with an emphasis on latent. Braun and Clarke
(2006) define these as follows:
A thematic analysis at the latent level goes beyond the semantic content of the data, and
starts to identify or examine the underlying ideas, assumptions, and conceptualizations
and ideologies that are theorized as shaping or informing the semantic content of the data.
If we imagine our data three-dimensionally as an uneven blob of jelly, the semantic
approach would seek to describe the surface of the jelly, its form and meaning, while the
latent approach would seek to identify the features that gave it that particular form and
meaning. Thus, for latent thematic analysis, the development of the themes themselves
involves interpretative work, and the analysis that is produced is not just description, but
is already theorized (Braun and Clarke, 2006, p. 84).
I constructed latent themes by weaving together codes into patterns and concepts, and reported
these in chapters Four and Five. I also related these to the existing literature, generating design
principles to inform future learning environments, and I reported these in Chapter Six. Latent
themes bridge codes answering RQ1A (how participants experienced critical game literacies

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learning) with codes answering RQ1B (how the design of the game jam supported these
experiences), assessing how, if at all, my theoretical conjectures played out in the game jam, thus
helping to answer RQ1C (what could be done differently in the future).
Participatory design researchers emphasize the need for collaborative data analysis and
writing (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). In this study, I invited participants to help refine codes and
to analyze some of the data together in ways that went beyond member checking regarding the
trustworthiness of my interpretations; I aimed to support them as researchers in their own right.
However, participants did not take me up on this offer, so that is why I am framing the study as
design-based research with participatory elements rather than as fully participatory design
research.
A Note About Further Assessment of Learning
This study treated the pre-and post-assessment data as qualitative data, but future
publications on it could augment this with a mixed-methods approach to comparing performance
on the assessments before and after each level of the game jam. For this dissertation, I coded the
open-and closed-ended assessment data using the same methods I applied to the rest of the
dataset, e.g., applying codes for evidence of learning related to key constructs which I generated
by comparing and contrasting participants’ responses before and after the game jam, recording
findings in the participant journeys charts. The study’s research questions are about design and
qualitative aspects of learning experiences, they do not focus on evaluating learning outcomes,
and I approached the data accordingly.
However, when I attempt to publish the results of this study, editors might argue that the
extent of learning must be proven for my themes and design principles to have rigor, and might
expect the use of a structured coding scheme or rubric, a kappa score indicating high inter-rater

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reliability, and a quantification of the qualitative coding of open-ended responses that would
bring them into conversation with the mean scores from the closed-ended Likert-scale questions
on the pre- and post- assessments. The data required to do such an analysis is complete and
robust, and I have begun to plan to conduct a more traditional mixed-methods thematic analysis
(Boyatzis, 1998), coding the pre- and post-assessments and videos with Kirsten Elliott and
calculating kappa scores. I chose not to include this analysis in this dissertation because I wanted
to learn and practice how to do a reflexive thematic analysis first before attempting to mix a
reflexive approach with an approach that will quantify qualitative findings. Researchers are
divided about whether it is even appropriate to mix these approaches (Braun et al., 2019;
Saldaña, 2021), and I need to hone my methodological training to better understand what is at
stake in these debates. I also need to reflect more on the ontological and epistemological
questions about pre-and post-assessments raised by this study’s findings (see chapter Five and
Six) to decide whether I should accept or push back on requests for more precise measurement of
learning over time.
Trustworthiness of the Study and its Contribution to Movements for Liberation
Many design-based researchers assess the credibility of DBR and PDR studies based on
whether they generate usable creations with positive socio-political consequences (Barab and
Squire, 2004; Reeves & McKenney, 2015); some consider this a standard of consequential
validity, the idea that the “validity of a claim is based on the changes it produces in a given
system” (Barab and Squire, 2004). Besides the designed interventions themselves, the most
common products of DBR studies are local (“domain-specific”) theories of learning, as well as
more broadly scalable theories or design principles (Crippen and Brown, 2018; Joseph, 2004;
Reeves &McKenney, 2015, Schmitz et al., 2015). Barab and Squire emphasize the importance of

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generating broad theory, arguing that without some level of larger-scale transferability, DBR
studies risk becoming niche boutique projects (Barab and Squire, 2004). Of course,
generalization is challenging in DBR because the emphasis on context-specific design, the lack
of randomized sampling, and the active intervention of the researcher limit notions of external
validity and replicability. Instead, design-based researchers employ standards of transferability
that are more similar to Toma’s (2011) standards for qualitative research. For Barab and Squire,
the goal is not replicability but rather a rich description of the design process so that some of its
insights might be applicable, with modification, in other contexts. For them, this process
involves narrative summation (Barab and Squire, 2004).
These criteria for assessing DBR projects often resonate within a larger pragmatist
philosophical paradigm, in which the success of a project at a local level is “necessary evidence
for the viability of a theory” (Barab & Squire, 2004, p. 7). Bang and Vossoughi (2016) point out
this can often lead to pressure not to report unsuccessful studies. I also wonder if it might lead to
pressures to warp the local context in some way in order to prove the validity of a theory. As an
alternative, DBR and PDR studies could be assessed using more rhizomatic notions of the
consequences of theory and praxis, such as the one that Foucault articulated in his introduction to
Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: “Do not use thought to ground a political practice in
Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political
practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the
intervention of political action" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. xil). Similarly, Bang and
Vossoughi (2016) argue that practicality is too often “mobilized in ways that can deflate wider
forms of social and pedagogical imagination” and that the goal of PDR work should be to create

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immediately useful projects while at the same time prefiguring and envisioning a proliferation of
possible futures beyond the limitations of the current political and economic structures (p. 178).
Given these standards of assessment, and given this study’s critical RQs and theoretical
framework, its findings and design principles could be considered trustworthy, relevant, and
credible if it they are meaningful and useful contributions to movements for liberation (e.g.,
abolitionism), and efforts to design future learning spaces to support critical game literacy and
Afrofuturist development. The study is likely to meet readers’ expectations in this regard, given
that it is grounded in years of previous iterative design work situated in such movements and in
Black communities and research teams.
The study’s trustworthiness is established in several ways. Its multiple data sources allow
for triangulation among them, where strengths in some data points can compensate for possible
weaknesses in others (Maxwell, 2013); as Lincoln and Guba (1985) posit, this can help establish
credibility of qualitative research results. Moreover, I shared the themes I generated through
coding with all participants, asking their feedback on them. While nobody responded directly, I
have been in informal conversation with Madu, Mims, and Olivia about the themes, and Madu
and Mims provided some feedback on them during the Level Two session. Before I publish any
of the findings of this study, I will share this dissertation manuscript with all participants and will
ask them to give me feedback, to ensure that I am accurately describing our collaborative
learning and design process. I will also ask for consultation from fellow participant-researchers
and designers who have extensive training in some of the research methods I am using here, and
from other friends and colleagues who are part of the larger 10-year process of participatory
design that this study is a part of. As Lincoln and Guba (1985) argue, such practices can support
credibility as well as confirmability (a sense that findings are shaped by participants and not

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warped by the researcher’s biases). Finally, I completed all of the steps on Braun and Clarke’s
(2006) quality assurance checklist for thematic analysis to ensure that the themes I generated are
well-supported by the data.
Positionality
Because this study is design research with participatory elements, informed by
sociocultural learning theory, it is necessarily reflexive, and requires me to be aware of my
positionality and sociocultural context, and how they inform this research. I am a queer (non-
binary) former humanities teacher from a working-class background who has been involved in
anti-racist and abolitionist movements since 2004. I am currently a part of university research
teams and off-campus abolitionist design teams where I am closely collaborating with Black
colleagues. Given my positionality as a white researcher, there is no way I could effectively do
this research alone, even with my extensive training in anti-racist and Black liberation-oriented
educational practices, and this project is the product of years of collective development and co-
design. At this moment in the United States, I am still white no matter how much I try to subvert
whiteness daily (Love, 2019). I obviously benefit from white privilege, and capitalism offers me
that privilege in an attempt to keep me loyal to it, expecting me to ignore how it oppresses my
queerness and exploits my labor power (Ignatiev & Garvey, 2014). But my communities are not
white, my working-class Mediterranean ancestors were not white (Roediger, 2018; Smythe,
2018), and my descendants will not be white either. To love them all well, I push back on
whiteness when it attempts to confine my research and my critical speculative imagination of the
past, present, and future. I am rooting for and collaborating with people of the global majority
who want to build worlds free from white supremacy (Love, 2019). That (dis)orients my actions
daily as I join collective efforts to decenter whiteness politically, culturally, economically,

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psychologically, spiritually, and scientifically. Hopefully my Black colleagues (present and
future) can deepen the Black liberation aspects of this research beyond what I can offer here.
Appendix B includes a deeper reflection on why I am choosing to focus this research on Black
liberation, and how I understand and experience connections between Black liberation and queer
liberation.

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Chapter Four: Critical Game Literacies in the Critical Game Jam
This chapter reports findings from the study that answer research question one: how can
one design learning spaces, games, and game design activities that support critical game literacy
learning? Through reflexive thematic analysis of the data, I found evidence of critical game
literacy learning during the Critical Game Jam that answers this question. I organized this
evidence into the following themes: deepening and expanding critical consciousness (theme 1A),
scaffolding critical game design learning (theme 1B), worldbuilding as scaffolding (theme 1C),
and building affinity around Black liberation (theme 1D)
6
. This chapter is organized by answers
to each of the components of research question one: it includes sections on how participants
experienced critical game literacy learning during the Critical Game Jam (answering RQ 1.1),
how the design of the game jam supported that learning (answering RQ 1.2), and what can be
done differently in the future (answering RQ 1.3). The four themes extend across these answers
to the research sub-questions, so evidence of each theme is present in each of the following
sections. Each section is also organized internally by theme (so, for example, theme 1A is
presented in sections 1.1.A, 1.2.A, and 1.3.A, and theme 1B is presented in sections 1.1.B, 1.2.B,
and 1.3.B). The four themes described in this chapter also form the basis for the design principles
consolidated in the first half of Chapter Six.

6
For some of the participants – Madu, Mims, and Gabriel - critical game literacy learning also supported
their development as teachers. This is technically not a theme of this study because it was not present across the
majority of participants as reflexive thematic analysis requires, but it would answer RQ 1 if a different analytic
method were applied. For example, it could be part of a future case study on teacher education during the Critical
Game Jam. Appendix N includes a summary of findings that could form the basis for this future study.

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RQ 1.1. How Participants Experienced Critical Game Literacy Learning
Participants experienced critical game literacy learning as deepening and expanding
critical consciousness (theme A), learning critical game design skills (theme B), learning through
worldbuilding (theme C), and building an affinity space around Black liberation (theme D). Each
of these themes is discussed in the following sections.
Theme 1.1.A. Deepening and Expanding Critical Consciousness
Deepening and expanding critical consciousness was one of the desired critical game
literacy learning goals for the study (as described in the design conjecture map in Chapter Three)
and I intentionally co-designed the activities of the Critical Game Jam to support its
development. As I anticipated, it was a prominent theme of the learning we experienced together.
Participants’ pre-and post-assessment questionnaires and videos demonstrated varying but
generally robust expressions of critical consciousness coming into the game jam. They deepened
this critical consciousness over the course of the study, discussing and brainstorming games
about intersecting systems of oppression and intersecting strategies for liberation. They also
found more expansive ways to critique oppression and to take action toward liberation,
particularly through gaming and game design. For example, before the game jam, Madu was
already thinking about decolonial film practices but they said they “didn’t know about critical
game literacy.” In their Level Two final reflection video they said they learned in the game jam
that “critical could be applied to everything, and that just expands how I think about what
curriculum can be in the classroom, how I can be critical about all my experiences, um, you
know, what is literacy, and literacy can be applied to multiple subjects.”
Participants also talked about deepening their critical consciousness in order to engage in
more resilient and sustainable critical actions. In their pre-videos, most of them indicated that

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they had engaged in community organizing or protests at some point in their lives. For example,
Cecilia said they were part of the South Central Local of LA Tenant’s Union and a successful
campaign to “stop the $3.5 billion LA county jail expansion plan.” However, many participants
had negative experiences with existing forms of activism. Cecilia said they were “heartbroken”
by “how harmful movement spaces can sometimes be.” Light Bird tried to organize a Black
student walkout on their campus but the administration portrayed them as “radical,” isolating
them from other students, and they were pathologized and nearly criminalized for not being
“legible” enough. Jomih said that Los Angeles activism tends to be “surface level” which leaves
them feeling “hopeless.” They said:
I feel as though a lot of the protests that I was going to, um, a lot of people seem to forget
how, like, black, um, trans and queer and disabled people are affected by police, um, as
well. And I feel like it's-it's hard because it's in a different way, but it's also, um, kind of
dehumanizing to be those identities and to struggle with, um, like, police brutality, I
think, especially coming from a place where I have also experienced police brutality.
They also said that grief and exhaustion from the pandemic made it hard for their community to
act, and they described how they had turned toward online affinity spaces to “find a safe place to
explain my experiences and all the identities and intersectionalities within me.”
To address these kinds of challenges, Cecilia and Mims turned toward play and game
design as a way to generate new motivation and movement strategies. Mims said, “Being
someone who has, and still kinda does, work in organizing space. Um, I see the same things,
same strategies, same concepts used over and over again.” She decided to design the abolitionist
worldbuilding game to “generate a different idea, a new possibility. Um, one in an organizing
way, but also what are we organizing for?”
In the post-videos, most participants expressed deepened desire to take critical action
against oppression and some of them attributed this to their experiences in the game jam. For

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example, Jomih said the game jam has “made me feel more positive about how I want to, um, go
about change in this world.” Light Bird said that participation in the game jam:
Really did change my perception, um, about what it means to change society…you can
change things through art and you can change things through design. You can change
things by pointing out the beauty in things, um, while maintaining your critical lens. Like,
that’s-that’s some, like, really excellent stuff and it’s sort of where I’m hoping that I can
take myself in the coming years, that I’m doing truly sustainable work, um, tru-work that
is informed by global justice and intersectional feminism, um, that is also just, like,
beautiful. Um, and by the way, Kai UnEarthed is an example of that.
Light Bird was one of several participants who deepened their critical consciousness through
developing their critical design practices during the game jam.
Theme 1.1.B. Learning Critical Game Design Skills
Learning critical game design skills was also one of the desired learning outcomes for the
study (see the design conjecture map in Chapter Three) and I intentionally co-designed the
activities of the Critical Game Jam to support it. As I anticipated, it was a prominent theme of the
learning we experienced together. Participants practiced and learned aspects of the playcentric
design methods taught in the USC Games program (e.g., setting player experience goals, creating
a prototype that facilitates these goals, and assessing whether prototypes are meeting the goals
through playtesting), with critical player experience goals and critical attention to designers’
positionalities. Because this theme was central to the overall game jam, evidence related to it can
also be found throughout the rest of the dissertation, e.g., in theme 1C on worldbuilding. Also, as
Chapter Five shows, most participants in the game jam accepted our invitation to brainstorm and
design games that prototype liberation rather than just narrating their experiences with an
oppressive current reality.
Through comparing participants’ pre-and post- assessment questionnaires and videos, I
found that all participants demonstrated more sophisticated critical game design skills by the end
of the game jam, especially critical brainstorming, prototyping, character design, and playtesting.

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This learning happened within a cohort constituted by overlapping zones of proximal
development. Some participants (e.g., Cam and Light Bird) arrived at the game jam equipped
with critical theories and wanted to apply these by learning game design skills; they generally
did, but wanted to learn more. Some (e.g., Reginald and Gabriel) arrived equipped with game
design skills and were trying to develop more critical design practices, and they did. For
example, Gabriel had never made a game challenging racism before, but he made a prototype of
one (called Feat) by the end of Level Two. Nathann was equipped with both skillsets, so he
served as a more experienced peer for everyone else; he grew in both capacities, saying the game
jam helped him design games’ “flavor texts” (e.g., narratives and worlds) more critically. Some
participants (e.g., Mims, Cecilia, and Jomih) were activist artists without formal game design
training and they developed their critical game design skills as part of interdisciplinary arts
practices. Because Mims and Cecilia had already started the Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding
Game before the beginning of the game jam, they served as more experienced peers in this
particular blend of interdisciplinary learning, modeling how to be a beginner at game design
while sharing and developing their already refined critical perspectives. Madu had already
created game/story-worlds inspired by Black liberation and Nigerian culture, though they did not
see themselves as a game designer; as discussed in other sections, the game jam helped them
develop as a designer through their affinity for worldbuilding and critical pedagogies.
Mims described her journey through the game jam as follows: “Folk's feedback
were really helpful to my process of developing the game, and just seeing how people were
perceiving things, understanding things, um, the questions that they had, and also the suggestions
were really helpful.” They described the overlapping zones of proximal development in the
cohort:

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I think for me especially, as someone who isn't a game designer, um, it was helpful just to
be in the room, uh, with game designers, and just, um, seeing their thought process
around things. And also, just seeing examples of other games that have similar values and
intentions, um, was really beautiful and really helpful, um, and also just, you
know, expanding my imagination as well.
Mims’ experience exemplifies how learning critical design and developing critical speculative
imagination were closely related learning processes during the game jam.
More critical game modding was also a desired outcome of the study, but we did not
provide enough scaffolding around how to mod and most participants did not have these skills
coming into the game jam. Gabriel is the only one who actually modded a game (discussed in
theme 1C). However, we did invite participants to mod Kai UnEarthed during the playtests by
altering their journals, and they all did. We also prompted people to imagine modding and
redesigning existing games and gamified rules of society, such as the rules of creativity, school,
relationships, and money.
The combination of these two activities supported more diffuse forms of critical
speculative design thinking at the intersection of game design and critical game studies. For
example, Madu reflected that “the conversation around modding was really interesting. What is a
mod, and how do we mod things in our daily lives? I think that was very fertile.” Describing how
they learned from Gabriel modding Uno, they said, “there's just all these things that we mod.
You mod food, you know.” They realized:
“Oh, that's what that means.” When in my head, like, modding was just so much more.
Um, and I think that was the best way to understand all critical game literacy. Maybe if
you think about activism and change, too, it's just like, “Okay, how do you mod your
experience at a predominantly white institution?” Or, um, wherever you are, whatever
systems or context you're a part of, how do you mod it in a way that's, you know, hittin’
for you? So yeah…that was cool.
This kind of thinking about modding a gamified society generated interesting speculative game
design research ideas. For example, Nathann wondered if online multiplayer games like League
of Legends might become less toxic and oppressive environments if they were modded to require

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all players to collaboratively set up the game equipment and matches themselves, adding a
“playground aesthetic” similar to a pickup soccer match at a neighborhood park. He posed an
interesting research question about metagaming: “when you have to engage on that level, is it
easy to even be —like, a jerk [laughter] to people?” This would be a good research question to
ask at neighborhood soccer matches and e-sports events.
Critical game design is a complex multi-step process involving a range of skills, and we
could not support learning around all of them so we chose to focus on one aspect of the process:
worldbuilding, described in the next section. Since worldbuilding supported more than just game
design learning, it constitutes a distinct but related theme.
Theme 1.1.C. Learning Through Worldbuilding
In the game jam, we defined worldbuilding as “developing imaginary worlds with
coherent qualities, such as history, geography, ecology…politics, economics and so on” and we
acknowledged it is an important part of filmmaking, fiction writing, and game design. During the
game jam, participants demonstrated growth in their worldbuilding skills, as well as a range of
skills they developed through practicing worldbuilding, especially critical character creation and
playtesting. Worldbuilding also supported learning outcomes associated with other themes in the
study, especially critical speculative imagination (theme 2A), imagining unpoliced future worlds
(theme 2B), and prototyping climate justice (theme 2C). For example, for Madu and Mims,
building worlds provided scaffolded experiences in which they also practiced game design skills.
Madu and Mims’ learning experiences were particularly noteworthy because neither of
them considered themselves to be game designers at the start of the study, and by the end they
designed and playtested sophisticated analog game prototypes. Madu did not consider themself
to be a game designer because they associated it with “computers and stuff.” However, self-

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assessing their learning at the end of Level Two, they said: “I think I'm a world builder. I would
like if you threw that word around a little bit more… I know how to build worlds. And that's a
really cool thing that someone could walk away feeling.” Similarly, Mims said “my abolitionist
life practice is world building.” Olivia and I also identify as worldbuilders, and I was one before
I became a game designer; it also was my gateway into game design. While Madu, Mims, and I
were worldbuilding together in Level Two of the game jam, I observed them both refer to
various aspects of their analog game mechanics (e.g., the biome and adaptation cards in Mims’
worldbuilding game) as “variables,” demonstrating fluency in procedural rhetoric. I watched
them take notes on how to balance these variables in response to the feedback they were getting
from each other and from me during their playtests. In USC MFA classes, this skill is framed as
one of the most important skills a game designer can have, so I was surprised they did not
recognize themselves as designers.
Madu said they did not see themselves as a designer because of “imposter syndrome or
whatever, like, I don’t wanna do it or can't do it.” However, this began to change by the end of
the Level Two session. At that point they said:
I feel like this has been a very fruitful, interesting conversation… this was just like mad
chill in like a way the, I don’t know, I- I wouldn’t really think, um, creation of games
could be. Like I don’t, I guess, if you had to think about it and using terms of other art
practices, like this was our studio. This paper, this laptop, you know…Um, and, you
know, things were created, and we laughed. And it was, you know, it was, my brain's
gonna be sore in a way. I guess my legs would if I was jumping and skipping.
Starting with worldbuilding - and doing it through paper prototyping- helped Madu to overcome
imposter syndrome and to rethink what it means to be a game designer. They reflected on how
game design tools are becoming more accessible to the point where someone does not need to be
an expert coder to make a game, and these tools can be used to build worlds. They recognized
the game jam was part of that process. Mims still did not see herself as a game designer at the

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end of the session. However, the Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game she worked on
during the game jam is currently the most widely playtested abolitionist game I am aware of.
Theme 1.1.D. Building an Affinity Space Around Black Liberation
As described in Chapter Three, we aimed to build the Critical Game Jam as an affinity
space characterized by distributed expertise, an appreciation for vernacular literacies and implicit
knowledge, and a collaborative, nurturing environment formed around shared passions and
values. This section describes how participants experienced group dynamics in this space, and
how they expressed affinities around a shared (but not homogenous) passion for Black liberation.
In field notes and debrief discussions after each of the 2021 sessions, Jaymon, Kirsten,
De’Andra, and I noticed that the affective group dynamics in the sessions included joy around
sharing and learning, curiosity, and excitement about connecting with each other. We noticed a
high level of engagement and collaborative knowledge production: participants frequently
responded directly to each other in respectful ways, building off each other through voice, video,
chat, and the Google Drive documents, sometimes synthesizing ideas from more than one person
who spoke before them. Jaymon described the space as “academic casual” with an emphasis on
brainstorming and prototyping rather than “performance.” We noticed that competitive dynamics
we had experienced in academic settings and activist spaces, e.g., people competing to be “more
woke” or more “meta,” did not appear to be present. Jaymon noticed people were “open to
learning and open to just, like, dialogue and not proving a point.” These dynamics are evidence
that the game jam functioned as a nurturing affinity space.
Participants’ reflections in their post-videos validated these observations. Gabriel
expressed gratitude for the sense of belonging in the game jam, describing it as “warm” and
“gentle.” Notably, the group’s most vocal members and its quietist both felt like they were able

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to participate. Cam said “I feel like the group dynamics in the workshop worked very well. I feel
like there wasn’t really any shade.” They experienced “enthusiasm” and “a lot of good energy”
from all participants, including the researchers. They characterized their participation as honest
and vocal, and they advocated for controversial perspectives on Black liberation. In response to
their directness, they “never once” felt like “somebody was coming at me sideways or
disrespectfully or anything like that.” On the other hand, Reginald, who is more softspoken, also
participated in the Zoom discussions (though less frequently) and also contributed through the
other channels, i.e., breakout rooms and Google docs. He said he “built a rapport” with people in
his breakout room over time and “eventually it was comfortable” and the group was able to
“brainstorm fairly effectively.”
Participants also expressed shared interests, passions, and values, and built affinity
around them. For example, Light Bird said “I enjoyed having the shared space and meeting new
faces who are invested in critical fun.” Jaymon said “it is nice to find people that share a passion,
in general, but especially around games where it is, um—it-it can be a very social activity and—
but also isolating.” Without prompting from the research team, Jomih initiated a process of
people sharing their contact info to stay in touch with each other over Discord, Instagram, and
gaming platforms. Kirsten observed this; during a formative debrief and curriculum planning
session, she assessed that “the space is, um, coming off very safe.” We also noticed that people
lingered on the Zoom call after the session ended on the last day.
Participants shared passions, interests, and values that were political and ethical, not just
related to games, being gamers, or being fans of certain games; in particular, they built affinity
around Black culture and the politics of Black liberation. These affinities are documented in
Chapter Five more broadly because they answer RQ 2 about Afrofuturist development. This

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section highlights pro-Black affinities in the game jam that functioned as critical game literacy
learning experiences.
Most participants expressed a desire for better and more diverse pro-Black representation
in games and the video game industry. For example, Reginald said: “I think it’d be a good idea,
in general, for people to try to make games that reflect themselves. And I do think that if the
game industry has more non-white people in it, it’ll be very much easier, um, to reflect the other,
um, races.” Jaymon wanted to play in a game world “solely comprised of Black and/or Latinx
people,” “similar to Wakanda” but the entire world. Similarly, Gabriel wanted to see “more
stories about the Global South,” where “the whole game” portrays the “people that live there”
and their daily lives. He said the majority of global media portrays places like New York and
Tokyo and he wanted to see games about majority-Black countries like Ghana and Brazil. He
said:
There are really poor countries because of capitalism because capitalism exports poverty.
And if there is technology in the north of the-of the-of the world, is it because there is
poverty in the south of the world. And I think that we need to-to change that.
This critique of imperial notions of technological progress also relates to themes in Chapter Five.
As Jaymon and I did formative assessments and planned instructional decisions, we noted
a “generative tension” over pro-Black representation in the game jam, so I made this a code in
the data analysis process. Some participants (especially Reginald) wanted more respectable and
humanizing portrayals of Black people. In his notes, he wrote “it would be helpful to clearly
define what proper representation would be for us” in media, and he aimed to develop games to
meet this goal. In his feedback on Gabriel’s prototype of his hip hop game Feat (described in
theme 1.2.C), he highlighted that the game shows that “black people and music are more than
promiscuity” and he suggested Gabriel add prompts for creating songs that “are beneficial and
dispelling of negative ideas about black culture and rap as a whole.” Other participants

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(especially Cam) argued that the very notion of humanizing representation can reinforce anti-
Blackness by homogenizing and policing Black identity and authenticity. Cam aimed to write
video game narratives that “show the multiplicity of ways that Blackness can be understood that
goes beyond the simple idea of respectability politics and the humanizing agenda of some
representations of blackness.” As we brainstormed group agreements and shared affinities, they
said:
You can read different sor-sorts of representation. It can mean different things. I.e.,
people would say that, like, Meg Thee Stallion and, like, Cardi B are not good
representation, but that might not good representation for one group. But for another
group of people, that might actually be very nice representation. So, like, pushing back
on, like, what we classify as, like, bad representation and, like, good representation.
As Cam indicated above, this disagreement remained respectful, and Jaymon and I facilitated
discussions aimed at making sure both sides were heard.
Several participants synthesized these perspectives as they expressed their strategies for
Black liberation; for example, Jomih critiqued anti-Black media representation without
demanding that any particular group of Black people change their behavior in attempts to avoid
it. In a breakout room discussion on what Black liberation means to us as a group, they argued
that the George Floyd Rebellion in 2020 “woke up a lotta people, um, on how important Black
liberation is.” They noticed “it got, like, a lot of, like, bad media coverage, um, which was
interesting because I was at a lotta the events, and, um, what was, of course, like, on the news
was not actually what was happening.” In particular, “media outlets were trying to paint rioting,
um, as if it was new and extremely focused on just destruction.” They contrasted this to
discourses about riots in other countries (global riots were widespread in 2019-20).
Internationally, the narrative was not “Oh, these people are destroying towns." It was “these
people need help right now, and, like, things are going on.” In contrast, in the US the media
focused on “property being damaged.” Jomih noticed “a lot of, like, white folks saying like, ‘But

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this is not the way to protest.’ And I think it's very interesting—because I don't think they would
know what the right way to protest for Black people is.” Rather than countering anti-Black media
narratives with more respectable representation of peaceful protests, Jomih advocated that one
should respect the political wisdom of Black people who rioted, and learn from them, and other
people in the breakout room agreed.
Jomih’s discourse is one example of how the legacy of the 2020 rebellion shaped the
affinity that participants built around Black liberation during the game jam. It also illustrates how
conversations around critical game literacies in the game jam related to conversations about
critical media literacies more broadly. Overall, the different perspectives on Black liberation
(exemplified here by Reginald, Cam, and Jomih’s quotes) overlapped enough to provide the
common affective and political grounding of a shared online affinity space, even as they
diverged more than the politics one might expect in a tighter-knit community or organization.
RQ 1.2. How The Design of the Game Jam Supported Critical Game Literacy Learning
The Critical Game Jam supported participants in having the critical game literacy
learning experience described in the previous sections, in various ways that are described in the
following sections. Given the study’s sociocultural theoretical framework, evidence of
scaffolding and learning from more experienced peers is prominent in these sections. This is also
the case because participants themselves emphasized an appreciation for these features of the
game jam.
Theme 1.2.A. How the Design of the Critical Game Jam Supported Deepening and Expanding
Critical Consciousness
Throughout the game jam activities, participants drew from various forms of critical
theory and expressed various forms of critical consciousness, and the game jam encouraged this

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through permeable, semi-structured discussion and design prompts focused on challenging
intersecting forms of systemic oppression. While analyzing the data, I coded for discourses
around feminism, disability justice and anti-ableism, queer liberation, decolonization, critical
race digital literacies, afropessimism, climate justice, and anti-capitalism (including
communism). The main pattern was interactivity around Black liberation, which is evident
throughout Chapter Five and is a core part of other themes in this chapter, especially 1D. For
example, Mims said that Black people are “living in somebody else's imagination,” “a very
specific imagination that's white supremacist.” Her design work during the game jam focused on
the question “how do we imagine something different”; she said “I think that's a lot of what I
saw when I was playtesting is that it's not always, like, some big campaign, but the way in which
we can build community and function differently…that's a big part of the work.” This shows
how critical playcentric design practices like playtesting an abolitionist card game (theme 1B)
can expand the scope of critical consciousness beyond traditional activism in ways that include
games and play.
The game jam tended to relate other aspects of critical consciousness to Black liberation,
and this was especially true for discourses around queer liberation. The group agreements stated:
“This is an unapologetically pro-queer space. We are here to contribute to the struggle for queer
liberation, which is part of the struggle for Black liberation.” This played out in various ways
throughout the jam. For example, in a breakout room discussion on Black liberation, Jomih
imagined it would involve dismantling the gender binary and related ideologies which “we don't
even realize are impacted by, like, colonialism and capitalism.” I agreed, and added “I will never
be free, as a nonbinary person, until black people are free, like, particularly queer black folks.”
Jomih described how they feel “especially, um in the United States, a lotta Black people are seen

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as always masculine. Um, and that's a role that's thrown on us.” We discussed how the gender
binary is racialized and how it will take Black liberation uprisings and movements to dismantle
it. Critical queer perspectives on relationships and friendship were also part of the conversations
in the game jam. In response to a game design brainstorming prompt, Jomih wrote: “I think an
experience I have lived through that I’d want to see in a game is more black trans love or
genderless love. Platonic and Romantic.” At the end of the game jam, Madu said: “what's present
for me right now is having safe spaces, creating safe spaces, um, for gay, queer people to just
talk about real shit. So I see that in my future.”
Theme 1.2.B. How The Game Jam Scaffolded Critical Game Design Learning
Scaffolding supported the overall learning goals of the game jam, with a particular
emphasis on critical game design learning. The scaffolding for overall goals included the shared
prompts document aligned with individual google doc journals. Participants wrote and drew in
both, more often in the shared one, which eight out of nine cohort participants annotated. People
sometimes brainstormed and prototyped in their individual documents and then copied and
pasted their ideas into the shared document, and sometimes shared them verbally over Zoom.
Several participants said they appreciated how this process provided all the key information in
one place, including a clear, dynamically updated agenda and an archive of information that they
could revisit later after the Zoom and chat had stopped. When participants pitched their game
ideas at the end of the 2021 workshops, multiple people gave feedback including suggested
readings and related media to support their peers design projects, which we archived in a table in
the shared document. Multiple participants quoted ideas from their notes in their post-video
reflections. Jaymon noted that this interactive multimodal scaffolding probably contributed to the
high levels of engagement we saw (e.g., field notes indicating that everyone participated on

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Zoom during sessions). He said that in his experiences with online learning, people tend to tune
out when slideshows start on Zoom, so minimizing slides and maximizing interactive prompts
and information archives may have helped avoid that outcome. Participants also said they
appreciated the resources we shared such as definitions Jaymon provided for key terms related to
critical theory and Black liberation. Gabriel also asked for my bibliography on critical game
literacy research literature, which I provided.
As Chapter Three describes, we intended for the game jam to be a space where
participants can learn playcentric game design skill such as setting player experience goals,
building prototypes that aim to facilitate these goals, playtesting these prototypes to see whether
the goals are being met, and iterating to move closer to the goals. Each of these skills forms a
sub-theme in this section, which includes evidence of how the game jam’s scaffolding supported
participants’ learning around each theme. As illustrated here, and also in Chapters Five and
Chapter Six, the Critical Game Jam supported a critical version of playcentric game design
learning, in which player experience goals related to critical goals for social change, and there
was reflexive awareness of how designers’ positionalities shaped the design process.
Critical Player Experience Goals.
Participants brainstormed a range of critical player experience goals. We explained that
these are goals for the emotions or sensations one wants players to feel, e.g., “we want players to
feel a sense of joy as they encounter the historic freedom dreams of Black revolutionary
movements.” We clarified these are different from what one wants players to do (e.g., “beat a
boss”) but they can be related to ones’ values or social change goals, e.g., “we want players to
increase their Black history knowledge so they are more prepared to fight for Black liberation
today.” We then prompted participants to brainstorm their own goals. Madu imagined a game

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that would feel like a “Nigerian graduation party,” and Cecilia wanted players to experience
“embodied gender euphoria
7
.” Expressing their afropessimist critical speculative imagination
described in Chapter Five, Cam wanted players to experience “Negative affects– nihilism,
pessimism– but a deeper feeling of hope and value which may accompany a mastery of failure.”
At the end of Level One and again in Level Two, participants either described or
prototyped a game they want to make and shared it with the group, along with their intended
player experience goal. For example, Jomih said they wanted to make a meditative open world
game with no goals or objectives, specifically designed for queer Black people. Their player
experience goals were rest, relaxation, and a sense of freedom.
Critical Prototyping.
The main prototyping activities in Level One of the game jam were critically prototyping
characters in Michelle’s critical character design workshop, and prototyping liberated worlds
with the Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game. For example, Michelle guided participants
through creating mood boards and character briefs, which are part of the design practices that she
does professionally as a game designer at a AAA game studio. She prompted participants to
critique racist and sexist stereotypes in mainstream character design, e.g., women wearing
impractically revealing combat clothing, games set in “smoggy, vaguely Asian cities,” and the
majority of playable protagonists in games being “brown-haired white guys.” She provided a set
of questions participants can ask to avoid these stereotypes and to generate less clichéd ideas for

7
Gender euphoria is powerful feeling of joy that trans and non-binary people sometimes experience when
our behavior and aesthetics diverge from our birth-assigned genders

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characters. She then she provided a curated set of digital prototyping tools that participants could
use asynchronously to create more diverse and inclusive characters for their games.
This scaffolding supported Gabriel in creating the Afrofuturistic character shown in
Figures Two and Three:
Figure 2
Gabriel's Mood Board Prototyping

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Figure 3
Gabriel’s Character Prototype

Multiple participants described these prototyping activities as highlights of the workshops.
Gabriel said these exercises provided him with some metacognitive self-reflection questions he
will ask in his career as a game designer: “I will take that for life, and how she taught us to
critically think about the character that you just made, that made me think ‘why are you making a
man, or why haven't you made a disabled person’.” Jomih reflected on their learning in their
notebook: “I got to see what goes on behind character design and how to recognize stereotypes
with different characters. I also learned how to make my own character and how to make sure I

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consider all backgrounds and experiences.” In their post-video, Madu also referred to this
activity, saying “I liked that, like, that type of, like…guided free creation, you know, 'cause our
brains are powerful. And, you know, we don't spend a lotta time doin that kinda stuff.” Madu’s
phrase “guided free creation” sums up the way that scaffolding and design prompts functioned in
the game jam.
Participants reflected on how the prototyping process requires overcoming perfectionism.
For example, as Olivia and I shared our reflections on prototyping Kai UnEarthed, we
encouraged people not to feel like they have to develop a full digital prototype like we did with
3D graphics and coding, and that analog games and rough digital prototypes are also valid. We
discussed how we used an easy-to-learn game engine called Twine to make an initial text-only
prototype of the game (available at https://kaiunearthed.itch.io/kai-unearthed), how we had to
overcome our own perfectionism in order to playtest incomplete prototypes, and how we
received valuable feedback from doing so, which allowed us to refine new iterations including
the one we shared in the game jam. Olivia concluded by saying:
I think all your ideas are so cool. Like, this whole week has been so amazing for me. Um,
please don't let your sense of perfectionism stop you from making it. Like, [laughter]—
’cause, you know, I think, a lotta times, like, when you're, like, a big galaxy brain person,
like, sometimes, um, wanting the thing to be perfect when it comes out can stop you from
making anything at all. Um, so, yeah, please go try your best. Make it in Twine. Get it out
there any way you can. Um, yeah. We've got people around who wanna help you who
have similar interests.
Madu took this advice when they presented a rough prototype during Level Two that they
had only playtested once before, but they seemed pleasantly surprised by how much Mims and I
enjoyed playing it (we were laughing and getting into deep conversations as we role played). In
their final video, Madu reflected on this experience:
It was very much like we were prototyping. I think there was a—in—in the whole game
jam, was just there was just a level of just, like, you know, this is a space where we're just
testing out ideas. And that was a way of creating—I think the process was really

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interesting to me. Like, you know, I'm not just here for—giving you feedback for your
research. I'm also learning. Um, I guess, like, you could say participatory research, going
through that process. I haven't really gone through that process before in this fashion, and
so it was informative for me… in terms of, like, what I wanna design in the future.
Madu’s description of the experience of prototyping also supports theme 2A (prototopian critical
speculative imagination) described in Chapter Five.
Critical Playtesting.
As Chapter Three describes, we positioned Kai UnEarthed and the Untitled Abolitionist
Worldbuilding Game as proleptic demonstrations of what is possible and also an example of
playcentric design, demonstrating how to conduct playtests. As a participant-researcher and co-
designer of Kai UnEarthed, I learned from participants’ feedback on the prototype during the
playtests and wrote down actionable insights and goals for the next iteration. I also analyzed
what participants learned about critical playcentric design methods by engaging in the playtests.
Both sets of insights answer RQ 1 in different ways, discussed next.
In the playtest of Kai UnEarthed, game co-designers Olivia, KB, and I studied whether
participants were experiencing our player experience goals of critical speculative imagination
about liberated and unpoliced futures, and post-playtest interviews show they did (described in
Chapter Five). We also wanted players to feel like they were on a journey and their decisions in
the game matter in ways that help them reflect on decisions in their daily lives. Most, players
said they felt like they did, and also demonstrated meaningful decision-making during gameplay;
they used the game as a chance to reflect on their values, ethics, and politics. For example, Jomih
said “I learned the importance of… setting your own boundaries and holding them” through
deciding how to interact with the teacher character Sol. Light Bird said “the way that I was
making decision in the game was probably nearing the way that I make decisions in real life,”
and most other participants said something similar. Light Bird appreciated that the game let

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players choose their own pacing; after playing through the scene where Kai meditates to avoid a
panic attack, they said “I’m just going slowly ‘cause this just seems very trauma-informed and
I’ve definitely, as many of us have, lived through our fair share of trauma.” Gabriel described the
game as a journey where “you can open yourself and go on and embark.” Jomih said “I feel
happy that everyone believes in me in [this] game.”
We were also testing to see how players experienced new features
8
like the journal. Most
people engaged intensively with it. Nathann and Gabriel both said it helped them reflect on their
decisions, and that it left them an artifact to reflect on later; Gabriel described it as an “analog
save cache” and said “I think every single uh choice that I had it is right there crystallized in the
journal.” Cam expressed frustration and confusion switching from the game software to Adobe
Acrobat to annotate the journal. Even after providing instructions that were previously tested for
quality assurance, setting up and troubleshooting this process also took time away from all of the
playtests, and most participants were unable to finish the game. In retrospect, we probably
should have mailed people physical copies of the journal and had them take screenshots of their
compositions rather than trying to research these interactions through synchronous Zoom video
9
.
Participants in the game jam also gave us feedback on how to improve the user interface of the
game software to make switching to and from the journal more seamless. I will apply everything
I learned about critical game design from these playtests in future iterations of Kai UnEarthed,

8
I also studied players experiences with the updated character design, and sound design. Most people liked
the character design, i.e., Tempest’s hair and gender non-conforming clothing (shown in Figure A3 in Appendix A).
This was a relief since existing character creation software seemed optimized to represent cis white people and I had
to do weeks of modding and debugging in order to create and animate a dark-skinned non-binary Black character.
8

Players also enjoyed the sound and music, and Nathann gave us specific, actionable, and well-scoped feedback on
ways to upgrade the sound design to make the game feel more immersive. I also identified a new bug to fix by
watching the playtest videos, and developed a plan for how to fix two known issues with the user interface that I had
been previously stuck on.
9
Since this session, we have been conducting other playtests involving physical copies of the journal (e.g.,
in a high school classroom), and this setup seems much more effective than an all-digital playtest.

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and I also wrote down methodological insights for future playtesting and user experience
research.
Mims also learned from the playtests of her game. Her player experience goal for the
Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game was for players to be “curious” with moments of
“confusion that pushes them to think outside the box. Of, oh, how- how do I create something?
Like what is this thing?.” In Level One, she playtested a paper prototype of what she imagined
would be a digital game facilitating this experience. Based on feedback from the playtest, she
realized that creating digital mechanics that meet this goal would be beyond the scope of her
team’s capacity because players’ creative worldbuilding could go in so many different directions
that a digital game would require either major sandbox-style player authoring tools or an
exponentially expanding branching narrative decision tree. I joined her team and we went
through a phase of rapid prototyping, scoping reviews, and iterative playtesting described in
other sections of this dissertation, and the result was an analog, card-based tabletop game
prototype that she facilitated Madu playtesting in Level Two. As they played the prototype,
Madu went through the combinations of cards they had played and pointed out which ones
supported them in feeling the kind of good confusion Mims intended, distinguishing these from
other places where they did not know where to start with their creative process and could have
benefitted from more scaffolding prompts. Mims took notes directly on her game prototype
materials, indicating places she intends to consider adding scaffolding to the analog user
interface in future iterations.
In their post-videos and other reflections, other participants described how these playtests
supported their learning. For example, Jomih said “it taught me a lot about, like, playtesting and
what that means and what it looks like as well.” Light Bird said:

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I liked the play testing of Kai UnEarthed the most because the game, um, clearly was
developed very thoughtfully. It was poetic. It was fun to play. Um, and I liked being
observed by another participant. It felt like kind of intimate ‘cause I’m like having this
first sensory experience and someone’s observing me having it um and then I’m like, “let
me say something and sort of try to translate”.
They described this as “one of the coolest things I’ve done in a while.” They said:
It was a trip to see the care and work put into building a world and then to narrate my
thoughts and feelings to someone who was witnessing me enter the world for the first
time. It was bringing some emotions up but introducing the experience with the word
‘play’ also reminded me that the emotions which resurface can amuse me…having the
observer looking over my shoulder while journaling was interesting too. That experience
felt like it mattered.
Light Bird’s experiences highlight the potential and importance of trauma-informed approaches
to playcentric game design. In his post-assessment, Gabriel summarized what he learned from
the playtests: “first thing, when I think a theme to my game, I’ll discuss it with the group that are
being represented in it. Then I would take the feedback, listen to what they think should have
more importance. Then work around these ideas.” Gabriel’s learning highlights the importance
of representation and positionality in critical playcentric design methods, discussed next.
How Designers’ Positionality Shaped the Design Process.
In addition to learning the core skills of the playcentric design process, participants also
expressed conscious reflections on how their positionalities and those of other designers in the
group shaped the design process and their learning around it. For example, the video game
prototype that Reginald shared in Level Two expresses his positionality as a Black person in
Seattle:
It's, like, basically a scene where the player is initially chased out of their home, uh,
which is a reference to gentrification since I know a lot of people of color, at least in my
neighborhood, have, um, experienced gentrification and rising prices and had to move
out... so it's kind of like a reference to-to that group of players surrounded by people that
don't look like them, and they are, um, being forced to leave the area.

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In the game, the player character must run through a building, city streets, and a rural area,
avoiding and fighting various white monsters who are trying to sacrifice them and other Black
people.
Reginald said their player experience goal is for “players to feel relief or safety when
they encounter a Black or Brown or Tan person in my game.” This experience is supported by
the game’s narratives, character design/ representation, and mechanics. As Reginald narrated
during his gameplay demonstration video:
As you can see on the screen, I have some—there is some characters in front of the
player that are not fighting the player. They're allies, and they are, um, Black people in
armor. Hopefully—yeah, as you can see, they are allies of the player… so that it'll
condition them to, when they see Tan people, be relieved… as opposed to feeling worried
that they're going to be attacked, since in my game that won't happen.
Not only does Reginald’s prototype show evidence of critical game design learning, it also
demonstrates a playcentric design process rooted in a particular sociocultural context. His player
experience goal speaks specifically to his context in Seattle where members of a small and
shrinking Black community often seek BIPOC and Black-Brown alliances to counter the
influences of pervasive and resurgent white supremacist politics.
Light Bird’s experiences with the Kai UnEarthed playtest also demonstrate how
researchers’ positionalities can affect the playtesting process in the context of user experience
research on games. I paired each playtester with a researcher who I thought would best be able to
relate to that playtester and their sociocultural context, and in Light Bird’s case I paired them
with Kirsten Elliott, who is a Black woman with extensive teaching and design experience
among Black people. When Kirsten asked Light Bird “how does it feel to play a game about a
future where Black people, queer people and Indigenous people are thriving?”, Light Bird
responded “It felt emotional, at one point I was telling you I really did feel that…burning feeling
in your chest and my head I’m not exactly sure how to describe it because it wasn’t sad

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necessarily but it just felt deep.” They described how they paced themself through this emotional
experience, and reflected on what this meant to them in the context of the playtest:
There's like a witness to how you’re choosing to play the game… I’m being witnessed by
a Black woman…and the game has been developed by people who are considering Black
liberation like and then to be the player who’s a non-binary Black person, like that's just -
that's just like, I’ve never done anything like this before.
Light Bird also messaged Olivia and I and thanked us for making the game; they described my
work on the game as allyship with the Black liberation movement. Their reflections on their
leaning process show that researchers’ and designers’ positionalities, politics, and sociocultural
contexts can shape players experiences, particularly around emotionally charged race-related
games.
Theme 1.2.C. How Worldbuilding Functioned as Scaffolding
During the game jam, worldbuilding activities scaffolded other aspects of critical game
design learning, as well as other forms of critical game literacy learning and Afrofuturist
development. As Olivia said while we were designing the game jam prompts: “people create all
sorts of worlds inside themselves that they can, like, go into and come out of all the time. So,
yeah, they should be able to make games then as well if it weren't for all these things that they're
seeing as barriers.” Our conjecture was that starting with worldbuilding might help participants
overcome these barriers in ways analogous to how it had helped us overcome barriers while
making Kai UnEarthed (as described in Chapter Three). Our Speculative Pedagogies chapter
narrated this theme across the broader 10-year participatory design process this study is one
phase of (Coopilton et al., in press). This section continues that story by providing empirical
findings showing how participants in the Critical Game Jam experienced this theme. Three
worldbuilding activities functioned as scaffolding for critical game design and other forms of

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learning: Michelle’s critical character creation workshop and the playtests of the Untitled
Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game and Kai UnEarthed.
The critical character design workshop included a prompt for creating mood boards that
prototype a character’s world. For example, as Figure Four shows, Cecilia’s portrayed the world
of South Central Los Angeles in ways that challenge typical media portrayals of dirty streets and
police helicopters:
Figure 4
Cecilia's South Central Worldbuilding

After I did some direct instruction defining and discussing worldbuilding, Mims invited
participants to playtest the Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game. She facilitated small
groups in creating unpoliced future worlds, deciding on how decision making, resource
distribution, community rituals, and responses to harm would happen in these worlds. Cam,
Gabriel, Madu, Nathann said these exercises were a highlight of the game jam. For example,
Cam said:

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It was a really good opportunity to bridge the relationship between theory and praxis, of
being able to think about if we imagine this world, how do we actually physically, you
know, politically, socially, economically—how do we actually get this to function to be
able to kind of, like, make this to happen? And so I really enjoyed… the experience to
kinda have that, you know, little thought experiment to be able to think through that.
This perspective shows the potential of worldbuilding to highlight what Gabriel called the
“materialist” dimensions of critical speculative imagination: paying attention to how social
contradictions like class struggles shape the future. Several participants said these exercises
should be used in school classrooms.
Presenting Kai UnEarthed as a proleptic demonstration of critical worldbuilding also
helped participants expand their own design practice. After participants playtested Kai
UnEarthed, they were curious about how we did the worldbuilding for it and Olivia and I shared
our design process (which is described in Chapter Three). We also shared a screenshot of
Abolition Playfield from Kai UnEarthed with participants; we asked them to imagine what
games might be played in this playground that has been built out of the reclaimed ruins of an
abolished youth jail. In response to this prompt, Gabriel modded the game mechanics of Uno to
make it a cooperative rather than competitive game. When he presented this idea in the final
2021 pitch session, Nathann suggested he add a narrative, where cards represent different aspects
of working together.
In the Level Two session it appears Gabriel had taken Nathann’s advice; he presented a
cooperative card game called Feat, simulating a collaborative process of hip hop production
among Brazil’s Black working class, where people build each other up as artists by featuring
each other on tracks. There are cards for various kinds of songs, and the most valued songs
require collaboration. He also created a mood board for the game, situating its art and writing in
the world of Brazilian hip hop and its contributions to movements for Black liberation. He said
his goal was:

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To take the world and theme of RAP and bringing it to a game. I grew up listening to
RAP music, only in RAP I founded lyrics that described my life, what I was going
through and the majority of the contradictory feelings I had…RAP was always about the
poor, the marginalized and oppressed in society. To survive we always needed to be
together and RAP was no different. People made groups to sing and help each other get
better. Mainstream media always tried to ignore rap because it was too subversive, until it
was impossible to ignore.
Not only does Feat demonstrate how worldbuilding prompts supported critical game design, it
also models how the process of game design could be more like the affinity spaces of
collaborative grassroots hip hop production, where designers feature each other’s ideas and
remix aspects of a shared world, developing critical speculative imagination about how to
liberate this world together.
In his feedback for Gabriel, Reginald connected this dynamic to Principle Seven of the
Afrofuturist Development Theory (creating systems of equity across developmental stages).
Describing how to apply this principle through critical playcentric design methods, he
recommended that Gabriel playtest Feat with people in different age groups to see if it supports
his player experience goals. He said this iterative process should aim to make “everyone feel that
the game is equally balanced and fair to all, but promoting that element to the point where the
players notice, and feel good about it, and want to incorporate that feeling of equity and inclusion
in their daily lives.” Reginald wondered if collaborative duos incentivized by the game
mechanics might end up becoming alliances that lead to rivalries, and if so whether those
encourage or discourage the communal camaraderie Gabriel intended; he said “it would just need
some user testing to confirm or deny that.” This feedback demonstrates Reginald’s
understanding of playcentric design methods, supporting Gabriel’s critical design practice.
Theme 1.2.D. How the Game Jam Supported us in Building Affinity Around Black Liberation
The Critical Game Jam supported us in building affinities around Black liberation in
several ways. We started out by making a list of shared values, experience goals, and related

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agreements for how we want to interact in order to nurture these. The top of this list stated: “This
is an unapologetically pro-Black space. We are here to contribute to the struggle for Black
liberation. We are rooting for Black people to win. We are opposed to all forms of white
supremacy and anti-Blackness.” We also agreed we would recognize that expertise is widely
distributed, would build on tacit knowledge, would provide both feedback and encouragement,
and would welcome vernacular literacies. The rest of the dataset shows we practiced these values
throughout the game jam.
For example, participants recognized they had a wide range of different forms of
expertise and offered this to each other to support each other’s’ learning. While discussing group
agreements, Cam asked people with more familiarity with game design terminology and
concepts to define these so those without this background can learn; Cam and Jaymon, in turn,
offered to define critical theory terms as discussed earlier. Jaymon also led a workshop critiquing
racism in games, and a discussion about what Black liberation means to us. Madu used their film
production expertise to teach me how to sync up different cameras to film their playtest, joking
that they used “Forty thousand dollars' worth of information right there.” People tended to give
each other the benefit of the doubt, and help each other find words to attach to the tacit
knowledge they already had based on their experiences in game-worlds and social worlds. Light
Bird reflected on this process in their journal: “I’ve really been thinking about the tacit
knowledge (thanks for this new term) and how I would like to build from tacit knowledge in a
community far more often than I ever have.” They reflected on a video I had shared from
Afrofuturist designer Onyx Ashanti, who “was talking about how ancient drumming practices–
which he addressed with a pan-Africanist perspective– are some of human’s earliest examples of
binary code: 00 11 01 10.” They recognized that tacit computational knowledge is part of every

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Black person’s ancestral legacy, and made this knowledge more explicit by metacognitively
reflecting on their own experiences learning coding in school.
Based on his experience in the UC Santa Cruz game design program, Nathann invited the
group to distinguish clearly whether we wanted feedback, encouragement, or both when we
share our ideas and prototypes. We agreed on this, and I structured the playtests accordingly;
after sharing Kai UnEarthed, I invited people to give Olivia and I encouragement first, and then
feedback, modeling how to receive feedback while reminding participants they would be in this
role when they share their game ideas. I also modeled giving feedback and encouragement to
Nathann during the pitch session at the end of Level One, and then other participants did the
same for him and other participants (engagement was particularly high in this session). The
games that people presented provided a range of different perspectives on Black liberation, and
this process allowed participants to hear how their games are perceived by a diverse group of
Black people and a few non-Black people, preparing them to eventually build player
communities around the games.
During the opening of the game jam, Dr. Tynes welcomed people to bring their “whole
self to this space,” letting participants know “we speak African American English” (AAVE) and
that they are welcome to do so as well. Black participants often spoke in AAVE during the game
jam, some with queer and gay lexicons, intonations, and body language. When I started the Level
Two session with Madu and Mims, I started out by inviting them to imagine ways they could use
the recordings to study and improve their games for their communities, and I reminded them:
“you don’t need to code switch…you know, this is- this is for whatever audience you want it to
be for. So, feel free to express yourself with, like, whatever, you know, uh, whatever forms of
expression feel- feel good for you.” Later in the session, they had a conversation in AAVE about

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Black vernacular game literacies. Mims said she designed the instructions for her game to be
intentionally short; she said if the list is 10 pages then “I don’t even wanna play no more.” She
also said that “Black people make up their own rules…I've never seen Black people read no
instruction manual for a game. So if the instructions are too big on this, my cousin n‘dem is not
playing the game.” Madu replied: “Mm-hmm. You could probably make a version just like, no
instructions. Just like, y'all just have fun.” Mims then described how different Black families will
make up different rules for the same game. Mims and I discussed how her “cousin n‘dem”
similarly modded her game prototype to make it fun for their group when we playtested it over
Zoom with them in Georgia as well as her other contacts across Africa and the diaspora. I said
“that is critical game literacy… that’s people acting like a game designer.”
Unfortunately, a company I paid to transcribe this video judged some of these AAVE
critical game literacies to be “extraneous conversation”; they left them out of the transcript even
though I had requested verbatim vernacular transcription. As I reviewed the section of the video
that the company decided was extra, I perceived Madu and Mims to be role playing in AAVE as
two members of a future community called Two Apples, bantering over whether to eat an apple
core that one of them had accidentally dropped on the ground. This was a moment of
spontaneous play where they “yes-and-ed” the core dropping, connecting the moment back to the
abolitionist gameworld Mims had designed for them to play in, a world full of aliveness in which
nobody and nothing is disposable. That is hardly “extraneous conversation” in a study on critical
game literacies and Afrofuturist development, but it might be to people who are not literate in
Black and Africana culture, politics, and forms of play. This moment seemed like a conflict
between two forms of literacy. On one side was the company’s optimization for non-playful
white-normative literacy practices. On the other was Madu and Mims’ Afrodiasporic critical

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game literacies, characterized by improvisational creativity: moves that compost mistakes into
new performances, constraints into play, and glitches into features of a game.
RQ 1.3. How Future Learning Environments Can Better Support Critical Game Literacies
While this pilot study demonstrates how one might design environments to support the
aspects of critical game literacies learning thematized in this chapter, these themes could be
developed further in future critical game jams and related critical game literacies learning
environments. The following sections describe how this might/should be done. These future
directions for research and design are based on analyses of participants’ expressed desires for
additional learning, combined with my own assessments of what was missing in the first iteration
of the game jam.
Theme 1.3.A. How Future Learning Environments can Further Deepen and Expand Critical
Consciousness
Future learning environments should include more prompts and discussions around
critical consciousness and action in the game industry. For example, Michelle spoke briefly
about challenging racism and sexism in her job at a AAA game studio, and multiple participants
said they wanted to discuss on-the-job-organizing more with her. Reginald said the game jam
helped him notice problems in the game industry and brainstorm solutions, but he wanted more
game-related activism workshops where people would collaborate to come up with solutions as
an entire group, “like, writing them down in a Google document, and then going through the-the-
the problems together and perhaps voting on one to focus on… and if possible, act on those
solutions, um, preferably.” Future critical game jams could also conduct participatory action
research, which Nathann advocated when he spoke appreciatively about research that people had
conducted to expose crunch (mandatory overwork) in game studios.

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Theme 1.3.B. How Future Learning Environments Can Better Scaffold Critical Game Design
Learning
Future learning environments should include more scaffolding around modding and
around technical aspects of the game design process. This was something that Cam and Light
Bird suggested, as people with critical humanities and social sciences backgrounds who were
looking for more computational media design skills. Cam suggested this could be “foretraining”
which made me think in future game jams there could be an optional intro to digital prototyping
and design tools before the overall game jam starts. Building on the overlapping zones of
proximal development in the Critical Game Jam cohort, Light Bird proposed a series of
workshops where people with technical skills in Unity and filmmaking (e.g., Nathann and Madu)
teach the group these skills, while in return Light Bird offered to “step up and, like, talk about,
um, ableism, transformative justice, um, glitch feminism, intersectional feminism in general.” I
tried to organize this after the 2021 workshops, but most people seemed unable to focus on it so
it did not come together. Hopefully there will be more space for it in future game jams that do
not occur during pandemics.
Such workshops could involve using game engines and templates (e.g., Twine and Unity)
as scaffolds that can allow people to jump right into design so they can start practicing and
prototyping while still learning technical skills such as coding. As Olivia reflected in their MFA
paper on Against Reality, coding is not fundamentally different from using templates in a design
software’s user interface; it involves remixing existing patterns of code that correspond with
existing patterns of interactivity. Future learning environments could demonstrate this process
with some annotated example projects, e.g., sharing some of the Twine and Unity code for Kai
UnEarthed and describing how I learned introductory coding by making it. Light Bird also

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suggested future game jams should teach how to build 3D environments in Unity, which would
be consistent with the next theme: worldbuilding as scaffolding.
Theme 1.3.C. How Critical Worldbuilding Could Better Scaffold Learning in the Future
Gabriel was the only participant who chose to make a game specifically influenced by the
world of Kai UnEarthed, though other participants referenced the game as inspiration for their
own critical worldbuilding, speculative imagination, and Afrofuturist design practices more
broadly (see Chapter Five). In the future, we should add more scaffolding for specific ways that
participants can build in Kai UnEarthed’s world if they want to, without making it required. This
could be part of additional scaffolding around modding and metagaming. In the participatory
design sessions that I did with students in Seattle when I was brainstorming early iterations of the
gameworld, I included prompts that do not require existing game design skills, like inviting
people to design clothes that would be worn in the game’s world where the gender binary has
been abolished, or inviting people to write stories and poems about characters in the game’s
world encountering artifacts left behind by people alive today. In the future, I could re-cycle
these prompts and situate them early in a game jam. Then, as participants develop more game
design skills, I could follow up with prompts inviting participants to make their own games
building on the worldbuilding they did earlier. These could be optional design challenges, e.g., to
make a game about genderless fashion or make one about finding old cellphones from the 21
st

century. We would also continue to prompt people to create their own worlds, as we did in this
study.
USC Games professors, former colleagues, and teacher friends have suggested more
worldbuilding- related writing prompts for Kai UnEarthed (some procedurally generated), part
of a larger writing workshop curriculum that could be used in informal learning environments

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and Language Arts classes. I could ask Gabriel if he would be interested in situating Feat and
Kai UnEarthed side by side in this kind of curriculum. Light Bird said they liked the hip hop
beats in Kai UnEarthed (made by my former student Devonte Aycox), and they imagined
freestyling over them. Related writing prompts could encourage that, and so could playing Feat.
I could assemble the existing character models for Tempest and Kai’s classmates into a cypher at
Abolitionist Playfield, and record a video describing them playing Feat there. This design
process would also involve the kind of collaborative creative experiences that Gabriel wants
players to simulate in Feat.
Theme 1.3.D. How to Build Stronger Affinity Around Black Liberation in the Future
While the game jam functioned as an affinity space, it was a relatively short-lived one.
Participants exchanged contact information but as far as I know they did not end up setting up a
Discord server or other means of continuing the conversation after the workshops. Olivia, Mims,
other friends, and I ended up building an Abolitionist Gaming Network with a Discord server,
but that is beyond the scope of this study, and only some of the participants from the Critical
Game Jam joined it. In future studies I will likely set up a Discord server for the study
participants to use to connect with each other.
Conclusion
Overall, participants in the Critical Game Jam developed their critical game literacies by
deepening and expanding critical consciousness, engaging in scaffolded critical playcentric
design learning, learning through worldbuilding, and building an affinity space around Black
liberation. They did this through playing and designing games focused on Afrofuturism,
described in Chapter Five. Design principles based on the thematic findings in this chapter are

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elaborated in Chapter Six, providing guidance for educators, organizers, game designers, and
researchers who may wish to build on these findings to design future learning environments.

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Chapter Five: Afrofuturist Development in the Critical Game Jam
This chapter reports findings from the study that answer research question two: how can
one design learning spaces, games, and game design activities that support Afrofuturist
development? Through reflexive thematic analysis of the data, I found evidence of Afrofuturist
development during the Critical Game Jam that answers this question. I organized this evidence
into the following themes: developing critical speculative imagination (theme 2A), imagining
unpoliced futures through abolitionist gaming and game design (theme 2B), imagining and
prototyping climate justice through Afrofuturist game design (theme 2C), and “bending
spacetime” (theme 2D). This chapter is organized by answers to each of the components of
research question two: it includes sections on how participants experienced Afrofuturist
development learning during the Critical Game Jam (answering RQ 2.1), how the design of the
game jam supported that learning (answering RQ 2.2), and what can be done differently in future
learning environments (answering RQ 2.3). The four themes extend across these answers to the
research sub-questions, so evidence of each theme is present in each of the following sections.
Each section is also organized internally by theme (so, for example, theme 2A is presented in
sections 2.1.A, 2.2.A, and 2.3.A, and theme 2B is presented in sections 2.1.B, 2.2.B, and 2.3.B).
The four themes described in this chapter also form the basis for the design principles
consolidated in the second half of Chapter Six.
RQ 2.1. How Participants Experienced Afrofuturist Development
Participants experienced Afrofuturist development in multiple ways. The most prominent
themes were critical speculative imagination (theme 2A), imagining unpoliced futures (theme

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2B), prototyping climate justice (theme 2C), and “bending spacetime” (theme 2D). These
experiences are described in the following sections.
Theme 2.1.A. Critical Speculative Imagination
The critical speculative imagination dimension of Afrofuturist development was a desired
outcome of this study and I intentionally co-designed the proleptic game playtests, prompts, and
other scaffolding of the Critical Game Jam to support its development (see the design conjecture
map in Chapter Three). As I anticipated, it was a prominent theme of the learning we
experienced together. This section describes how participants experienced this learning and
development (answering RQ 2.1) with two sub-themes presenting examples of these experiences:
a) how participants analyzed the effects of digital media on their critical speculative imagination
and b) ways that participants imagined revolutionary change in the future.
Through comparing and contrasting participants’ pre- and post- assessment
questionnaires and videos, I found that Gabriel, Jomih, Light Bird, Nathann, Madu, and Reginald
deepened their critical speculative imagination of possible futures over the course of the game
jam. For example, in their pre-video, Light Bird struggled to answer our questions about
imagining the future: “I appreciate that someone wants to know what I think. But I but I.. I don’t
have an answer.” In their post-video, they imagined a future where Black people are safe and
whole, were they have the autonomy and self-determination to be “stewards of like, a more, um,
equitable healthy world.” While there was no summative evidence of Cam and Cecilia
developing around this theme, there was formative evidence of them developing their visions for
the future during workshop activities. The following sub-themes describe patterns in particular
participants’ experiences of critical speculative imagination.

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Facing “The Wall”: Digital Media and Critical Speculative Imagination
Participants reflected on how technology and media influence how they imagine the
future; Nathann did this most robustly. In his pre-video, he imagined humanity’s collective
journey into the late 21
st
century being blocked by a fatal “wall,” consisting of “climate disaster,”
“political division” and oppression of “minorities”: “Um, so imagine that… we’re driving and
we’re going toward this wall and its very off in the distance.” Humanity could design digital
media that could help us swerve to avoid the wall: “We’re becoming very connected in general
um in terms of our ability to find information and share it with other people at a rapid-fire pace
in a constant pace.” However, instead of helping us swerve, the dominant forms of contemporary
digital media just give us more information about how bad the wall is: “because it’s, you know,
good for advertisers if they can always keep you looking at your phone and interesting stories.
Um, and because of that we are constantly becoming aware of these really horrible things that
are happening that we can’t have any control over.” In other words, digital media algorithms
feed us high levels of information that promotes personalized critical awareness proportionate to
a relatively low level of information that supports collective critical action. This ratio encourages
feelings of overwhelmed and isolated helplessness, and it discourages critical speculative
imagination.
Nathann thought the result of this skewed ratio is that humanity is “procrastinating on a
global scale;” we are likely to reach a point that “we are so close but we finally know that it’s
time to turn and I don't know if we will be able” to swerve “fast enough before we hit the wall.”
As a result, “a lot of people feel sort of like the existential dread about what's going to happen in
the next 50 years.” Swerving would require bending the trajectory of society and the fatalistic
experiences of space and time currently cultivated by digital media. Throughout the game jam,

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Nathann wondered if we can do this through play and game design. As discussed in Theme 2C
(“Bending Spacetime”), he said the game Portal 2 embodied the way workers bend spacetime on
the clock through humor to find joy in dire situations. He identified this as an example of a larger
critical skill:
A skill that we’re going to be learning is finding something to sincerely enjoy even
despite the despair of everything going on…because in the end, that is what makes life
like one worth living but also something you can actually think about and do something
about. I think in the future that will be the skill that will be the most valuable will be
being able to recognize that stuff despite everything else going on.
This skill is an important part of Afrofuturist development, in its emphasis on the power of Black
joy.
Nathann analyzed video games that might help one brainstorm new kinds of social media
that can support people in learning this skill. For example, he analyzed the online version of
Death Stranding, where players can build useful objects and leave them for other players to build
on, and people can “like” these creations to provide encouraging feedback and a sense of facing
an unknown future together. The algorithmic game mechanics encourage massively distributed
collaboration around solving large, shared problems rather than curating an increasingly specific
critical awareness of how social problems affect us each personally. In the game jam workshops,
participants discussed how playing games is often an escapist break from the existential dread
resulting from critical awareness of social problems; however, Nathann pointed out that games
are not just another form of procrastination. To the extent that they cultivate a sense of agency
and show people what they are capable of, they can also help people practice swerving away
from the wall in ways that are discussed further in this chapter.

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Afrofuturist “Swerving” Toward Revolution?
Echoing Nathann’s vision of swerving, multiple participants expressed forms of
revolutionary critical speculative imagination, expressing disillusionment with agendas for social
change premised on gradual progressive political reforms, and imagining revolution instead.
Cam, Gabriel, Olivia, and I did this most directly, speculating about what it would actually take
to liberate the Earth from anti-Blackness in the future.
Throughout the game jam, Cam questioned notions of linear progress: “to just
automatically assume that things are going to get better, like that’s just like—that doesn’t make
sense… Logistically that’s not how things work.” For example, Cam pondered 2043-44, the year
that the US becomes “majority minority,” and they expressed curiosity about how that change
might alter “whiteness being the status quo and things like that”; however, they imagined that the
destruction of anti-Blackness would require much more than demographic change:
Following in line with like with what I would say afropessimist thinkers and stuff like
that, society is going through like systems of reform, but the only way they are gonna
have true significant structural change is by having, I feel like there’s gonna have to be
some sort of very violent insurrection. Rather than a physical… I mean it could be like a
physical thing… Or it could be, you know, as Frank B Wilderson says, kind of like an
epistemological, cultural, whatever… there just needs to be a massive giant shift.
Cam said this a little over a year after the 2020 riots and protests against police in the wake of the
police murder of George Floyd. Rather than accepting the ways this rebellion was contained and
channeled into reformist campaigns, they imagined that an even more insurrectionary rebellion
might attack structural anti-Blackness in future.
Cam expressed curiosity about Gabriel’s experiences with race in Brazil, which is already
a “majority-minority” country, and Gabriel expressed similar revolutionary imagination there. In
his pre-video he was “negative about thinkin’ about the future” because “We have elected a-a
president who hates minorities and who’s trying to kill us.” The country was in “political

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turmoil,” and he was worried about a possible “military coup d'état.” Between the two game jam
levels, Gabriel and many other Brazilians defeated far-right former president Jair Bolsanaro’s
coup attempt and progressive Ignacio Lula’s was re-elected. However, even after this, Gabriel
imagined that revolutionary change is still necessary. In 2023 he said that “in 2043, I still think
that Black people will be the workforce that moves the capitalism. I really wish that it didn't. I'm
a revolutionary, so: power to the people!”
Olivia and I also expressed revolutionary speculative imagination as we reflected on our
experiences designing Kai UnEarthed. Olivia described their experience reading Afropessimist
theory right before and during the George Floyd Rebellion and “having it, like, completely
devastate me. Like, I was, like, flattened by this…I read it, and I didn't like it, though I knew it to
be true…And so-so then now what?” Olivia came to the realization they needed to “detangle”
themselves from the “inherited…hierarchical system” that we call politics, that “I shouldn't even,
like, waste my time, um, involving myself in it.” But then they asked “if we, like, kind of depart
from that, then what are we now? What might we focus on?” They said “that's what
Afrofuturism is to me.” They described it as a “sort of spirituality,” an ongoing practice of
imaginative questioning.
We discussed how we incorporated that kind of revolutionary Afrofuturist practice into
Kai UnEarthed. I described it as an “artifact that embodies some of these ideas that Afrofuturism
and Afropessimism speak to. Like it embodies a fundamental rejection of American politics as
the horizon of meaning.” I talked about how critical theorists say that it is “easier to imagine the
end of the world than the end of capitalism,” which is the “fundamental block to critical
imagination” that we have overcome. Because that block exists, Afropessmists say “for Black
people to be free, we have to end the world… but then it’s like, what’s next?” Kai UnEarthed

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poses that question, and on our website we quoted graffiti from the George Floyd Rebellion that
said “Another End of the World is Possible.” Olivia described Kai UnEarthed as a “world where,
like, capitalism is also abolished. And people are living, like, full, healthy lives, you know, and
then still have, like, some stress and some problems, but it's just not, uh—yeah, it is-it's
something different… without it feeling so far off.” Through playtesting, we invited the rest of
the participants in the Critical Game Jam to join our practice of imaginative questioning and
prototyping, posing the question: after the disillusionment, after the rebellions, what next?
During the game jam, multiple participants imagined liberated Afrofutures that are anti-
capitalist, often involving maroon-like communes that secede from racial capitalist empires.
Madu developed this theme most explicitly. Before the game jam, they could not imagine things
getting better in terms of race and racism, particularly in terms of the positions of Haiti and the
African continent in the world. At the end of Level One they were inspired by the Untitled
Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game and Kai UnEarthed to learn more about socialism and
communism and to seek out more “utopic movies, but then not, like the corny ones” that explore
similar themes. At first, they thought the games were allusions to communist experiments that
had already failed historically, but as they researched more, they began to question this
assumption.
In their final reflection video after Level Two of the game jam, Madu imagined Black
people building liberated “hubs” in the South (I couldn’t tell if they meant the South of the US or
the Earth) where “it's like there's certain places where it's just, like, no capitalists [laughter] and
there's certain places where it's just, like, all communists, but, like, in a good—good kinda
communism.” They imagined a system of free transportation between these maroon-like hubs
where people can travel to seek refuge “away from moments of terror” or to connect and build

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solidarity with other communities. This system would be self-managed by everyday people with
no surveillance: “Like, going on a flight might as well be teleporting 'cause it's free. No TSA. No
long lines. No pre-check. You just roll up. Might as—I might as well [they laughed] fly a plane.
[they laughed again].” Madu’s Afrofuturistic vision departs from both capitalism and from
bureaucratic “Communist” ideologies from the 20
th
century (e.g., Stalinism). It is an attempt to
wrestle with practical challenges facing the Black liberation movement, such as how to open
borders to welcome refugees from fascist violence and climate genocide.
Theme 2.1.B. Imagining Unpoliced Futures Through Abolitionist Gaming and Game Design
Among the varying forms of Afrofuturistic critical speculative imagination that
participants expressed in this study, imagining unpoliced futures stood out enough to be its own
theme. Data showed that participants critiqued police and prisons, arguing they are anti-Black;
they also imagined future societies without these institutions.
For many participants, abolitionist imagination meant freeing up the energy previously
put towards trying to appease and reform the system. As Cam put it, “the police… it’s like you
don’t even—you can’t really fix stuff like that…that’s the whole point of abolition work, is like
not really to kinda fix those things.” Echoing Nathann’s narration of how to serve away from
“the wall,” this perspective swerves sharply away from strategies for police reform that involve
sharing images and videos of police killing Black people in order to raise awareness about the
problem, or games that involve simulating this oppression to raise empathy among non-Black
people (as discussed in Chapter Two). Such strategies involve increasing critical awareness
without building collective power to stop the violence, generating the feelings of overwhelmed
despair that Nathann worried about. Instead, abolitionist critical speculative imagination means
focusing energy and attention on what could become possible if police and prisons are abolished.

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This includes abolishing the ways carceral capitalism polices imagination and what is considered
to be “reality.”
Participants discussed how police and prisons define what is normal and real in society in
anti-Black ways. Cam argued that police are “fundamentally anti-Black.” By anti-Blackness they
meant not just anti-Black racism but also “a pervasive like structural ontological feeling that like,
you know, over-codes the rest of the way—the rest of the way that like reality operates and stuff
like that.” They applied the same critique to prisons, which they say “are not designed to like
rehabilitate people.” Instead, “Legal systems code bodies for the values and precedents that it can
set on certain bodies- i.e., the reason Black men overrepresent in the prison-industrial complex is
because Blackness is always signified and overcoded as fungible and criminal.” Summarizing a
break-out room discussion they were a part of, Kirsten elaborated on this theme: “we talked
about, like, what it means, um, to be policed and, like, pathologized. So like, ‘Oh, you're too
this,’ or, ‘You're too that. You're ‘too much,’ um, and the idea of just being policed by what you
wear, what you say…what you look like’. Echoing the abolitionist critical theories that inform
this study (see Chapter Two), participants talked about how carceral capitalism treats Black
people like they are extra, too much, and disposable (fungible). In a carceral society, Black
people being alive and expressive disrupts ontological law and order; Black aliveness and
imagination is policed and confined accordingly.
Abolitionist Critical Speculative Imagination
Participants imagined unpoliced futures in various ways. For example, after a breakout
group discussion on Black liberation, Kirsten shared: “something that we kind of talked about,
like, um, in regards to the future is, like, just being able to present how you want to, um, without

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worrying about how that would affect your opportunity in the future.” In Jomih’s pre-video they
said:
What I would like to see for my future is that we go to a place where there are actually no
police, um, and that things are really written by the people and for the people. Um, and,
for my descendants, I would like a world of joy. I feel like we have gone through so
much hardship that, um, I would love to see a world of joy and just focus the happiness
and ease of living.
Several other participants also associated abolitionism with Black joy, play, rest, ease, and
critiques of work after hundreds of years of unrested labor and anti-Black violence.
Linking Afrofuturist abolitionist imagination to critical game literacies, Jomih also
imagined a future online multiplayer gaming ecosystem featuring “moderation that is simply
moderation and not surveillance and not censorship based on the current definition of terrorism
in the United States.” While Jomih wanted better game moderation (presumably to prevent white
supremacist harassment), they argued that carceral measures like surveillance are not the way to
accomplish this goal.

Theme 2.1.C. Imagining and Prototyping Climate Justice Through Afrofuturist Game Design
Imagining and prototyping climate justice was another expression of Afrofuturistic
critical speculative imagination that was prominent enough in the data to name as a distinct
theme. Participants recognized how ecological harm is deeply intertwined with systemic racism
and anti-Blackness; they ideated and prototyped approaches to navigating climate change that
were grounded in their visions of Black liberation and their instance that there are Black people
in the future.
In their post-videos, Light Bird, Jomih, and Nathann expressed a deepened imagination
of liberated futures where their descendants survive climate change, which they said helped them
overcome despair about climate change they had expressed in their pre-videos. For example,

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Light Bird imagined that in the future “we’ve built, um, more sustainable relationships with the
land” and that “we’ve returned to, like, indigenous ways of knowledge and we have a connection
to the ecosystems that we are a part of while, um, also maintaining an awareness of global
ecosystems and how our participation in them, um, has consequences.” They prototyped aspects
of this vision in ways described in theme 2.2.C. Cam and Gabriel also imagined Black liberation
and climate justice to be closely intertwined aspects of the revolutionary processes they imagined
and prototyped (described in theme 2.1.A). For example, Cam described the ecology around life
and human relationships with more than human beings changing during a revolution; they
imagined this through the lens of their critical analysis of the video game Covane.
Participants’ visions of the future showed evidence of critical speculative imagination
and critical consciousness (key aspects of Afrofuturist development). Not only did they speculate
about futures where Black people can thrive, they critically imagined how this would require
them and their descendants to take action to dismantle the anti-Black and colonial structures that
fuel climate change, described further in theme 2.2.C.
Theme 2.1.D. “Bending Spacetime”
While the other themes in this chapter are composed of patterns of learning and
development over the course of the game jam, I am choosing to write about bending spacetime in
this section for a different reason: participants built a consensus around it by naming it as one of
the main Afrofuturistic experience goals they set for themselves during the game jam. Dr. Tynes
quoted Rasheeda Phillip’s (2015) Black Quantum Futurism during the opening of Level One,
providing language of “bending spacetime,” which Light Bird, Nathann, and other participants
used to name the experience of time they wanted to share together during the game jam as we
discussed the interests, passions, values, and group agreements that we aimed to build consensus

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around as an affinity space. This emergent consensus prompted analyses and reflections
throughout the game jam on how gameplay and game design can modify ones’ experience of
time in Afrofuturistic ways. While that process is described in Theme 2.2D, this section focuses
on how Light Brid and Nathann’s experiences interacting with science fiction worldbuilding and
games prepared them to build this consensus.
Light Bird and Nathann’s pre-videos included complex essays about how their
engagements with speculative media depart from standardized capitalist experiences of space
and time. In their pre-video, Light Bird analyzed their experiences watching Star Trek
Discovery’s adaptations of radical mycology. The show’s worldbuilding involves a gender non-
conforming Black main character and a diverse crew navigating a universe composed of
mycelial webs that bend space and time, interweaving a multiverse of possible alternate realities
and timelines. They described watching the show as similar to being moved by a symphony of
coordinated sensations.
Analogously, Nathann analyzed his experience of playing Portal 2, a physics simulation
puzzle game in which players use a device to open portals that bend and slip through spacetime.
Informed by critical theories of everyday life and work, Nathann found comedic utopian
longings in the dystopian world of the game
10
:
What you are doing, for the most part, is running around in this little environment solving
puzzles um for a robot AI… the aesthetic of the environments is very much created as a
business. Everything, all the puzzles, are being used to create this portal gun and test this

10
In this analysis, Nathann applied critical theories he said he learned in Madeline Lane-McKinley’s
Critique of Everyday Life class at UC Santa Cruz. Lane-McKinley (2022) is the author of a book called Comedy at
Work: Utopian Longings in Dystopian Times. I am friends with her and her partner Kyle, and we share an affinity
for intergenerational playful design projects that involve co-creating imaginary time machines. When their child Tuli
was 7, we went on a camping trip together with our abolitionist friends. During that trip, friends and I supported Tuli
in writing and directing a play called The Clocks Strike. It is about clocks going on strike because they want to play
instead of tell time. People are unable to go to work because the clocks refuse to demarcate the workday and they
eventually set up a picket line disrupting capitalist productivity. I acted in this play as one of the rebel clocks. This
was one of many experiences that motivated me to design Kai UnEarthed and to do this study.

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device that’s supposed to be sold as mass market, you can hear it in the voice of Cabe
Johnson, this other narrator that comes in um in the game who is very much
capitalistically driven. He is very much focused on making money… the writing is so
funny and in the at the end of the day…when you're solving puzzles, some of it is
because you want to get at an answer um but also you're doing it because you want to
hear the next joke and it's something I really like because it’s a game about finding little
bits of joy in this thing that was made for capitalistic intent and that is cold and
unfeeling… I like the idea of finding joy in those very dire situations.
Analyzing play as slippage in the capitalist system, Nathann compared his experience of playing
Portal 2 to the playful comedic slippages workers create to cope and resist everyday life on the
clock. Treating work like a puzzle, a game, or a joke is one way that working people use play to
bend the cold clock time of capitalist productivity, to express capacities for joy even when
everyday life requires facing a future that feels like crashing into a wall. In this sense, Nathann’s
phenomenology of bending spacetime is closely related to his vision of the future as a wall or a
swerve discussed in theme 2A.
RQ 2.2. How the Design of the Critical Game Jam Supported Afrofuturist Development
The Critical Game Jam supported Afrofuturist development in various ways. The
following sections describe how various prototyping activities, prompts, playtests, discussions,
and other activities supported the four Afrofuturist development themes discussed in this chapter.
Theme 2.2.A. How the Design of the Critical Game Jam Supported Critical Speculative
Imagination
The game jam supported critical speculative imagination in a variety of ways, from
playtesting to designing games. These activities cultivated a set of skills that Nathann identified
are most important for turning and facing the realities of the 21
st
century: “even though we can’t
fix everything right now—we can only fix what we can fix—we can still try to be happy. And
trying to not ignore the world, um, but still be able to like it even though there’s so much horrible

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stuff in it all the time.” They said these skills are crucial in order to swerve away from “the wall”
of climate catastrophe and racism. In their post- video they noted:
I think, because of the critical game jam sessions, being able to talk with all those
people
11
, I think we’re going to get past—we’re—I think-I think we’re gonna turn on
time. What I also think is that we’re going to have more walls. I don’t think there’s ever
going to be a point where there isn’t a wall we’ll have to turn from and then turn from
again and then turn from again. I think there’s always going to be something, um, that
we’ll have to deal with. That revelation is going to keep happening forever.
Participants in the game jam learned skills that prepare for this constant iterative swerving into
unknown futures, through two additional subthemes: a) prototyping liberated futures and b)
rehearsing for revolution. The following sections describe each of these.
Prototyping Liberated Futures
In my memos and reflections while organizing the game jam, I began to call our designs
“prototopian” because we focused on prototyping liberated futures rather than relying on existing
dystopian or utopian genre conventions. For example, Olivia and I shared Kai UnEarthed with
participants as an imperfect, unfinished prototype of a liberated but incomplete future. This
process was prototopian in both form (the game as an open work that players can help finish) and
content (the game’s narrative, rituals, and worldbuilding about leaping into an unknown future).
Participants described how this approach helped them imagine futures where Black and
LGBTQIA+ people can thrive.
Because Olivia and I were modeling how to do critical playcentric game design (as
described in Chapter Four), we invited participants to playtest a prototype of the game that was

11
He said this realization was also influenced by attending an Annapurna Games showcase and following
media coverage of the walkouts against worker exploitation and sexual harassment at Activision-Blizzard, one of the
largest game studios in California.

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intentionally incomplete so that we can incorporate their feedback as we complete it, in the hope
that they will learn to do the same thing with their own prototypes of Afrofuturistic game-worlds.
Also, consistent with Nathann’s emphasis on choosing to find joy in what we can actually do
now, we chose to share an imperfect prototype to demonstrate to participants that their
imagination of the future does not need to be fully polished before they begin to take
collaborative action to model, simulate, or build a part of their desired future right now. Olivia
intentionally described our design process in ways that would encourage people to overcome
perfectionism and to begin prototyping their dreams (which is what they also did with AI tools
when they made their Academy-Award-Winning film Against Reality). As described in our
Speculative Pedagogies book chapter (Coopilton et al., in press), we designed Kai UnEarthed as
an open work (Eco, 1989) and an open-source cinematic universe, inviting participants in the
game jam to add to the game-world through the game’s analog journal, and to imagine their own
stories and games set in its world. As playtest findings reported in Chapter Four show,
participants did extend the game through the journal and this helped several of them feel like
their decisions matter. With the exception of Gabriel’s mod of Uno that informed his prototype
of Feat (also discussed in Chapter Four), participants did not choose to prototype games set in
the same world as Kai UnEarthed, though several of them did brainstorm such games (discussed
later in this chapter).
Kai UnEarthed embodies prototopian critical speculative imagination in its content as
well, which is the focus of this section. The world of the wildtenders is neither utopian nor
dystopian; it is a liberated future that is still growing and developing. It is a world where Black
people are thriving, but it still has conflict and trauma that must be addressed. Participants
recognized and appreciated this prototopian approach as they interacted with Kai UnEarthed. For

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example, although Cam is usually a fan of dystopian framings, they recognized the game departs
from these, and they found this refreshing: “like oh hi! Like the world is not contingent upon
anti-Blackness on like capitalism and how it functions. So, I think the framing of this is like
really good.” Nathann said “one thing that I like is that it tows the line between utopia and
dystopia,” in contrast to most of the media about the future they have seen which is “steeped in
dystopia.” As a game design student, Nathann recognized that dystopian stories are dominant
partially because of storytelling genre conventions: “imagining a utopia is almost like it feels
naive to make something like that” because “media is usually about conflict. Um, and usually
that ends up things looking like dystopias.” He recognized that Kai UnEarthed does involve a
narrative with conflict between Kai and their parent Mars over whether to do the wildtender
ceremony. But he appreciated seeing Black characters facing interpersonal conflict with support
and dignity rather than having to fight anti-Blackness in the future: “It still felt like that even
though there were problems being faced especially with Mars…it still felt like a good thing to be
engaging with these the post-arachnids, engaged with the class, engaging with myself and my
ancestors, connecting with myself, drawing on my hand.”
Nathann enjoyed how the game prompted him to leave marks on his hand and in his
notebook, creating “this thing that lasts after the game is over.” This got him interested in
designing game mechanics that prompt “the player, themselves, creating some sort of ideal
future or creating something from their own imagination that plays into whatever other systems
are involved in the game.” This re-thinking of endings echoes Nathann’s view that history will
never end, that we need to prepare to constantly swerve since there will always be more walls.
Jomih said that playing Kai UnEarthed gave them hope and a sense of open-ended
becoming. They preferred meditative open world games with no grind and fewer objectives, and

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they intended to build such a game to support LGBTQIA+ Black people in finding joy, peace,
and exploration. Playing Kai UnEarthed helped them imagine a future world where these kinds
of player experience goals are everyday lived realities for their descendants. They described the
game as “a lot of peace. I feel like a lot of the sci-fi movies that I see…a lot of it is focused on
apocalypse and end of the world um and there's not really much peace.” In contrast, they felt like
Kai UnEarthed “wasn’t the end of the world. I felt like it was the beginning of a new world.”
After they finished the playtest, Jomih and KB had an impromptu conversation about how the
dominance of dystopian media fuels despair and inaction, similar to Nathann’s point about social
media fueling procrastination. Jomih said “I feel like there’s like a lot of like lack of hope right
now… before like playing the game, I definitely felt like there was like almost no hope. And I, I
felt like now like after playing there’s like a glimpse of something like we can probably still
create something.” They said: “if this was real, I feel like I would be very happy. I feel like I’m
peeking in to the future and getting a glimpse on what might happen. And I'm like that's exactly
what I wanted.” The experience they are describing is an example of how the game jam
supported prototopian critical speculative imagination. Jomih also said:
I kind of feel like motivated to actually create a um better future…this game inspired me
to view it differently [from apocalyptic media] and to actually act different um ‘cause it I
feel like it reminded me that there's different types of media and there different types of
inspirations behind how people lead their life. And I'm like this can definitely be one of
the inspirations behind how I lead my life.
In this sense, engaging in critical speculative imagination supported Jomih in developing critical
consciousness: a sense that their actions matter and they can shape the future. This is an example
of a core premise of Afrofuturist Development Theory: that young Black people can use media
and technology to prototype futures where they can thrive.
Mims made a prototopian design choice similar to what we did with Kai UnEarthed.
When she playtested the Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game, she said “people are not

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creating a utopia or a dystopia, um, we're encouraging them to create a real community with
conflict, grief, and challenges. Um, obviously creating a community where folks of all races,
ethnicities, genders, sexualities, body types and abilities can thrive.” Other sections of this
dissertation demonstrate how players experienced her prototype.
Rehearsing For Revolution
In addition to prototyping liberated futures, participants also imagined and began to
create games that can help people rehearse and practice the skills needed to build and fight for
these futures.
Cam spoke about countering far-right attacks on Black people, e.g., bans on teaching
Critical Race Theory; they wanted themself and their descendants to “have the tools they need to
be able to fight [this] resistance uh or to be able to fight to create resistance for themselves.” As
mentioned above, Cam anticipated that resistance to anti-Blackness is likely to be revolutionary,
so in the game pitch and feedback session at the end of Level One they proposed a game that
would allow people to roleplay as revolutionaries in order to practice the skills needed to fight
for Black liberation. They said:
I'm particularly interested in, like, a world in, like—that, like, the Black
Panthers…necessarily talk about, like, a world in which, like, the State does not exist.
And so, basically, I'm kinda—just kind of envisioning kind of thinking about sketching
out, um, a game in which, like, the whole purpose of it is to, I guess, like, bring about,
like, the end to, like, the nation state, like, as we know it and stuff like that and, like, a
revolutionary, um, type of setting.
They wanted the game to involve “conscious conversations, like, about race, um, and, like, anti-
Blackness and how that also filters also things like misogynoir, um, like, and transphobia and
stuff like that.” Participants gave Cam feedback on how they could design game mechanics to
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Light Bird also imagined and pitched a game that involves rehearsing key community
organizing skills. A component of it would involve training people to identify their biases, and
they imagined using it to train teachers, clinicians, and staff in schools. Another component
would be focused on “the idea of transformative justice” which means “to hold people
accountable to their actions, um, using systems beyond the state and to end, um, like, all forms of
harm, that that's the ultimate goal is to end harm.” They said that “obviously, there's, like, a
transformative justice lens in Kai UnEarthed that I really appreciated” and they wanted to build
their own game focused on practicing the skills needed to enact transformative justice. Jomih
said that they liked this idea of gaming in the workplace and other participants helped Light Bird
imagine how the game could involve site-specific augmented reality mechanics.
Madu created a playable prototype of an analog game with a goal for players to “rehearse
Black liberation or rehearse intra-community conflict” in a safe space. Mims and I playtested
their prototype in the Level Two session and gave them feedback. It is a role-playing game
where a game master describes a scenario, and each player plays as an archetypical character
with a particular personality trait such as always drawing from past experiences or always trying
to be diplomatic. We playtested several different scenarios, including one where we pretended to
be at a protest against police brutality; young Black protestors tagged graffiti on a Starbucks and
some of the other protestors disapproved and became hostile towards them. Playing the
facilitator (gamemaster) role, Madu generated time pressure and dramatic tension, pushing us to
make decisions quickly. Mims and my characters decided to intervene to deescalate the
opposition from the other protestors so they would not call the police on the crew of young
people, and they got away without getting arrested; they were grateful for our solidarity, but only
after we reassured them and demonstrated that we are not “the ops.” This scenario involved

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rehearsing affects, skills, and decisions that tend to come up in actual protests. As I was giving
Madu feedback, I told them that in the emerging Abolitionist Gaming Network we need more
games that support this kind of rehearsal for real-life scenarios. I described how it was similar to
abolitionist theater game nights we have been organizing. In response to this, Madu said “you’re
gassing me up,” and their body language became more confident. They said this feedback
encouraged them to playtest the game in the after-school program where they work at an urban
public school district in Southern California. I also asked Madu what it would look like to play
the game as archetypal characters in an Afrofuturistic setting, and they imagined a queer Black
character embodying polyamorous relationship dynamics, which they have never seen
represented in media. They said they wanted to have characters like this that they can model their
future life on, i.e., a way to model possible Afrofuturistic selves. Overall, their game prototype
provides ways to rehearse speculative political and ethical practices, simulating them in a lower-
stakes setting.
Theme 2.2.B. How the Design of the Critical Game Jam Supported Imagination of Unpoliced
Futures
During the Level Two playtest Madu said “in my experience trying to bring questions of
abolition to classroom, it’s about scaffolding - getting people to think about it when they’re not
thinking about it.” We designed Kai UnEarthed and the Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding
Game as scaffolding to nurture abolitionist imagination. During the Critical Game Jam,
playtesting both games supported participants in imagining unpoliced futures. Participants also
imagined their own abolitionist games.

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Abolitionist Playfield in Kai UnEarthed
As discussed in Chapter Three, Olivia, Claire and I designed Kai UnEarthed after
imagining together what games could be played in Abolition Playfield, the 3D world I built in
Unity based on the participatory design research I had done with colleagues and students in
Seattle, many of whom were formerly incarcerated. We had imagined what would replace the
youth jail in Seattle as we organized to abolish it, and Abolition Playfield was my attempt to
further prototype this vision using computational media. During the Critical Game Jam playtest
of Kai UnEarthed, players generally reacted positively to scenes of the game set in Abolition
Playfield. For example, Light Bird said “Awe. That’s beautiful!” when Sol (Kai and Tempest’s
teacher) stood in front of post-arachnid webs, grass, and trees covering the ruins of the jail and
said “Now we've started to make sense of what our ancestors suffered. They fought to abolish
places like this and the police who ran them." When Kirsten asked Light Bird to elaborate on
their reaction, they said they thought it was beautiful that “the spot used to have like the trauma
there and that the Earth had just grown over it eventually.”
Before participants playtested Kai UnEarthed, I showed them a screenshot of Abolition
Playfield and asked them what games they could imagine might be played there in a “liberated,
unpoliced future"? (I clarified that the sign on the hill of the playfield reads “Play for your
ancestors who weren’t allowed to.”) Participants responded in the shared prompts document. For
example, Olivia imagined “a game wherein you, take turns, brick by brick taking apart a
symbolic jail building and, as a group use those bricks to design a new structure.” Future critical
game jams could prototype this game in Minecraft. Madu wrote “I don’t know what it looks like
to truly rest - so something with that.” They reflected back on this moment in their post-video,
saying “there's a lot of things that-that it brought up in terms of thinking about, um, just what

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could the future look like. I mean, that was the whole point. And seeing how everyone
imagines... like, moments of joy and things like that.”
Prototyping an Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game
Mims’ design goal with the abolitionist worldbuilding game was to support players in
developing critical consciousness and practical everyday actions they can take to move toward
abolitionism. Mims described why she started making the game:
The last project I had worked on was Jail Bed Drop and there's a part of the installation
that's interactive in various different ways, and it was one of my favorite parts of the
project. So, I wanted to figure out how to create something that facilitated conversation in
an interesting way. Um, and for me, always thinking about abolition, I was, like, what,
you know, what part of abolition do I want to work on now? And so, I was thinking about
dreaming and our imagination space, um, and so, I was like, oh, play would be a beautiful
tool to kinda do that in. So that's how the game came about.
The game’s guidelines are informed by abolitionist politics and ethics: “You are not creating a
community that has a government, court, legal system, police, prisons, carceral institutions, or
military. It is not situated within a nation state… Nothing in nature is disposable, no one in your
community is disposable.”
After the Critical Game Jam Level One session, I began to support Mims with
redesigning the game based on the playtest feedback from the game jam. We engaged in a
process of rapid prototyping, implementing new features and playtesting them with various
player groups to refine them (she led the playtests and I supported when I could). In particular,
she playtested it inside of NORCO prison. Because that playtest was not covered by the IRB for
this study, I did not analyze it as data, but in the Level Two session, Mims described her
experiences organizing it, and I analyzed the transcript. In particular, she noted that the game
supported people in imagining rituals that would be done in their unpoliced future communities,
and to enact these together in real time:

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The dances that we did inside of the prison were amazing. People were, you know, doing
like grief and death ritual dances…people did welcoming dances…and people really had
a good time and had fun. Um, and what I really appreciated was the range of emotions
and conversations that were being had. There were moments where people were
laughing. There were moments where people were angry. There were moments where
people were vulnerable. Um, so it just was a really wide array of, um, things happening
throughout the creation process.
Mims’ creative process designing and playtesting this game demonstrates that critical playcentric
design methods (see Chapter Four) can support a design process around abolitionist speculative
imagination as an intended player experience goal and critical design practice. Game jam
participants’ experiences playtesting the game are discussed further in other sections of this
chapter and in Chapter Four.
Theme 2.2.C. How the Design of the Critical Game Jam Supported Afrofuturist Climate
Justice Imagination and Prototyping
The Critical Game Jam supported an Afrofuturist development approach to climate
change by supporting participants in imagining and prototyping visions of the future
characterized by Black liberation and non-dominating relationships between human and more-
than-human beings. It did this through the prototyping and playtesting processes around Kai
UnEarthed and the Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game, and through Michelle’s character
creation mood-boarding activity.
When we prototyped Kai UnEarthed together, Olivia and my thoughts and feelings
around climate change and Black liberation were interwoven, so it was a learning experience for
us to see and hear the cohort of young adults engage with the ecological themes embedded in the
game world. Jomih summarized their experience with our prototype: “I felt…the goal was to like
connect back to nature and connect back to the world that was kinda taken from, I’m assuming,
Black people.” Cam also made a connection between Black liberation and climate justice while
playtesting the prototype: “I’ve never been like ‘oh climate change is not happening’ but like

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now I’m like “oh, actually these are all the ways anti-Blackness actually really makes climate
change a lot worse.” They said that playing Kai UnEarthed helped them “reorient the ways I
want to think about the future. Something I think about, but it’s not in the forefront when I think
about Black liberation is the specific tie in to the environment.” Cam had not made this
connection earlier because the mainstream environmentalist movement has been dominated by
white people. They said: “I just get really [they gestured suggesting frustration] with climate
activists and the whole environmental movement because it’s like very white.” They reflected
that they were surprised to engage with a science fiction world that is not premised on anti-
Blackness and is also healing from climate change; it made them think about “the relationship
between the environment and anti-Blackness, and how anti-Blackness structures the Earth and
the resources of the Earth and I guess this specific focus on animals.” Applying their
afropessimist lens, Cam recognized that Kai UnEarthed’s post-humanism challenges the binary
between humans and animals; in fact, it challenges capitalist ideologies of humanity (i.e., the
idea that humans are separate from and above nature); throughout the game jam, Cam argued this
notion of humanity is premised on the domination of Blackness, and during the playtest they
were able to link this critique to a positive vision of climate justice and Black ecological thrival.
Mims came to similar conclusions after prototyping, playtesting, redesigning, and re-
playtesting the Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game across the two levels of the game jam.
The iteration they playtested in Level Two includes a quote from Nigerian philosopher Bayo
Akomolafe:
What we rudely call "nature" today does not even have a name in Yoruba culture,
because there was no distinction between us and the goings - on around us. The Yoruba
religion of Ifa sees a ‘vitality’ in the non-human world. Mountains could be consulted,
trees could have privileges.

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Much of the scaffolding that Mims and I added to the second iteration of the game (in response
to feedback on the first) was an attempt to facilitate an experience of ecological interrelatedness
that is not dependent on a human vs. nature binary. The game’s procedural rhetoric is a mix
between card- based divination practices and collaborative tabletop worldbuilding games like A
Quiet Year. The game facilitates procedural worldbuilding by combining variables into emergent
patterns, prompting players to create meaningful worlds out of the cards they are dealt. In the
new iteration, players choose cards that situate their unpoliced worlds within a specific biome,
and they must design their worlds based on the constraints and affordances of their
interrelatedness with that ecosystem.
Players then chose adaptation cards that allow their communities to thrive in ways that
are analogous to how other species thrive, gesturing towards symbiosis (e.g., they might share
information and nourishment like mycorrhizal networks). The instructions specify that “the
species that originally evolved the adaptation you’re looking at might not live in your biome -
you’re not necessarily moving to its biome, you’re just taking inspiration from it for how you’d
live in your biome.” The range of combinations between these two variables opens up multiple
possibilities of worldbuilding and storytelling which Mims and I have observed together through
many playtests of the game in many different sociocultural settings around the world. In the
Level Two playtest, Madu used the cards to imagine a ritual that could help them develop a
better relationship with water (while wearing a “Remember Flint” t-shirt). In this way, the game
helps people prototype and envision futures that Mims describe as “interdependence with all of
the species, and, um, just greater reverence for all of the species and people that are here. Um,
and I think that also inherently improves race relations when-when you understand, um, that you
are not a-a singular individual, but everything is interconnected.”

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The game jam also supported participants in imagining climate justice through
scaffolding a convergence of Afrofuturism and Solarpunk in the game prototyping and
worldbuilding process. Solarpunk is an aesthetic and artistic/activist movement focused on
imagining future societies powered by the sun rather than fossil fuels. While we were making
Kai UnEarthed, Olivia and I learned about Solarpunk and interpreted it as an ecological version
of punk values: collaborating on imperfect DIY prototypes of future forms of life we wish to
inhabit and experience a taste of now. This validated our design process and encouraged us to
prototype an Afrofuturistic world that is healing from climate change; the wildtenders in the
game want “as much sunlight to pass through as much living carbon as possible, in as many
diverse ways as possible.”
Similarly, in response to Michelle’s critical character design ideation prompts, Light Bird
created a mood board for a future character who is a “street doctor” and “grower” of plant
medicines, running an urban farm in a building with wind turbines and other industrial measures
to protect the plants from the extremes of climate change (see Figure Five). Their jamboard
included the text “Abolition is the only answer” next to Afrofuturistic images. Michelle said it
reminded them of Solarpunk; they and Light Bird agreed the world they are prototyping was
“not, like dystopian or utopian. It’s just like ‘hey the environment is so up and down’”; Light
Bird said this approach was shaped by their experiences adapting to biomes such as the Sonoran
Desert. They argued that “using the virtual as a way to prepare ourselves for extremes, uh, seems
prudent.” They used virtual tools, including game design and worldbuilding, to brainstorm
practical sustainability practices our communities can use to survive climate change.

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Figure 5
Light Bird’s Worldbuilding

Inspired by this interaction, Jomih, Gabriel, Olivia, and I followed up on this interest in
Solarpunk in our group reflections. Jomih shared how Light Bird’s worldbuilding was informing
how they used the Sims 4 Eco Lifestyle pack to prototype characters for the game they wanted to
make. Connecting this game literacy with print literacy, Olivia shared the Solarpunk anthology
Sunvault, I shared the book Weight of Light, and Gabriel found an anthology in Portuguese about
Solarpunk in Brazil. Then Olivia and I gave an impromptu design talk on how Solarpunk gave us
a way to name our design process as we made Kai UnEarthed. In his final reflection a year and a
half later, Gabriel mentioned that learning about Solarpunk was one of the highlights of the game
jam; he said “it's something that I’m really into right now. Like it is my kind of fictional or you
know, wishing for the future.” He interwove these ecological wishes with his “materialist” and
“revolutionary” anti-capitalist vision for the future, and the practical actions he is taking to make
this vision real as a critical educator and activist.

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Theme 2.2.D. How the Design of the Critical Game Jam Supported Experiences of
Afrofuturistic Temporalities
“We are here to bend space and time this week. I wanted to remind you of your power to
do so,” said Dr. Tynes, while smiling. This moment functioned like an opening ceremony for the
game jam. Dr. Tynes invoked “Rasheedah Phillips' theory of Black Quantum Futurism, which
argues that we can manipulate spacetime in order to see into possible futures and/or collapse
spacetime into a desired future in order to bring about the future's reality.” Soon after, I
facilitated an activity where we wrote down our shared affinities and passions and decided on
group agreements for the affinity space we were building together. When I asked what values
people wanted to prioritize, Light Bird responded:
You can think about time like, um, minutes, seconds, hours, units of time. And then you
can also think about, um, the passage of time, eh, like, temporality, which would be the
experience of, um, your experience, like, in spacetime and what that feels like. So given
what, um, Dr. Tynes was saying about, uh, how—I-I wrote—that we're ‘here to bend
space and time this week’, um, I'm thinking ’bout how one of my values is that I value,
um, temporality more than time. So, like, I value how I experience time more than how
much time actual-actually passes, um, which I think is, like, a good way to-to talk about,
like, what you really can learn from being, like, in a game, um, because it's not
comparable to how you move through—or at least how I, like, move through the facets of
life that, like, I have—the things I have to get done every day…I value my experience of
time, or I value temporality more than, um, what the clock says.
Olivia, Nathann, Cecilia, Jomih, and Cam all responded enthusiastically in the chat saying that
they share this experience goal; Cecilia said “As somebody w ADHD…. who also functions on
Mexican time …. Yes lol.” Cam summarized the emerging collective affinity as “Experiencing
time vs. resource capitalistic notions of time,” and I copied that into the group agreements,
signaling our intention to experience this quality of time together.
Nathann highlighted how this emergent theme can be enacted as an Afrofuturistic
approach to game design:

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Like Light Bird mentioned, with Dr Tynes talking about spacetime and
Afrofuturism…we’re trying to imagine futures like it’s a separate thing, separate from us
and where we are now, and then being like, able to condense that down and bend
spacetime so that we can imagine what it’d be like if we had to make a game right now,
it’s sort of like picking and plucking those things we can do to try to create those kinds of
worlds… things we would imagine in that perfect or ideal scenario, and then seeing how
far we can actually get in this moment.
Putting Light Bird, Cam, and Nathann’s ideas together, it seems that Afrofuturistic critical
imagination (prototyping and rehearsing liberated Afrofutures) is linked to the experience of
critically suspending the “resource capitalistic notions of time” that structure our daily lives. In
order to create space and time to imagine future Black thrival as a liberated zone beyond the
limits of the current white supremacist system, the Critical Game Jam participants exerted their
collective power to bend their experience of spacetime. This is similar to how game designers
attempt to prompt altered spatiotemporal experiences among players. They attempted to suspend
the cold rationality of capitalist clock time in order to share an experience of Afrofuturistic
quality time, what Light Bird calls “temporality.” Nathann linked this experience to the
prototopian aspects of critical speculative imagination discussed in Theme 2.1A and 2.2A;
prototyping liberated futures does not require a sense of lack in relation to a desired ideal; it does
involve noticing ones’ desires for liberation, moving toward them, and “seeing how far we can
get.” This is analogous to the sense of facing an unknown future that happens when one designs
a game and shares it with players who are likely to play it in unpredictable ways.
The theme of bending spacetime continued throughout the game jam. For example,
several participants brainstormed or designed games intended to support Black and queer people
in experiencing joy, rest, exploration, and just being their whole selves without having to meet
external objectives and expectations. Gabriel brainstormed a game about bending spacetime
based on the Quilombos, the communities of enslaved people in Brazil who escaped and built

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autonomous camps at war with the plantations (similar to the maroons in the Caribbean and parts
of the U.S.):
It got me thinking in a game like Banished. What if we could run and escape through a
portal and build a new settlement. But in a new world, maybe escape to the future, maybe
build some kind of Wakanda. Then send back expeditions and save our brothers without
violence. In Banished you’re only focused on building your society for balance, without
militarization. In that game could have a building like a museum where they teach about
the history of Black and Latinxs people. Even the buildings could be aesthetically
different, inspired in Afrofuturism.
This design vision links the experience of bending spacetime to the Black liberation traditions of
fugitivity, rebellion, abolitionism, and marronage/ autonomous commune-building that informed
several participants’ visions for the future.
Also, while playtesting the Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding game together, Cam and I
described worlds outside the heterosexist and colonial norms of capitalist productivity embedded
in mainstream education, parenting, and child development. Cam said “Western, like civilization,
culture, we’re like very obsessed with like the youth and like the future.” They said that focusing
on the future is not bad because the future is inevitable, but we agreed that this often becomes a
heterosexist ideology of progress, where adults are expected to sacrifice their lives through
capitalist overwork in order to uplift the “Child of the Future” who will supposedly live a better
life than us, but in the process end up reproducing a society that harms actually existing children
and adults. Cam said that this ideology of linear and productive development is also “the thesis
of like colonialism and like imperialism in other countries, is the idea that you’re gonna civilize
these people, and like, you know, make them, the quote un quote like ‘better’ and stuff like that.”
As we deliberated about the decision-making processes in our imagined unpoliced future
world together, Cam reiterated the need to bend spacetime to break out of these ideologies:
Yeah, thinking about like even Light Bird… what they had said about thinking about
time is experiential and time is like a unit in like measurement and stuff like that. Like
that all ties back into this idea that it ha—time has to be something that is like linear,

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stable, productive and moving in a certain sort of direction, other than time can be like
pleasurable, experiential, and something that happens, um, in and out. Like it’s not just
like one static specific thing.
This conversation highlights how bending spacetime means making it not straight. It could mean
queering one’s life trajectory: choosing to experience queer Afrofuturistic temporalities instead
of following a predetermined heterosexist script for what normative developmental milestones
(e.g., career and family life) are supposed to be and how they are supposed to be achieved and
measured.
RQ 2.3. How Future Learning Environments Can Better Support Afrofuturist
Development
While this pilot study demonstrates how one can support the Afrofuturist development
thematized in this chapter, these themes could be developed further in future critical game jams,
related critical game literacy learning environments, and other learning environments beyond
gaming. The following sections describe how his might/should be done. These future directions
for research and design are based on analyses of participants’ expressed desires for additional
learning, combined with my own assessments of what was missing in the first iteration of the
game jam.

Theme 2.3.A. How Future Learning Environments Can Better Support Critical Speculative
Imagination
Future learning environments can better support critical speculative imagination by
allotting more time and space toward playing and designing games that help people rehearse for
Black liberation. While this was definitely a theme in this first iteration of the Critical Game
Jam, it was overshadowed by the amount of time we spent on prototyping liberated futures. In

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the future there should be more scaffolding and discussion about the rehearsal side as well so that
people are not only able to imagine Black liberation but are also learning how to enact it in real
life.
Theme 2.3.B. How Future Learning Environments Can Better Support Abolitionist
Imagination
Future critical game jams can support abolitionist imagination by incorporating more
brainstorming and critical prototyping around issues of surveillance. I remained critically aware
of potential surveillance as we designed the game jam and the research methods, and this shaped
the study; for example, I intentionally chose not to collect data on certain aspects of the overall
participatory design research process I have been in for ten years because of risks of surveillance.
However, I did not share this thought process with participants, and we never had a shared and
scaffolded conversation about how to address these kinds of surveillance problems. This should
be done in future game jams, perhaps as exploration of a theme of building refuges from
surveillance, and learning social and technical practices involved with that kind of
worldbuilding.
Ideally, future projects could be conducted on reliable, user-friendly encrypted platforms
that are immune to police and right-wing surveillance so that people would feel free to speak
freely, but such platforms have not been widely proliferated yet. Until that happens, designers
will have to balance the accessibility that comes from using platforms that are familiar to people
(like Zoom and Google docs) with the surveillance baked into these tools. If designers do choose
to use these tools, they should scaffold more metacognitive discussions about their affordances
and limits in terms of data security and privacy. Also, future game jams could prompt
participants to prototype forms of moderation in games that do not involve policing and

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surveillance, building on Jomih’s vision described above. This is discussed further in Chapter
Six.
Theme 2.3.C. How Future Learning Environments Can Better Support Afrofuturist Climate
Justice Prototyping
The theme of climate justice, Solarpunk, and ecology was inductive, initiated by us as a
group through unplanned resonances. Surely, it was intentionally embedded in Kai UnEarthed as
a participatory-design research artifact, informed by a wide range of literature and theory.
However, it was not central to our research questions and protocols for the overall Critical Game
Jam pilot study, so we did not ask people detailed follow up questions about their thinking
around it, either in the playtests or the post-videos. Future iterations of participatory design
research on Afrofuturist critical game jams should make more space for these themes in the
framing of game jam design challenges, the formulation of research questions, the design of
game jams’ scaffolding, the study’s design conjecture mapping, and the research protocols used
to study learning. Chapter Six describes how I intend to apply this theme as a design principle
informing an Afrofuturistic climate justice game jam I am planning.

Theme 2.3.D. What Could be Done Differently to Better Attune to Afrofuturistic Temporalities
in the Future
Two main things could be done differently in the future to better support these
experiences of Afrofuturistic temporalities and bending spacetime. Future game jams should be
longer so there is more time for participants to experience temporalities without having to move
onto the next activity based on a clock-timed agenda. Also, the alignment between scaffolding,

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learning objectives, assessments, and research measures should be re-designed, with a better
balance between open-ended becoming and the pursuit of learning objectives.
Multiple participants suggested that future critical game jams should be longer and more
spacious in terms of pacing. For example, Reginald said “It would’ve been nice to be in the
group a little bit longer, since in general, I don’t tend to be as outspoken with, uh, people I’m not
super familiar with.” Similarly, Jomih said that the time constraints for breakout room activities:
Didn’t give us enough, like, I guess, space and time to think. I wish we had, like, more
time to think to ourselves and then maybe breakout into those rooms…Um, and maybe
that's, like, a accessibility thing, um, allowing me to, like, take in and process everything
and then come together with everyone.
They also suggested spacing out the workshops so there would be days in between each one to
reflect and imagine. These suggestions are similar to a flipped classroom model I had begun to
plan in my memos, and we did provide asynchronous prompts for people to reflect outside of the
game jam and then share their ideas during synchronous sessions. However, I was hesitant to
design too many asynchronous activities between sessions given the context of the pandemic
restrictions lifting during the summer of 2021; I thought participants’ attention might be drawn
toward outside activities reopening, and in their post reflections, many of the participants did say
their time was stretched between the game jam and other activities, which made it hard to
participate asynchronously outside of the workshops. Nevertheless, Jomih and Nathann both
recommended moving further in a flipped classroom direction next time, and that might be easier
to do now that the COVID lockdowns are further in the past. Overall, having more time could
offer more opportunities for improvisation, flexibility, community building, and experiencing a
sense of temporality together.
Future Afrofuturist game jams should also better integrate and balance scaffolding
aligned toward objectives with scaffolding that holds space for experiencing time as

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temporalities, i.e., for open-ended and improvisational imagination, or mediated immediacy. This
first iteration had a mix of these two kinds of scaffolding. One the one hand, the narratives,
worldbuilding, and game mechanics of Kai UnEarthed and the Untitled Abolitionist
Worldbuilding Game both aimed to scaffold Afrofuturistic experiences of multiversal
temporalities, or journeying into multiple unknown futures. As Mims wrote in the worldbuilding
game’s guidelines, “This is not destination-oriented dreaming. The world is always becoming.
There are no right or wrong answers! This is a play space. Honor the gray areas/nuances/the
middle.” On the other hand, the study’s conjecture map (see Chapter 3) includes specific desired
learning outcomes like critical game design and deepened critical consciousness, and many of
the learning activities were designed to scaffold learning toward these goals. We measured how
people learned these constructs with the pre- and post-videos and questionnaires/assessment
tasks. Future game jams should combine these two kinds of scaffolding more intentionally, with
more space overall for playful objectiveless imagining. Tuning this balance feels similar to
tuning a balance between objectives and open exploration when designing open-world game
mechanics like I did when I co-designed Lofi Hip Hop Worlds to Study In. Chapter Six includes
ideas for how the study’s research methods can be re-thought to better support such a re-
designed learning environment.
Conclusion
Overall, participants in the Critical Game Jam engaged in Afrofuturist development by
deepening their critical speculative imagination, imagining unpoliced futures, prototyping
climate justice, and “bending spacetime.” They did this through playing, analyzing and designing
games focused on themes of abolitionism and Black liberation. This chapter is not an exhaustive
catalog of all of the ways that Afrofuturist development occurred during the Critical Game Jam,

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and future studies can focus on other aspects (e.g., the cultivation of Afrofuturistic selves, or
historical consciousness and freedom dreaming). Design principles based on the thematic
findings in this chapter are elaborated in Chapter Six, providing guidance for educators,
organizers, game designers, and researchers who may wish to build on these findings to design
future learning environments.

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Chapter Six: Discussion and Design Principles
This chapter discusses the findings presented in Chapters Four and Five. In the following
sections, I distill each of the themes presented in those chapters into a design principle that can
function as a heuristic guide for the design of future learning spaces featuring critical game
literacies and Afrofuturist development. After presenting each principle, I connect each one to
previous research and pedagogical literature, showing where the principles build on or diverge
from existing knowledge and practices in the fields of game studies, computational media, and
education. I then discuss how these principles can be applied together, identifying ways that
critical game literacies and Afrofuturist development might converge in future learning
environments. I conclude the chapter by naming limitations of the study and sketching future
directions for research.
Discussion of Findings on Critical Game Literacies Learning
This study found that an Afrofuturist Critical Game Jam was able to support young adults
in developing critical game literacy skills such as designing and playtesting games in ways that
challenge systemic oppression. The study found four themes, which coalesce patterns in
participants’ critical game literacy learning during the Critical Game Jam (listed in Chapter
Four). These themes, plus related literature, form the basis for the design principles elaborated
below: deepening and expanding critical consciousness through play and design (principle 1.1),
scaffolding critical playcentric game design methods (principle 1.2), prioritizing worldbuilding
as scaffolding for imagination and design (principle 1.3), and building gaming affinity spaces
around Black liberation (principle 1.4). These principles can be used to design future critical
game jams and critical game literacy learning environments.

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Design Principle 1.1: Deepening and Expanding Critical Consciousness Through Play and
Design
Future learning environments should support people in deepening and expanding their
critical consciousness through play and game design. Fostering critical consciousness means
going beyond using games as a communications medium to raise awareness or empathy about
social justice issues. It means playing and designing games in ways that deepen critical analyses
of systems of oppression, preparing to take action against them (Jemal, 2017). Building on
critical race digital literacy research (Tynes et al. 2021), this might mean challenging and
critiquing racism in gaming as a medium (Gray, 2020), and an industry (Woodcock, 2019), and
challenging the corporate platforms that currently control video games (Garcia and de Roock,
2021). But it also might mean playing and designing games in ways that deepen and expand the
strategic and tactical repertoires of movements for liberation more broadly, e.g., prototyping and
rehearsing strategies for Black liberation, abolitionism, and climate justice like we did during the
Critical Game Jam.
Many participants in this study were already activists before the game jam, but were
frustrated with the current state of movements and organizations they were a part of, and they
used their growing critical game literacies to reflect critically on these experiences. Most of them
ended the Critical Game Jam with a fresh perspective on how they might seek liberation in their
daily lives and organizing, and increased motivation to do so. This suggests that playful critical
speculative imagination might serve as a bridge between the critical analysis and critical action
components of critical consciousness that have been studied in previous literature (Jemal, 2017).
Nathann and other participants discussed how focusing too much on critical analysis without
action can be overwhelming, contributing to the sense of procrastination as humanity hurtles

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toward a future that feels like crashing into a wall. However, this problem cannot always be
solved by encouraging people to engage in more activism. Activism can be challenging and
draining, and opportunities to act in consequential, strategic, and liberating ways are not always
available. This is especially true in moments of movement lulls, like the time the Critical Game
Jam happened; large-scale movements for change like the George Floyd Uprising and
abolitionism had been repressed, internally divided, and coopted, people were exhausted and
grieving because of the pandemic, and social isolation made it hard to build the trust and
cohesion necessary to take risky actions. Most of the participants had taken critical action
recently, but were heartbroken, frustrated, exhausted, or traumatized by internal divisions within
movements and carceral repression (e.g., one of them was pathologized and nearly incarcerated
when they were labeled a radical by school administrators). As they coped with these challenges,
participants were trying to find new strategies, motivations, shared affects, etc. and they turned to
play and games to do this. I went through a similar process in 2014 when I began the
participatory design trajectory that led to this study; I turned to game design and designed Kai
UnEarthed to make sense of the demoralization and fragmentation of the first wave of the Black
Lives Matter movement in the wake of the Ferguson and Baltimore uprisings.
At that time, it suddenly became popular to be an activist influencer, and social media
algorithms began to encourage a certain kind of performative online activism while still
surveilling and fostering internal divisions among actually existing movements in the streets and
in our communities. In this study, Nathann critiqued the outcome of this development, saying
that the dominant social media algorithms generate some level of critical analysis of the
problems facing humanity without providing a vision of how to solve them. They promote a
certain type of critical imagination focused on anxiously perseverating about how social

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oppression affects us each personally and how the future could get worse. This develops our
imaginative capacities but also overwhelms us with anxiety and procrastination. Findings for this
study show ways that play and game design can support people in redirecting these imaginative
capacities towards prototyping and rehearsing strategies for collective liberation. In this sense,
the Critical Game Jam was adjacent to modes of pro-Black speculative online activism in gaming
(e.g., Cortez et al., 2022), but was not synonymous with them because the game jam cannot be
easily characterized as an activist project without reducing some of the nuances in participants’
experiences. More accurately, it was a space where activists could take breaks from activism by
seeking joy, rest, learning, and play, in ways that renewed their desire to take further action in
the future.
In that sense, the study’s findings are similar to Gray’s (2020) findings that Black gamers
built affinities with each other in gaming platforms while seeking rest from the algorithmically
amplified news of Black death permeating their social media timelines in the wake of the 2014
uprisings. Like the gamers in her study, participants in this one turned to critical game literacies
to find a sense of refuge. However, in both studies, this refuge cannot be reduced to race-evasive
escapism. In Gray’s study, the same participants simultaneously challenged racist gamers in
multiplayer games, defending both #BlackLivesMatter and the riots that were happening at the
time. In this study, participants similarly explored an affective and intellectual space somewhere
between refuge and fugitivity, which I began to name (ref)ugitivity during data analyses. They
found joy and rest while playing and prototyping games that imagined phenomena like Black
liberation insurrections, fugitive maroon societies, and communistic (re)fugitivity via free forms
of travel across borders. Most of them said they intended to take action in the future to make

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some aspect of these imagined futures happen, and some of them made games that help people
practice skills needed for such actions.
Past studies have analyzed how young people become historical actors through engaging
with gaming and metagaming (Gutiérrez, Becker, et al., 2019). This study also involved young
people producing possible futures through metagaming activities that treated video games as
open works (Eco, 1989). But in this case, they were not doing this by hacking or glitching
existing games. When they played Kai Unearthed, they did not break the game; instead, they
added to it and modified it through the journal and design prompts. Gutiérrez and colleagues
(2019) focused on young people glitching games and celebrated the breaking of constraints
because the particular constraints in their study were oppressive game mechanics baked into
digital games as closed corporate commodities rather than open modifiable works; the young
people in their studies became historical actors through challenging the game designers’
intentions and finding weaknesses in the software’s technocultural infrastructure (Boluk and
Lemieux, 2017). This process is an important component of critical game literacies, and was also
evident in this study, for example when participants discussed modding games to increase Black
representation, or when Madu discussed how to mod predominantly white institutions. However,
not all constraints are bad; constraints can also function as scaffolding for imagination and
playfulness (Bogost, 2016), and the rules of games should not always be equated with oppression
or carceral state control. They can also scaffold processes of imagining ways to challenge these
systems. In the Critical Game Jam, Kai UnEarthed provided constraints, asking people not to
imagine a dystopian future ruled by police, and to imagine something else instead. This study
shows what becomes possible when young people learn from a gaming and metagaming

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ecosystem with generative constraints that actually prompt them to produce possible futures,
rather than having to hack and mod games in order to do so.
Design Principle 1.2: Scaffolding Critical Playcentric Game Design Learning
Future learning environments can support critical game literacies by scaffolding
processes of critical game design learning, supporting people in learning to make games that
challenge systemic oppression. In particular, this study demonstrates the potential of teaching
and learning a critical playcentric design methodology: a version of playcentric design
(Fullerton, 2019) with player experience goals that challenge systemic oppression and attention
to designers’ and playtesters’ positionalities and sociocultural contexts.
Tracy Fullerton (2019) developed the playcentric design methodology, and this design
principle builds on her critical feminist interventions in the field of game studies. In her research
and teaching, she has challenged designers to facilitate experimental play experiences that can
reach non-dominant players rather than catering to unquestioned assumptions about what play
and fun mean that have been shaped by a historic but increasingly challenged hegemony of white
men in gaming (Fron et al., 2007). This study supplements the focus on diverse players in her
work by drawing attention to diverse designers’ own positionalities as well. Future curricula
informed by this study could support non-dominant (e.g., BIPOC and LGBTQIA+) designers in
creating games as forms of collective expression rather than catering to a presumed player base.
Game design learning environments can encourage designers to draw from their own
communities’ technological ingenuity and cultural strengths, as Afrofuturist Development
Theory advocates in relation to Black creativity and genius (Tynes et al., 2023). Playtesting such
games with a wide range of potential players is still important to ensure that the games are
playable and fun, but critical attention to designers’ sociocultural contexts is also important,

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especially when people are making games for themselves and their communities to play. Such an
approach could build on the work of the New Games movement, where the role of player and
game designer intentionally overlapped, and designers functioned as community organizers,
designing and re-designing games to suit the needs of their communities (DeKoven, 2013).
As Light Bird’s playtest of Kai UnEarthed shows, attention to positionality is especially
important when one is designing trauma-informed games that address issues of racism and
intersecting systems of oppression; this is true for user/player experience researchers as well as
game designers. The playtest was successful partially because the design researcher conducting
it, Kirsten Elliott, is a Black woman with expertise and experience supporting young Black
people’s development, and Light Bird felt witnessed by her when intense emotions came up for
them. Such expertise is important to ensure that the design and playtesting process can provide
insights designers can build on while also supporting playtesters in coping, healing, and resisting.
Without this expertise and context, playtesting a game with themes of racial trauma could cause
harm. Game design educators should be aware of these dynamics as they support their students
in prototyping games and organizing playtests, and professional designers and user experience
researchers should take them into account as they plan their research methods.
This study also fills a gap around critical design in the constructionist and connected
gaming research literature, which, for the most part, has not focused on using game design to
challenge racism or other systems of oppression (Kafai & Burke, 2015, 2016). At best, this
literature has focused on attempts to generate more inclusive cultures of computational
participation among people of color (Kafai & Burke, 2016); while this study’s findings
contribute to that goal, they also provide insights into how people learn while intentionally
making games to challenge systemic oppression. As Mirra and Garcia (2020) argue, researchers

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and practitioners who focus on the affordances of digital tools and raise concerns about
inequitable access to them often do not extend their analysis to ask whether these tools are being
used for social transformation and how learning environments can support such uses. This study
challenges and extends constructionist and connected gaming research by posing this question
and beginning to answer it.
In particular, the study diverges from one of the main studies that Kafai and Burke (2016)
cited when they discussed connected gaming among Black people. DiSalvo and colleagues
(2010, 2014) found that young Black men were not interested in designing games, so instead
they found that employing them as game testers provided a route toward greater computational
participation. Kafai and Burke (2016) note how that study’s findings challenge the assumption
that all young people are interested in gaming; they say that computer science educators need to
pay attention to what young people value, not just what they are interested in, and the young
Black men in the study valued getting paid. Certainly, it is important to compensate participants
for their labor; we did that in this study as well. Building on the literature and discussions with
colleagues who are professional game quality assurance testers, I also framed participation in the
study as learning to test games, which can be an entry point into game industry jobs, and I
offered to write participants letters of recommendation. However, we expressed our gratitude for
participants’ feedback and insights not just with paid compensation but also by sharing our
design skills with them and inviting them to make their own games. In contrast to the group of
young Black men in DiSalvo and colleagues’ study, this group of young Black men, women, and
non-binary people clearly expressed interest in developing as game designers, and valued aspects
of game design expertise, especially critical worldbuilding. This divergent outcome could be a
result of different samples and sociocultural contexts, or it might indicate a change in attitudes

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among young Black people in recent years as gaming has become more popular. Or, it could be
the case that the Black participants in this study valued critical game design in particular; it is
possible that making games about Black liberation provides a different level of motivation,
value, and interest, and could provide an alternative route toward computational participation and
growth in computational literacies.
Design Principle 1.3: Worldbuilding as Scaffolding
Future learning environments can support critical game literacies by prioritizing
worldbuilding activities, and situating them as scaffolding for people to learn other aspects of
game design, as well as other aspects of critical game literacies and Afrofuturist development. In
this study, several participants did not see themselves as game designers but did see themselves
as worldbuilders; through building worlds, they developed sophisticated game design skills. This
echoes our design process for Kai UnEarthed: Olivia, Claire, and I learned to develop an
abolitionist video game through imaginatively playing and telling stories together in the world
that I had built with my former students, friends, and colleagues during the movement in Seattle
to abolish youth incarceration. We studied how we had learned together as we made Kai
UnEarthed and we applied it as we designed the Critical Game Jam. Through that process we
supported people in making their own games that model and build liberated worlds -including
the Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game that also invites players to build their own
abolitionist worlds. Overall, the study was characterized by worlds scaffolding worldbuilding
scaffolding more worlds scaffolding more worldbuilding; the shape of its trajectory has been like
a fractal. This recursive and iterative process demonstrates the potential of worldbuilding as a
form of abolitionist and Afrofuturist speculative pedagogy (Coopilton et al., in press).

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Prioritizing worldbuilding could encourage critical game literacy learning activities that
resonate with decolonial movements. Many different decolonial projects and thinkers have
emphasized worldbuilding, worlding, and worldmaking. For example, in their attempts to
challenge colonial education systems, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico have been creating
learning spaces to imagine, build, and fight for a “world where many worlds fit” (EZLN, 1996;
Shenker, 2012). Inspired by the Zapatistas and Hawaiian decolonization struggles, the Academy
for Gameful and Immersive Learning Experiences is building a “multiversity” composed of
interconnected online virtual worlds that can support projects of decolonization and critical
imagination (About-AGILE, n.d.). The Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTec) research-
creation network has also built a series of interconnected online worlds and trans-media
narratives, with the goal of ensuring “Indigenous presence in the web pages, online
environments, video games, and virtual worlds that compose cyberspace” (Home, n.d.; Pullen,
2016) Similarly, in the Critical Game Jam, we encouraged participants to imagine multiple
possible future worlds on planet Earth and to imagine the ways they might relate to each other.
Scaffolding design skills through worldbuilding adds a new dimension to debates over
whether games are procedural systems (Bogot, 2007) or ideological worlds (Sicart, 2011; Squire,
2011), as conceptualized in Chapter One. In the Critical Game Jam, we treated games as worlds,
and I thought about them that way throughout this study. We used games as tools for surmising
the possibilities of different worlds, creating “niches in the real world” for them to inhabit (Gee,
2013, p. 153). This builds on D’Aveta’s (2020) study, which theorized that game designers and
players co-create projective worlds, and demonstrated how students did this through Minecraft
fantasy maps. In this current study, participants co-created projective worlds to model and
simulate liberated Afrofutures. In doing so, they went beyond Squire’s (2011) work prompting

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Black students to critically model oppressive dynamics like colonialism using gameworlds; in
this study, they created their own worlds expressing strategies for liberation.
At the same time, I observed sophisticated forms of procedural rhetoric and critical
discourse models (Gee and Aguilera, 2021; Proctor & Blikstein, 2019) in the design processes
that the game jam’s worldbuilding scaffolded. For example, the Untitled Abolitionist
Worldbuilding Game supported abolitionist critical speculative imagination through a variety of
procedural combinations of biome and adaptation cards that Mims, Madu and I consciously
treated as variables. Procedural rhetoric like this has been emphasized in the connected gaming
literature as one of the ways that game design learning can support computational thinking and
computer science education more broadly, because it involves forms of thinking that people also
use when they write code (Kafai & Burke, 2016). While this claim is supported by a robust
evidence base discussed in Chapter Two, overemphasizing this learning pathway risks reducing
games to systems in ways that strip them of their power and complexity as audiovisual (or even
haptic and embodied) computational media situated in broader sociocultural worlds (Sicart,
2011, Squire, 2011). This study suggests that worldbuilding can add one more layer of
sociocultural scaffolding to the learning process discussed in the computer science education
literature thus far: worldbuilding can lead to procedural rhetoric, which might lead to increased
computational participation. While this study did not involve teaching coding, future studies
could ask whether the knowledge of procedural systems generated through critical worldbuilding
can support learning to code.
Moreover, prioritizing worldbuilding as scaffolding connects the computational media
elements of game design with broader interdisciplinary research and pedagogies in the arts and
(post)humanities. Considered as a work of literature, this dissertation study did with games what

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Walidah Imarisha and adrienne mareee brown (2015) did with speculative fiction short story
writing: we invited people with activist backgrounds to generate speculative future worlds as a
way to thematize and narrate processes of social change. Worldbuilding is a key skill within the
craft of fiction writing and storytelling; this study’s findings show that using game design tools
to build worlds nurtures critical speculative imagination, which can be applied in activities such
as learning to write Afrofuturistic narratives. In particular, Kai UnEarthed, the Untitled
Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game, Madu’s roleplay game, and Gabriel’s Feat are all designed to
support players in generating emergent narratives out of simulated worlds. Applications of this
design principle in language and literacy teaching and research could build on Stephanie
Toliver’s work on Afrofuturism in language arts education (Toliver, 2021) as well as practices of
queer feminist speculative fabulation in literature education (Truman, 2018).
This design principle can also be applied within the fields of cinematic arts,
computational media, and media arts and practice. As described in our Speculative Pedagogies
Book chapter (Coopilton et al, in press), while designing Kai UnEarthed, Olivia and I adapted
methods from the Worldbuilding Media Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, which
conducts worldbuilding to support trans-media storytelling. The lab designs research-based,
detailed worlds before writing stories, constructing a “space for multiple stories to emerge
logically, organically and coherently from the coding” of the world (World Building Media Lab,
n.d., n.p.). Lab director Alex McDowell developed this method while working on the film
Minority Report; he co-designed the world of the film first, and elements of the storyline flowed
from it. This process also generated ideas for several new technologies (McDowell, 2015).
Similarly, we want Kai UnEarthed to be one among many possible stories that could emerge
from the future world that I imagined with my friends and former students, and participants in

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this study generated transmedia storytelling possibilities when they imagined games that could
be played at Abolition Playfield. While the Worldbuilding Media Lab mostly works with
corporate clients, Olivia, Claire, and I are applying similar methods from below and to the left in
our communities, creating an open-source UnEarthed fictional/cinematic universe that other
abolitionist designers, educators, and organizers can add to (Coopilton, et al., in press).
That being said, this worldbuilding-first design principle should be implemented in a way
that does not overshadow other aspects of game literacies. Centering worldbuilding too much
might limit other key aspects of narrative design such as relatable conflicts and relationships
among characters. As Olivia Peace and I discussed in the book chapter on our design process
(Coopilton et al., in press), Kai UnEarthed supplements critical worldbuilding with a focus on
relationships, mirroring young adult interactive fiction and queer dating simulator games;
Olivia’s expertise, having directed the adolescent coming-of-age film Tahara, helped us seek this
balance. The playtests of Kai UnEarthed in this study suggest we met this goal; participants said
they experienced a good balance between worldbuilding lore and plot. Future applications of
worldbuilding as scaffolding should similarly balance worldbuilding with other activities and
prompts supporting learners in designing characters and narratives.
Pedagogical applications of worldbuilding as scaffolding can build on findings from this
study as well as the Afrofuturist curriculum that Avi Lonny Brooks and Ian Pollock (2018)
developed for the Minority Reports 2054 Game Jam at California State University, East Bay.
Brooks and colleagues invited working class students to reimagine their social, media and digital
worlds, forecasting Afrofutures in the year 2054—the year McDowell imagined for Minority
Report. Students created games that generated stories of 2054 focused on Black futures. Their

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study and this one both demonstrate the pedagogical potentials of Afrofuturist game jams, and
the ways that critical worldbuilding can scaffold broader critical narrative design processes.
Design Principle 1.4: Building Affinity around Black liberation
Future critical game literacy learning environments should recognize the ways that Black
gamers are already building shared affinities around Black liberation (Gray, 2020) and should
aim to support and nurture such affinities through informal learning environments like game
jams, after school programs, online learning spaces, and, if possible, through school classes. This
study shows that it is possible to encourage the development of these affinities through a critical
game jam informed by Afrofuturist Development Theory.
Such an approach addresses some of the impasses that the field of games and learning
and broader research on connected learning affinity spaces has reached. Much of the most
prominent research around gaming and other affinity spaces in the early 2000s emphasized their
potential for cultivating new forms of learning and sociality, e.g., their participatory cultures
(Jenkins, 2006). For example, Gee (2013) said that his conception of affinity spaces was utopian,
describing an ideal form that seemed to be emerging from the actually existing practices he and
Elizabeth Hayes Gee studied, a form he thought transcended racial divisions in American
society. Such claims are hard to take seriously now at a moment where the internet has fully
revealed itself to be a racist battleground (Garcia & de Roock, 2021). Fascists and other white
supremacists are using online affinity spaces and videogaming platforms like Steam to recruit
and agitate people to violently attack Black and LGBTQIA+ people (Anonymous, 2023). In
response to these developments, it is tempting to swing from utopian toward dystopian
conclusions about youth digital media practices; as Gee said in his 2022 keynote address at the
Games, Learning, and Society conference, the world is ending. Mims, Roberto de Roock, Joel

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Lovos and I are currently theorizing the ways that this dissertation study’s findings challenge the
field’s earlier utopian framings as well as current dystopian ones. In a journal article we aim to
submit to Learning Sciences journals, we are arguing that affinity spaces, like game literacies
broadly, are neither inherently good nor inherently bad, and can be used for both oppressive and
liberating purposes. Building on Gray’s (2020) research on counter-publics among Black
gamers, this study demonstrates that it is possible to build affinity spaces around Black liberation
that serve as a refuge from white supremacist politics in gaming and society, and a space to
imagine ways to fight back. As discussed later in this chapter, this design principle can offer a
way to navigate the white supremacist threat in gaming without relying on carceral approaches to
surveillance and counter-terrorism.
Building affinity spaces around Black liberation challenges Gee’s (2013) assumption that
such spaces need to transcend racial identity categorizations. In the Critical Game Jam, Black
culture and vernacular literacies were explicitly prioritized, and the shared interests and passions
that constituted the affinity space included an unapologetic political commitment to movements
for Black liberation. However, it is important to note that these interests and passions were
shared not only among Black participants but also among non-Black participants in the game jam
(myself included), a year after Black people were able to mobilize millions of non-Black people
to take direct action against anti-Black policing in the summer of 2020. This is an expression of
the freedom dreams (Kelley, 2002) of intercommunal solidarity that the internationalist wing of
the Black liberation movement has continued to prototype (e.g., Fanon, 1967; James 1989). Also,
building an affinity space around Black liberation does not require reaching a monolithic
consensus around what Black identity and cultural authenticity should be. Game jam participants
expressed a generative tension over their strategies for Black liberation, with some advocating

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for and prototyping more humanizing representation of Black people in video games, and others
critiquing that agenda as assimilation into anti-Black ontologies and reified identity categories
that must be challenged.
Overall, participants were careful to avoid homogenizing discourses of Black
respectability politics that would require representatives of the Black community to contain
aspects of themselves that a carceral and anti-Black society deems to be too much or extra. This
attempt to move beyond respectability politics echoes Andre Brock’s (2020) critiques of
respectability policing on Black Twitter and Gray’s (2020) findings that Black lesbians sought
community on gaming platforms after having been excluded from Black identity-oriented
Facebook pages. Many of the Black participants in this study are queer and non-binary people,
so it makes sense that they challenged respectability discourses given these discourses’
association with heterosexist values (Brock, 2020). Conversely, by associating queer liberation
with Black liberation, participants challenged moves toward assimilation into white middle class
cultural politics pushed by mainstream gay, lesbian, and bisexual politicians, opting instead to
imagine and rehearse radical queer and Black futurities (Muñoz, 2019).
The first generation of social impact games, games for change, and serious games tended
to focus on proving that games are a respectable medium by using them to support learning in
already well-respected domains like the hard sciences (e.g., Squire, 2011). Now that several
decades of research have firmly established that digital games are more than just violent
distractions, it is well past the time when the field should be considering more politically
controversial forms of learning through gaming, e.g., learning that supports Black liberation,
queer liberation, and abolitionism. The following discussion and design principles related to
Afrofuturist development support this goal.

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Discussion of Findings on Afrofuturist Development
This study found that critical game literacy learning activities such as playing,
playtesting, analyzing, and designing games (Coopilton, 2022) can support aspects of
Afrofuturist development (Tynes et al., 2023). Published preliminary findings from this dataset
show that the Critical Game Jam’s combination “of iterative design practices, critical
consciousness, and Afrofuturist temporality demonstrates the potential of Afrofuturist
Development” (Tynes et al, 2023, p. 36). The current study adds rigor, nuance, breath, and depth
to that claim.
This study’s findings align with several of the principles of Afrofuturist development. In
particular, findings around Black participants’ critical speculative imagination of liberated
Afrofutures (in Chapter Five) show evidence of Afrofuturist development Principle Two:
“Contexts in which children and young people learn, play, and work center their full humanity,
as well as foster Black aliveness and innovations of speculative futures void of oppressions” (p.
9). This claim is supported by related themes from Chapter Four such as evidence that the game
jam functioned as an affinity space centering Black liberation, e.g., findings around how
participants expressed Black vernacular literacies as they designed games for their community.
Black participants also critiqued, brainstormed, prototyped, modded, and designed games
focused on Black liberation, abolitionism, and pro-Black visions of climate justice,
demonstrating Principle Ten: “Black children and young people, often powered by their
Afrofuturistic selves, imagine, build, and reinvent liberated, pro-Black futures and technologies”
(p. 10). This dissertation does not report findings around Afrofuturistic selves in particular,
though it was a deductive code in the reflexive thematic analysis and preliminary findings around

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it have been published (Tynes et al, 2023); future studies on this dataset can focus on it in more
depth.
Evidence that participants developed their critical speculative imagination (Chapter Five)
and critical consciousness (Chapter Four) over the course of the game jam demonstrates
Principle Five: “Critical consciousness and action are competencies taught in developmentally
appropriate ways to support Black people as they navigate and resist oppressive media,
technology, institutions and social practices” (p. 9). In the Afrofuturist Development Theory
book chapter, this principle frames critical speculative imagination as a component aspect of
critical consciousness. The current study’s findings do not necessarily challenge that framing; the
narration of critical speculative imagination in Chapter Five is closely related to the theme of
deepening and expanding critical consciousness in Chapter Four because the evidence of critical
speculative imagination in the Critical Game Jam remained closely linked to real-life movements
for Black liberation and participants’ reflections on their attempts to take critical action.
However, the findings in Chapter Five do show that critical speculative imagination
stands out as a distinct and important theme, and that designing for critical speculative
imagination should be prioritized as a relevant design principle, especially in sociohistorical
situations where critical consciousness alone is not enough to overcome despair. Participants
particularly valued aspects of Black liberation related to the abolition of police and prisons and
the pursuit of climate justice and ecological healing, so these should be centered in future
learning environments that aim to support Afrofuturist development. These findings -plus the
fact that the study has intensified my own involvement in abolitionist gaming organizing in
collaboration with several study participants - demonstrate how this kind of playful, speculative
design research can be consequential and relevant to Black liberation efforts more broadly. The

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study’s findings and related design principles could inform ongoing efforts toward developing
critical pedagogies in schools, community organizing efforts, and critical digital media learning
spaces, enhancing aspects of these pedagogies that hold space for Black joy, play, and
imagination (e.g., Love, 2019).
This is the first study of Afrofuturist development with a sample including Black queer
and non-binary people, and queer Black participants expressed visions of queer liberation as part
of Black liberation (in Chapter Four) and queer temporalities as part of Afrofuturistic
temporalities (in Chapter Five). These findings build on the intersectional aspects of Afrofuturist
Development Theory (Tynes et al, 2023), enhancing its connections to theories of queer
futurities (e.g., Muñoz, 2019; Storm & Jones, 2021) discussed throughout this chapter.
This study contributes to an ongoing process of empirical research demonstrating how
Afrofuturist development can be applied as a design lens (Tynes et al., 2023), building on
previous work on Afrofuturist design (e.g., Winchester, 2019). Moreover, it demonstrates one
way that Afrofuturist development can be used as a developmental science theory; as a
theoretical framework, it informed data analysis in this study of learners’ experiences with
technology prototypes and other experiential dimensions of a designed learning environment.
This suggests it could be relevant to future user/learner/player experience research, design-based
research, research on learning in designed environments, and participatory design research.
This study found four themes, which coalesce patterns in participants’ Afrofuturist
development during the Critical Game Jam (listed in Chapter Five). These themes plus related
literature form the basis for the design principles elaborated below: developing critical
speculative imagination by prototyping and rehearsing worlds free from oppression (principle
2.1), prototyping and rehearsing unpoliced futures (principle 2.2), prototyping and rehearsing

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Afrofuturistic strategies for climate justice (principle 2.3), and attuning to Afrofuturistic
temporalities (principle 2.4). These principles can be used to design future Afrofuturistic critical
game jams and related learning environments that aim to bring together critical game literacies
and Afrofuturist development.
Design Principle 2.1: Prototyping and Rehearsing Worlds Free from Oppression
Future learning environments can support Afrofuturist development by prototyping and
rehearsing worlds free from oppression. Tynes and colleagues (2023) called this skill “critical
speculative imagination”; we defined it as the capacity to “conjure, enact, and rehearse” liberated
futures (p. 23). This study emphasizes prototyping, which is a combination of conjuring and
enacting. Many contemporary games that deal with issues of race do so by simulating anti-Black
racism in the name of raising awareness about it (Gray, 2020), and studies of game design
learning with Black students have tended to involve creating games that do this also (e.g.,
Proctor and Blikstein, 2019). This design principle challenges this trend; instead of centering
non-Black players and trying to build empathy among them, it centers young Black people and
their needs and desires. Black participants in this study chose to brainstorm and prototype games
that simulate their own liberation.
Prototyping liberated worlds means creating unfinished models of unfinished -yet
liberated - futures (e.g., a prototype of a game set in a future where police have been abolished).
It means sharing these models with one’s community to begin a playful, imaginative, open-
ended, and joyful conversation about what actions we can take to make these worlds real.
Prototyping liberated worlds also means refining these models based on feedback from these
social interactions, sharing them again, and continuing the cycle, like Mims did with the Untitled
Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game during the Critical Game Jam. It means grounding one’s

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imagination in critical consciousness (e.g., seeking feedback on how one’s vision for the future
resonates within actually existing sociohistorical contexts and struggles for freedom) as well as
one’s desires and imaginative approximations of what could become possible in the future. As
described in relation to Kai UnEarthed in Chapter Five, this prototopian process departs from the
ways our imaginations of the future are usually mediated by utopian and dystopian genre
conventions. It remixes both, and prompts feelings and ideas that may not be possible inside of
either.
Rehearsing worlds free from oppression means practicing the skills needed to build, fight
for, and sustain the worlds one has imagined through prototyping. For example, it might mean
designing and playing games where people can practice navigating conflicts, like Madu did
during the Critical Game Jam. This design principle highlights the importance of arts education
for Afrofuturist development, especially theater; it builds on critical theater practitioner Augusto
Boal’s (2000) notion of theater games as rehearsals for revolution. Findings in this study show
that video games, card games, and live action roleplaying can also be rehearsals. In this sense,
digital game design and other computational media design learning is closely intertwined with
the arts, including theater, storytelling, the performing arts, and cinematic arts. Black students
deserve access to quality artistic creation processes, and these are an important part of digital
literacy learning and Afrofuturist development. As discussed above, game design should be
learned in relation to broader processes of creativity and artistic expression, not just in relation to
engineering.
However, building on the notion of prototopian imagination, this design principle
emphasizes learning through the messy and imperfect process of collaborative rehearsal, which
involves aspects of improvisation and serendipity. These elements tend to be overshadowed in

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arts education by an emphasis on achievement through legible performance. In this sense, this
design principle is aligned with modes of techno-vernacular creativity (Gaskins, 2021) in the
Black community, particularly the notion of “making a way out of no way” (Tynes et al., 2023,
p. 27). It challenges norms of perfectionistic commodity production promoted by Hollywood and
the professional art world. For example, when faced with emerging gaming technologies like AI,
we should ask questions like “how can young Black people mod these technologies the same
way the founders of hip hop modded the audio equipment of their time, and what kinds of
cyphers will they practice in,” not questions like “how can we make sure people take games
more seriously as an art form” or “who will be the next video game auteur.”
Design Principle 2.2: Prototyping and Rehearsing Unpoliced Futures
Future learning environments can support Afrofuturist development by inviting learners
to prototype unpoliced futures where police and prisons have been abolished, and to rehearse the
skills needed to build, fight for, and inhabit these unpoliced worlds. This study demonstrates that
critical game jams and their component parts (playing, analyzing, designing, and playtesting
games) are effective abolitionist pedagogies (Love, 2019); they can support young Black and
Latino/Latina/Latinx/Latine people in imagining pro-Black unpoliced futures and in practicing
skills needed in contemporary abolitionist movements.
This design principle also means taking an abolitionist approach to digital literacy
learning (Garcia & de Roock, 2021), particularly by supporting learners in critiquing carceral
surveillance apparatuses that are endemic in corporate digital platforms, including gaming
platforms like Steam that are increasingly functioning as distributed social media networks. This
requires taking an abolitionist approach to the problem of fascism and other forms of white
supremacist violence and harassment in video game platforms. This harassment is a well-

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researched problem (e.g., Gray, 2020), but no effective solutions to it have yet been developed.
The Department of Homeland Security is currently funding researchers to study the problem
using their framework of combatting extremism, with the goal of developing content moderation
systems (Anonymous, 2023). In this study, Jomih raised concerns about this sort of approach
(see Chapter Five). This is similar to concerns raised by critical technology scholars such as
Ruha Benjamin (2019) and members of the abolitionist gaming network, who warned that
police-lead frameworks of combatting extremism online will likely be used to surveil and
criminalize Black people and people who are organizing for Black liberation (Anonymous,
2023). They outlined an abolitionist approach to anti-fascism in video games, one that challenges
both fascist recruitment and carceral surveillance; this included calls for more abolitionist game
design learning environments where people can learn to prototype abolitionist and antifascist
games.
Roberto de Roock, Brianna Mims from this study, Joel Lovos, and I are working on an
academic version of this argument; we will make an argument for the proliferation of abolitionist
gaming learning environments as a potential way to prototype non-carceral, pro-Black responses
to the growing fascist threat. We intend to submit it to learning sciences journals. This kind of
activism, pedagogy, and research is necessary to counter fascists who aim to exterminate Black,
trans, and queer people, supporting the core premise of Afrofuturist development: there are
Black people in the future and they will thrive (Tynes et al, 2023).
Design Principle 2.3: Prototyping and Rehearsing Afrofuturist Strategies for Climate Justice
Future learning environments can support Afrofuturist development by inviting learners
to prototype sustainable futures rooted in climate justice, and to practice skills and actions
needed in climate justice organizing. Such approaches to climate change education should

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challenge racism, anti-Blackness, and related forms of oppression in mainstream gaming and
narratives about the future as well as in the environmental movement. Future learning
environments should support learning about how ecological destruction and anti-Blackness are
related, and should center perspectives and skills that can be used to build and fight for futures
where Black people can survive climate change and can thrive.
While implementing this design principle, educators can learn from the informal
education efforts that activists have organized as part of the movement to defend the Atlanta
forest (Defend the Atlanta Forest, n.d,). They are trying to maintain the forest as a buffer against
climate change, opposing police and corporate interests who are trying to cut it down to build
Cop City, a militarized police training center (Stop Cop City, n.d.). The popularity of this
movement signals the possibility that Black liberation, abolitionist, and climate justice
movements might be starting to coalesce in effective coalitions. The movement also involves
prototopian visioning, with various design projects imagining police infrastructure being
overgrown by the forest, similar to the vision of Abolitionist Playfield in Kai UnEarthed. While I
am not aware of academic research on this movement, professors and students from multiple
historically Black colleges and universities have supported it (Weissman, 2023).
While 60% of people in the US are somewhat or very concerned that climate change will
affect them personally in their lifetime, only 30% are willing to make major changes to address it
(Pew Research Center, 2021). This reflects Nathann’s theory of “the wall”: people are aware of
the issue but this awareness is not translating into action, possibly because they might be
inundated with apocalyptic and dystopian digital media highlighting how bad the problem is,
without getting enough chances to imagine and practice solutions. Games and game design offer
such chances; game designers have begun to help players develop the self-efficacy and

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motivation needed to take collective climate action by inviting them to imagine futures where
they can survive and thrive in the face of climate change, playfully practicing strategic actions
they could take to build these futures (Whittle et al., 2022). This study demonstrates ways to
support young people in learning to participate in these emerging game design efforts. It also
shows that prototopian Solarpunk games like Kai UnEarthed can help people challenge the
assumptions they have absorbed from dystopian media, developing hope that we can serve away
from the wall of climate genocide and human extinction and can swerve towards unpoliced,
liberated Afrofutures.
Afrofuturist climate justice gaming could also complement broader efforts toward climate
education (e.g., Sinatra & Hofer, 2021). Chang (2019) found that games can function like the
mesocosms used in ecology research: they can be miniature models of complex systems, offering
people chances to learn how their interactions with these systems change them. The Untitled
Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game invites players to create mesocosms of unpoliced futures by
designing medium-sized communities shaped by ecological symbioses with their surrounding
biomes.
I am going to apply this design principle (and the other ones in this chapter) through a
larger second iteration of this study with adolescents and college students, posing the following
research questions: How can one design critical game jams that support participants in imagining
and prototyping sustainable futures rooted in climate justice? How can these designs support
them in practicing climate actions they can take to help build these futures? How can these
designs support Afrofuturist development in the context of climate change education?
Design Principle 2.4: Attuning to Afrofuturistic Temporalities

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Future learning environments can support Afrofuturist development by embracing
Afrofuturistic temporalities: experiences of quality time, rather than treating time as a linear
measure of capitalist productivity. The Critical Game Jam built affinity and consensus around
choosing to experience Afrofuturistic temporalities together, learning from Rasheeda Phillips’
(2015) notion of Black Quantum Futurism, which posits that Black people can bend spacetime to
activate desired futures.
In this study, Cam and I connected this Afrofuturistic experience of time to critiques of
heterosexist notions of time in queer theory, e.g., critiques of reproductive futurism (Edelman,
2020), the expectation that one must follow a straight life trajectory through time focused on
raising the next generation in ways that end up reproducing a society that harms actually existing
adults and children. This critique is not a rejection of the choice to raise children; as Black
feminist theorist Alexis Pauline Gumbs argues, raising Black children well breaks from
reproductive futurism because it challenges the reproduction of a society set up to prevent Black
children from thriving (Gumbs, 2016). Muñoz (2019) also found examples of queer futurities in
radical queer art: experiences of altered spacetime that break from reproductive futurism but still
serve as prototypes of a more radical queer liberation movement that is yet to come. These queer
theories influenced the design of Kai UnEarthed in this study.
The principle of attuning to Afrofuturist temporalities holds that the future is an
experience that can be designed for, an experience with the potential to disrupt the reproduction
of an anti-Black and heterosexist society while bending spacetime toward worlds where Black
people can thrive. Black people alive today have the ability to generate a taste of this future
experience of time, where life is not regulated by clock-time attuned to the capitalist exploitation
of Black people’s labor. Participants in this study repeatedly emphasized their desires for Black

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joy, rest, play, and imagination, which carceral capitalism currently labels as extra or too much.
They insisted on cultivating these experiences through play and game design.
This design principle is a challenge to educators and education researchers who tend to
focus on measuring learning as a series of outcomes and objectives, rather than focusing on the
experiential quality of time in learning environments. Some critical learning scientists have
emphasized improvisation (Philip, 2019) within learning environments, and implementing this
principle might create more space for that. As discussed in Chapter Three, learning objectives
and pre-and post-assessments are not fundamentally incompatible with Afrofuturist
Development Theory as a whole because it aims to remix existing developmental science
methods; however, these methods are not necessarily designed to support experiences of
Afrofuturistic temporalities. In fact, the phenomena of bending spacetime calls into question the
ontology of linear time that underlies the epistemological assumptions of methods such as pre-
and post-measures. Future research would need to pose questions like: if Afrofuturistic time is
not linear, is it still possible to measure learning and development through assessing what people
are capable of doing earlier and later in time? What are other ways to scaffold and assess
learning experiences without relying on linear notions of time? How can we study the qualitative
experiences of queer and Afrofuturist temporalities? How can we look at experiences of play
and learning as quality time, and a quality of time, so that we can design rhythms and sequences
of time that support playful learning? Such questions depart from the field’s reigning
assumption that games can and should be efficient content delivery systems in classrooms (Kafai
& Burke, 2016), generating learning that can be measured as an increase over time.
Participants offered some initial insight into these methodological questions when they
reflected on their experiences creating the pre- and post-videos. Madu described them as a space

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to elaborate on their ideas that compensated for the time constraints of the workshops, and they
engaged in a deeply metacognitive reflective self-assessment in their final post-video, reflecting
on their notes from the game jam and their growth as an educator in the year and a half since it
started. They used it more like a summative portfolio assessment rather than a post-test.
Similarly, Light Bird said the following about the pre- and post-video protocol: “I’m gonna keep
coming back to these questions so that the answer is always yes. And I need to check in when the
answer isn’t yes because that’s not ok. I should be able to imagine a future where my people are
thriving.” It seems that they treated the protocol as an Afrofuturist mental health self-assessment
tool. These examples suggest ways that research tools could be repurposed as non-linear learning
and development experiences in future participatory design research.
Where the Design Principles Converge: Future Learning Environments Featuring Both
Critical Game Literacies and Afrofuturist Development
Figure Six summarizes the design principles discussed so far in this chapter; the
principles are modular, meaning they can be applied separately or together, reflected in the
overlapping circles of the Venn diagram. The study supports principles that can be applied in
Afrofuturist development learning experiences that do not necessarily involve gaming, but might
involve other forms of prototyping liberated Afrofutures through design, e.g., using artificial
intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, etc.; similarly, critical game literacy learning
might support Black liberation without necessarily focusing on liberated Afrofutures. However,
in this study, critical game literacy learning and Afrofuturist development were part of one
coherent process and learning ecology. This suggests that the design principles generated
through this study are compatible with each other and possibly stronger together; future learning

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environments should aim to combine them together if possible and appropriate. This section
suggests some ways this could happen.

Figure 6
Design Principles for Learning Environments Featuring Critical Game Literacies and
Afrofuturist Development

One possibility would be to organize future Afrofuturist-themed game jams that involve
prototyping and rehearsing liberated Afrofutures, with the goal of building affinity spaces around
Black liberation. Alternatively, existing pro-Black affinity spaces (e.g., abolitionist activist
groups, Black gamer groups, or youth mentoring groups) could incorporate game design
activities focused on prototyping and rehearsing liberated Afrofutures. In either case, the
combined application of these design principles could support learning environments where
people develop their design skills and their strategies for liberation movements, while

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simultaneously building affinity, engagement, trust, and social connection through shared
interests and passions. Such a combination of design, imagination, critical consciousness, and
socio-emotional development might support young people who are facing mental health impacts
of online racial discrimination and witnessing race-related traumatic events online (Stewart et al.,
2023) as well as the long-term impacts of the COVID19 pandemic. Young people who clearly
perceive the future “wall” of climate genocide and racism that Nathann described might feel
better supported to swerve away from it if they face the future collectively with peers who share
their interests, who can validate their perceptions and passions, and who can encourage their
critical speculative imagination.
Another possible combination of principles would be to embed play and design activities
designed to expand critical consciousness and critical speculative imagination within a
scaffolded curriculum teaching emerging game designers critical playcentric design methods.
For example, students could learn about abolitionism and climate justice in preparation for
prototyping, playtesting, and iterating upon games for change and learning that support such
movements. Black students could apply Afrofuturist Development Theory, identifying aspects of
technological genius in their own communities; they could find playful experiences that Black
people are already interested in, and could develop digital or analog prototypes of games that
build on these experiences to deepen and expand their community’s critical consciousness. For
example, Gabriel’s game Feat built on playful collaborative mutual-aid dynamics he had
experienced in working-class Black hip hop circles in Brazil, and Mims built on the vernacular
tabletop game modding practices she observed in her family. Such an approach would build on
the playcentric design method’s emphasis on finding games within existing sociocultural
phenomena such as literature and spiritual practices (Hamilton et al., 2021).

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This kind of curriculum would be particularly relevant in colleges and universities that
have game design programs; it could bridge critical game studies scholarship usually associated
with humanities or media studies programs with game design teaching often associated with
schools of engineering, computational media, or cinematic arts. A developmentally appropriate
high-school-level version could also be created, supplementing the STEM-oriented game design
learning offered to some adolescents with critical game studies learning that has largely been
offered only to college students, not high school students thus far. Such a curriculum could also
be implemented as professional development among working game designers and people
training to enter the industry. Going beyond diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings focused on
interpersonal and institutional human resources concerns, such workshops would prompt game
developers to think critically about social changes they wish to make in society at large, and how
they can build systems, game mechanics, worlds, narratives, and audiovisual representations that
support such changes. Michelle Ma’s critical character creation workshop during the Critical
Game Jam demonstrates the possibilities of this kind of learning opportunity, and she has been
organizing related learning experiences among her coworkers at a AAA game studio and in
computer science academia (Ma et al., 2022).
Finally, the principle of attuning to Afrofuturistic temporalities could be combined with
the principle of prioritizing worldbuilding as scaffolding through design practices that invite
people to tell transmedia stories across a multiverse of multiple possible worlds. For example, an
Afrofuturistic worldbuilding workshop could invite learners to create worlds informed by Black
history and/or Afrofuturistic visions of the future, using tools such as paper prototyping or clay
sculpting, game engines, 3D modeling software, or AI art generation software. There could be
scaffolding to prompt participants to imagine aspects of their world such as the ecology, political

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economy, cultures, spiritualities, technologies, educational practices, rituals, etc. The final
released version of the Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game could support such activities,
or a more open-ended set of prompts could be provided.
Once learners create these worlds, they could share them with each other through a
gallery walk, presentation, or online portfolio. In addition to giving each other direct feedback on
their designs, learners could also be equipped with world-linking prompts and protocols, e.g., a
set of emoji-style pictograms that indicate ways the world they are engaging with might be
connected to the world they themselves designed within a multiversal cosmos that is not
premised on Western notions of linear time. For example, one pictogram might indicate “your
world would be a freedom dream for people in my world,” another might indicate “your world
would be a hallucination that people in my world experience when they do _______ activity.”
Through this process, the group could create a time-web (rather than a timeline) showing
temporal links between their worlds, e.g., between a maroon society in the 1800s, an autonomous
zone created during a climate justice uprising in the 2030s, and a liberated Afrofuture in the 22
nd

century. Attuned to Afrofuturistic temporalities, these links would not necessarily be linear, and
could involve various ways in which dwellers in each world connect with the other worlds
through technologies that might be considered spiritual by current Western ontologies. This
process could generate narrative themes and sociohistorical analyses of race, gender, class, and
other phenomena that could be applied through follow-up activities involving speculative fiction
writing and literary criticism informed by social scientific literature.
These examples provide only a few of the many possible combinations of design
principles generated by this study. Ultimately, decisions about how to implement these principles
should prioritize the needs of the specific learners within their specific sociocultural contexts,

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and it may be more appropriate to apply certain principles rather than others in any given
situation. Other principles outlined in the Afrofuturist Development Theory (Tynes et al., 2023)
that were not featured in the Critical Game Jam should also be considered. Future research on the
kinds of learning environments sketched here could demonstrate how people learn within them,
and to what extent, informing future iterations of critical game literacy and Afrofuturist
development curriculum design.
Limitations and Future Directions Not Yet Discussed
Limitations of the study and possible future directions have already been addressed in
answers to research question 1.3 (Chapter Four) and 2.3 (Chapter Five) about how future
learning environments can better support Critical Game Literacy Learning and Afrofuturist
development. This section discusses additional limitations related to research methods, and
additional areas of future research beyond the scope of this study’s research questions.
The study was limited by the fact that we only asked participants to share their ability to
imagine themselves engaging in future efforts toward social change, we did not ask what actions
they did or did not take after the game jam. Colleagues and I are building an Abolitionist Gaming
Network, which is drawing on what we have learned in this study. Some study participants are
involved in that already. However, we made a strategic decision to keep this organizing separate
from academic research. As a result, there is no data from that activist project to validate the
long-term consequences of this intervention.
Also, this study only reports empirical findings on one iteration of the game jam and Kai
UnEarthed, whereas design-based research studies often (but not always) report data from
multiple iterations. The iteration in this study is not actually the first round of iteration in the
overall trajectory of this research; as mentioned, it builds on previous participatory design

222
research I did in the classroom and in activist spaces. However, the IRB would not allow me to
include the data I collected from those projects in this study because at the time I had considered
that data collection to be design and pedagogy, not research, so participants and I were not aware
that the data could later be used in a research project and hence it is not possible to establish
informed consent (even though students had signed consent forms). This highlights a challenge
in participatory design research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2014) where it is difficult to decide when
studies begin and end given their emergence from real-life learning contexts and existing
relationships. In any case, I consider the dissertation to be a pilot study that will help shape a
longer research agenda, and I am already planning the next iteration of it.
If there is significant enough interest from participants, future research building on this
study could use games and game design as participatory research tools; this current study
involved participatory design but not fully participatory research. In particular, future studies
could involve more participatory processes of posing research questions and analyzing data
together to answer them, making research expertise more distributed in the affinity space and the
role of researcher more porous and reciprocal. I assumed participants were not interested in
playing that role because they did not accept my invitation to collaborate on data analysis, but
after reflecting on their post-videos I realized many of them were actually interested in education
research, especially Madu, Mims, and Gabriel, who became teaching artists as described in
Appendix N. I wonder if maybe they just needed more scaffolding (e.g., specific prompts) in
order to pose their own research questions about our learning experiences together, or to
collaborate on answering questions we could have posed together. Future studies could invite
people to design games that pose specific research questions about Afrofuturist development,
and could then use them to answer these questions through playtesting the games with their

223
peers. However, it is also important to recognize that participants may not always want to do this
time-consuming research work; some may prefer to focus on participatory design activities,
leaving the work of publicizing and sharing their designs to researchers who have the time and
interest in that kind of work.
Given this study’s grounding in sociocultural learning theory and its qualitative design-
based research methodology, it is important to note that findings are not generalizable, so the
design principles elaborated here should be used as heuristics for contextually situated design
efforts, not recipes for replication. In particular, the synergy reported here between critical game
literacies and Afrofuturist development occurred in a learning environment that was consciously
informed by Afrofuturist Development Theory, facilitated by a team with “training in Black
children and young people’s histories, technocultures, and development” (Tynes et al, 2023, p.
9). Attempts to apply the design principles generated in this study in sociocultural contexts that
do not share these features may not yield the same results.
As I suggested previously (Coopilton, 2022), critical game literacy learning activities
may be relevant for cultivating critical consciousness and critical speculative imagination about
possible futures in ways that are broader than Afrofuturist development. Future design and
research efforts could see if these design principles are also relevant in contexts such as
indigenous decolonization movements, multiracial queer liberation movements, or global class
struggles. However, these movements need to remain inextricably related to Black liberation and
the goal of building futures where Black people can thrive. As we discussed in the Critical Game
Jam (echoing the Combahee River Collective), none of us will be completely free until all Black
people are free (Taylor, 2017).

224
This study was multimodal and generated a rich multimodal archive of video data. I
eventually plan to return to the video clips associated with key coded excerpts, e.g., quotes
reported in Chapters Four and Five that exemplify thematic findings from this study, editing
these clips to be presented to the public. I also intend to analyze these clips further as multimodal
discourses, possibly employing the video analysis methods and qualitative theater research
coding strategies discussed by Saldaña (2021) and/or Robinson’s (2020) rhizomatic process of
annotating video screenshots to show relationships between moments in the video and
interactions recorded in other data sources. This could be a part of case study inquiries on
specific aspects of the game jam such as teacher education, player experiences with Kai
UnEarthed, or queer participants’ experiences with queer temporalities. To prepare for this next
step, I generated a range of structural and descriptive codes and also coded for insights into
research methods, improving online playtesting methods, and future research questions.
Conclusion
This study asked how one might design learning spaces to support critical game
literacies, defined as the literacy skills needed to play, analyze, modify, and design games in
ways that challenge systemic oppression. The study also asked how one can design spaces to
support aspects of Afrofuturist development (Tynes et al., 2023), a process in which young Black
people imagine and build futures where they can thrive. I answered these questions through
design-based research on a critical game jam where participants played, analyzed, and created
games related to themes such as Black liberation and abolitionism. A reflexive thematic analysis
of participants’ learning experiences and their relationship to the design of the game jam
generated eight design principles such as “prototyping and rehearsing worlds free from
oppression,” “worldbuilding as scaffolding,” and “practicing critical playcentric design

225
methods.” These principles could inform future learning environments that support critical game
literacies and Afrofuturist development.
Over the next two to three years, I intend to apply these principles in new iterations of
this study as one of the USC President’s Postdoctoral Fellows for Sustainability Solutions. I am
planning new iterations of the Critical Game Jam focused on prototyping and rehearsing
Afrofuturist and abolitionist approaches to climate justice. The study reported in this dissertation,
combined with these next iterations, could inform the development of curricula, games, and
design principles that could be used in learning environments from informal online spaces and
after school programs to Language Arts, Social Studies, and computer science classes. They
could also inform learning and community organizing within movements for Black liberation,
queer liberation, abolition of police and prisons, and related freedom movements.

226
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Appendix A: Additional Figures Referenced
Figure A1
Simmers metagaming during the George Floyd rebellion

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Figure A2
Critical Race Game Literacy Scale

Figure 2. Critical Race Game Literacy
Scale

Instructions:

Please rate your level of agreement with each
of the following statements about digital
media, news, and technology.

1. I critique racism and inequality in games by
streaming gameplay.
2. It is difficult to critique racism and
inequality by writing and sharing
stories/art/memes I have made about games.
(Reverse scored)
3. When I experience racism in a game, I talk
with people I trust about what to do about it.
4. I make my own games that challenge
racism.
5. I have changed (or “modded”) a game to
make it more relevant to my community and
culture.

Response Options:

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Figure A3
Tempest from Kai UnEarthed

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Appendix B: Further Notes on Positionality, Intersectionality, and Freedom
Dreaming
Critical game literacy is relevant to anyone seeking liberation from systemic oppression.
However, due to limited space and time, I cannot develop its relevance to every single movement
or non-dominant community. Given this, I will focus on Black liberation and queer liberation.
This focus stems from my positionality, the collaborative teams I am a part of, recent pro-Black
cultural movements and uprisings, and a need to fill gaps around race and gender in the critical
game literacy research literature.
I am part of a majority-Black research team focused on how Black young people develop
and learn with technology, a majority queer game design team making Kai UnEarthed, and a
majority-Black working class community thinking about how to raise Black children beyond the
gender binary. The research proposed here is dynamically related to these broader collaborations.
It also builds on ten years of teaching work I did with working-class Black and queer students
and colleagues, and over 10 years of participation in movements against mass incarceration,
policing, and white supremacy.
This focus does not just stem from my subjective experiences; my critical theoretical and
conceptual frameworks and my research methodologies involve staying responsive to the real
movements that are challenging the capitalist system, allowing my thinking to be affected by
their strategic priorities and emergent potentials. Historian Robin Kelley’s (2002) book Freedom
Dreams documents the critical speculative imagination embodied in the Black liberation
movement through its various historical phases, including its communistic/ communalistic and
utopian tendencies; he describes how these persist and inspire new movements even if the
original strategic moves that incubated them were defeated by the system. As I study critical

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speculative imagination today, I need to stay attuned to the freedom dreams emerging from the
ongoing real Black liberation movement, especially ones nurtured by the George Floyd uprising
of 2020, which may have been repressed and coopted for the time being, but cannot be forgotten
(e.g., Salam & Castillon, 2021). A sizable current of this movement has advocated abolishing
police and prisons (e.g., Kaba, 2020), reviving the freedom dreams of abolitionists who fought
slavery. The movement has also inspired -and been inspired by- recent upsurges of Black
cultural production, including Afrofuturism (e.g., Anderson & Jones, 2016). These developments
are likely shaping ongoing freedom dreaming in classrooms and gaming spaces all over the
world, and the studies proposed here are designed to support that process, which is why I focus
my research questions on Afrofuturism. These currents of Black liberation continue to focus my
research even though talk about a racial reckoning is no longer in news headlines or university
diversity statements.
When the Black liberation movement made moves like this in the 1960s, it gave rise to
queer liberation and feminism in the 1970s; we can ask, what new queer forms of life, what new
strategies for subverting heteropatriarchy might it be generating today? The queer liberation
movement started through events like the Stonewall riots, where working-class Black and Latinx
LGBTQIA+ people rose up against heterosexist policing. These events were inseparable from
the Black liberation uprisings that were going on at the time; in the wake of Stonewall,
LGBTQIA+ crowds marched to the jail and demanded the release of Black liberation political
prisoners, chanting “Free our sisters! Free ourselves!” (Stanley & Spade, 2012). Dean Spade
(who I just cited) and I are both part of queer abolitionist circles that are attempting to keep that
same energy today, in new forms; for example, we were both part of Seattle’s movement against
youth incarceration that inspired Kai UnEarthed.

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I am non-binary and gender non-conforming (I use they/ them pronouns), and many of
my queer family and friends are Black. Many of us are arguing that queer liberation cannot be
separated from Black liberation without losing its dynamism and becoming coopted into
heterosexist capitalism as a tool of anti-Black oppression and assimilationist social reproduction.
Queer liberation should embrace the gender fluidity expressed in Afrofuturism (Anderson &
Jones, 2016), as well as abolitionism, which could free us all from heterosexist policing and
incarceration (Stanley & Spade, 2012). This involves queer, anti-carceral feminism, where we
aim to deconstruct gender binaries that enforce patriarchal domination over women. I want to
liberate my feminine tendencies, and I know I will only be free if women are free. But not all
women face the same matrices of oppression (Gray, 2020; Collins, 2002). Black feminists
developed the concept of intersectionality to pursue their own liberation, challenging white
supremacy in the feminist and queer movements and patriarchy in the Black liberation
movement (Collins, 2002; Crenshaw, 2017; Taylor, 2017). They generated the freedom dream
slogan that guided many of our actions during the 2014 protest wave that popularized
#BlackLivesMatter: “when Black women get free, we all get free.” Women and queer people
will only be free if we end anti-Black institutions like policing and prisons.
Some abolitionists, including me, argue that these visions for liberation also require the
abolition of whiteness. When we say whiteness, we are not referring to a skin tone or any
particular European ethnic culture – we mean the pervasive ideology that programs us to embody
capitalist control, exploitation, alienated individualism, and efficiency, the settling of indigenous
land, and anti-Black violence. This does not mean we claim to be color-blind. At this moment in
America, I am still white no matter how much I try to subvert whiteness daily (Love, 2019). I
obviously benefit from white privilege, and capitalism offers me that privilege in an attempt to

249
keep me loyal to it, expecting me to ignore how it oppresses my queerness and exploits my labor
power (Ignatiev & Garvey, 2014). But my communities are not white, my working-class
Mediterranean ancestors were not white (Roediger, 2018; Smythe, 2018), and my descendants
will not be white either. To love them all well, I push back on whiteness when it attempts to
confine my research or my critical speculative imagination of the past, present, and future. I am
rooting for and collaborating with people of the global majority who want to build worlds free
from white supremacy (Love, 2019). That (dis)orients my actions daily as I join collective efforts
to decenter whiteness politically, culturally, economically, psychologically, spiritually, and
scientifically. Hopefully, Black people can deepen the Black liberation aspects of this research
beyond what I can offer here, and hopefully we can all connect this work to related freedom
movements in the near future, e.g., anti-ableism, decolonization, migrant worker organizing, or
movements against deportations and border imperialism.

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Appendix C: Ten Principles of Afrofuturist Development Theory
1. Afrofuturist learning and development is multi-level, unfolds across
developmental stages, and is the product of spiraling, racialized interactions
between an individual, technology, and their environments.

2. Contexts in which children and young people learn, play, and work center
their full humanity, as well as foster Black aliveness and innovations of
speculative futures void of oppressions.

3. Black history knowledge, literacies, and historical consciousness are key
building blocks for a liberated present and future; they also protect children
and young people from negative outcomes that may result from risks in their
environment.

4. Technological ingenuity and power are a part of every Black person’s heritage
and therefore if not already possessed or expressed, an individual is assumed
to be highly capable of developing these strengths.

5. Critical consciousness and action are competencies taught in developmentally
appropriate ways to support Black people as they navigate and resist
oppressive media, technology, institutions and social practices.

6. Community members, teachers, employers, researchers, and clinicians must
have training in Black children and young people’s histories, technocultures,
and development for optimal outcomes.

7. Systems of equity that resist anti-Black racism, create a sense of belonging,
and provide Afrofuturist developmental learning and community possibilities
are key drivers of optimal development.

8. Shared and unique developmental needs are met and developmental assets
(e.g., imagination and creativity) leveraged and nurtured across contexts.

9. Toolkits for future physical and mental wellbeing are tailored to an
individual’s needs in a given setting.

10. Black children and young people, often powered by their Afrofuturistic selves,
imagine, build, and reinvent liberated, pro-Black futures and technologies.

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Funding: Funding Agency: Center for Empowered Research and Development with Technology
Contract or Grant Number: n/a
PI of Project: Matthew Hamilton, MAT, MTS
ROSSIER SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Title of Project: Critical Game Literacy Curriculum Pilot Study
PI of Main Grant: Matthew Hamilton
Title of Main Grant: n/a

Details: Funding Agency: Center for Empowered Research and Development with Technology
Contract or Grant Number: n/a
PI of Project: Matthew Hamilton, MAT, MTS
ROSSIER SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Title of Project: Critical Game Literacy Curriculum Pilot Study
PI of Main Grant: Matthew Hamilton
Title of Main Grant: n/a

The University of Southern California Institutional Review Board (IRB) designee reviewed your iStar application and attachments on
3/24/2021.

Based on the information submitted for review, this study is determined to be exempt from 45 CFR 46 according to §46.104(d) as
category (2, 3).

As research which is considered exempt according to §46.104(d), this project is not subject to requirements for continuing review. You
are authorized to conduct this research as approved.

If there are significant changes that increase the risk to subjects or if the funding has changed, you must submit an amendment
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The materials submitted and considered for review of this project included:
1. iStar application, dated 3/23/2020
2. Data Collection Form for Retrospective Data
3. Critical Gaming Workshop Co-Design Interview Protocol
4. Critical Imagination Pre and Post Interview Protocol
5. Kai UnEarthed Design Process Interview Protocol
6. Kai UnEarthed Playtest Focus Group Interview Protocol
7. Protocol for interviews reflecting on the overall workshop curriculum.docx(0.01)
8. Critial Game Literacy Pre- and Post- Assessments
9. Kai UnEarthed Online Feedback Questionnaire
10. Application Form

NOTES to PI:
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on the study (represented in 2.1, with the required human subjects certification) is able to serve as an independent data collector.

253
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STUDY PERSONNEL

Individuals who are knowledgeable about the protocol must obtain consent from subjects for participation in a study. Specifically, they
must be able to describe the purpose, procedures, benefits, risks, and alternatives to participation in the study. They must be able to
answer subjects’ questions about the protocol and about risks of the research procedures and alternatives. The PI must identify all
individuals who will obtain consent and attest that they fit the above criteria. The PI is ultimately responsible for ensuring that ethically
and legally valid consent is obtained from all research subjects.

Funding source: Other
Name of Sponsor: Center for Empowered Research and Development with Technology
Named Principal Investigator: Matthew Hamilton
Institution awarded the grant-award:
Grant-award number provided by the Sponsor:
Title of the Funding Project, if applicable:
Type of Funding: Other
Attachments:
2019-10-31 guidance-for-recruitment-tool-final.pdf
Information-Sheet-for-Exempt-Studies-07-27-2019.doc

Social-behavioral health-related interventions or health-outcome studies must register with clinicaltrials.gov or other International
Community of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) approved registries in order to be published in an ICJME journal. The ICMJE will not
accept studies for publication unless the studies are registered prior to enrollment, despite the fact that these studies are not applicable
“clinical trials” as defined by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). For support with registration, go to www.clinicaltrials.gov or
contact Jean Chan ( jeanbcha@usc.edu, 323-442-2825).

Important
The principal investigator for this study is responsible for obtaining all necessary approvals before
commencing research. Please be sure that you have satisfied applicable requirements, for example conflicts of
interest, bio safety, radiation safety, biorepositories, credentialing, data security,
sponsor approval, clinicaltrials.gov or school approval. IRB approval does not convey approval to commence
research in the event that other requirements have not been satisfied.

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Appendix E: Game Jam Invitation Flyer

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Appendix F: Application Form

Critical Game Literacy Workshop
Application Form
* Required

1. Name *
2. Age *
3. School *
4. Race *
5. Gender (e.g. man, woman, non-binary, boy, girl, trans) *
6. Anything you want us to know about yourself or your cultural background so we
can connect with you better? (optional)
7. What kinds of games do you play? *
8. Have you ever made a game before? *
Mark only one oval.
o Yes
o No
o No, but I want to make one
o Other:
9. Why do you want to participate in this workshop? How will it help you meet your
goals?*
10. Have you ever participated in a critical media literacy class or workshop before? *

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Mark only one oval.
o Yes
o No
o Not sure

11. Did your parents graduate from: *

Check all that apply.
o High school
o 2 year college
o 4 year college
o Graduate School

12. Are there any questions you have for us?
13. Your phone number
14. Your email

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Appendix G: Study Info Sheet
INFORMED CONSENT FOR RESEARCH
Study Title: Critical Game Literacy Pilot Study
Researchers: Matthew Hamilton, Jaymon Ortega, Brendesha Tynes, Olivia Peace, and colleagues from
the Center for Empowered Learning and Development with Technology. Please direct any questions to
Matthew Hamilton: [email redacted].
Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California
KEY INFORMATION
The following is a short summary of this study to help you decide whether or not you should
participate. More detailed information is listed later on in this document.
1. Being in this research study is voluntary – it is your choice.
2. You are being asked to take part in this study because you are an educator/youth worker, or a
young adult (age 18-25) interested in gaming and game design.
3. The purpose of this study is to design learning activities to nurture critical game literacy. Your
participation in this study will last until the end of the second workshop session, which will probably
happen sometime in the fall or winter of 2021. Activities will include critical game literacy workshop
activities, playing games, designing games, doing interviews/focus groups, sharing your design ideas with
your communities, and filling out questionnaires, with observations and photo/video recording of these
activities.
4. There are risks from participating in this study. The most common risk is discomfort from
discussing sensitive topics. More detailed information about the risks of this study can be found under the
“What are the risks and possible discomforts?” section.
5. The possible benefits to you for taking part in this study may include learning game design skills
from game designers, working on your own game ideas, and learning to play games more critically and
consciously. Educators and facilitators may develop new curriculum ideas for their classes, learning
spaces, and organizations. Overall, we hope to learn how to better support people in designing and
playing games that challenge oppression and support liberation.
DETAILED INFORMATION

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PURPOSE
The purpose of this study is to design critical game literacy learning spaces and activities with and for
young adults.
Critical game literacy means being able to play games and make games in ways that challenge oppressive
social structures and build peoples’ collective power to construct a better world. We hope to learn what
you think should be included in such a learning space, and what you think about our initial attempts to
design one together.
About 5-15 participants will take part in the study.
This research is funded and supported by the University of Southern California Center for Empowered
Learning and Development with Technology and its director Dr. Brendesha Tynes.

ACTIVITIES
If you decide to take part, this is what will happen:
You will participate online with other educators, young adults, and researchers in these learning
activities:
-critically analyzing existing games
-learning game design skills
-beginning to design your own game-world
-playing new games and giving feedback on them so that designers can improve them and make
them part of future learning activities.
-imagining what actions we could all take to build a future where we can make and play the
games we want
-brainstorming and discussing how to build curricula at schools and community organizations to
support critical game literacy

Members of the research team will observe these activities and take notes. Researchers may also
interview you, asking you questions about your experiences in the workshop, ideas you have contributed,
and other questions related to the research goals of the study.
Sessions of the workshop/ study will be video recorded and photos/screenshots will be taken by members
of the research team. Videos of the sessions will be made available to other participants to review
afterwards.

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Things you draw, write, craft, or video record during the workshop and gameplay sessions will be
collected and analyzed by the research team to develop ideas for further curriculum and game designs.
While there is no guarantee of publication or wider sharing of your ideas, we hope to share some of them
on social media such as Instagram or a website, and/or in academic journals and conferences so that other
teachers, game designers, and researchers can learn from them. We will ask you whether you want us to
share these with your name or with a pseudonym.

RISKS AND DISCOMFORTS
Possible risks and discomforts you could experience during this study include:
Interviews/Discussion Topics: Some of the questions asked may make you feel uneasy. You can choose
to skip or stop answering any questions you don’t want to.
Breach of Confidentiality: There is a small risk that people who are not connected with this study will
learn your identity or your personal information.
Unforeseen Risks: There may be other risks that are not known at this time.

BENEFITS
Learning: learning game design skills from game designers, learning to play games more critically and
consciously.
Creativity: working on your own game ideas and getting feedback on them
Curriculum Ideas: Teachers may develop new curriculum ideas for their classes, and chances to
network with each other and with USC education researchers/ game designers, which might possibly lead
to ongoing collaboration.

PRIVACY/CONFIDENTIALITY

Efforts will be made to limit the use and disclosure of your personal information, including research study
records, to people who are required to review this information.

We may publish the information from this study in journals or present it at meetings. If we do, we will not
use your name - unless you ask to be credited for a specific curriculum / game idea that you co-design
during the study. Credit and public recognition is our goal but is not automatically guaranteed; our plans
for publication are still in process at this time.

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The University of Southern California’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) may review your records to
ensure that the study is being conducted ethically.
Your data will be stored in locked offices and password protected computers. Only members of the
research team will have access to this data.
Your information that is collected as part of this research might be used or distributed for future research
studies without your additional informed consent. Any information that identifies you (such as your
name) will be removed from your private information before being shared with others, again unless you
give us permission to share your work by name.
The researchers are required by law to report certain cases with the potential of serious harm to you, or
others, such as suicidality or child abuse to the appropriate authorities.
As mentioned, there might be the possibility of sharing some of the ideas we co-design in the workshop
with the public over social media (e.g. Instagram or websites). We encourage you to familiarise yourself
with the privacy policies of those sites.
PAYMENTS
The study will be divided into two phases. At the end of each of the phases, participants will receive $100
for their participation in that phase, in the form of a VISA gift card. Participants will be encouraged to
attend all of each phase's activities, but partial compensation for partial attendance might be negotiated if
appropriate and necessary.
If you are engaging in other studies besides this one, please note you may be required to pay taxes and
receive an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 1099 if you are paid more than $600 in one year for
taking part in research studies. This does not include any reimbursements such as parking fees.
NEW INFORMATION
We will tell you about any new information that may affect your willingness to stay in the research.
VOLUNTARY PARTICIPATION
It is your choice whether or not to participate.
If you are a teacher or youth worker engaging in this study and someone you are teaching/ mentoring also
engages in it, this engagement must be in addition to any existing class / internship/ program activities
they do with you, and their engagement in it should not affect their grades or compensation in your
program.
If you choose to participate, you may change your mind and leave the study at any time. Refusal to
participate or stopping your participation will involve no penalty or loss of benefits to which you are
otherwise entitled (e.g. grades or compensation in another program). If you stop being in the research,
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already collected data may not be removed from the study. No new information will be collected about
you or from you by the study team without your permission.
The study team may still, after your withdrawal, need to report any safety event that you may have
experienced due to your participation to all entities involved in the study. Your personal information,
including any identifiable information, that has already been collected up to the time of your withdrawal
will be kept and used to guarantee the integrity of the study, to determine the safety effects, and to satisfy
any legal or regulatory requirements.
PARTICIPANT TERMINATION
You may be removed from this study for any of the following reasons: you do not follow the community
norms established in the workshops, at the discretion of the research team or the sponsor, or if the sponsor
closes the study. If this happens, the researchers will discuss other options with you.
CONTACT INFORMATION
If you have questions, concerns, complaints, or think the research has hurt you, please talk to Matthew
Hamilton at [email redacted].
This research has been reviewed by the USC Institutional Review Board (IRB). The IRB is a research
review board that reviews and monitors research studies to protect the rights and welfare of research
participants. Contact the IRB if you have questions about your rights as a research participant or you
have complaints about the research. You may contact the IRB at (323) 442-0114 or by email at
irb@usc.edu.

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Appendix H: Intellectual Property Forms
Critical Game Literacy Pilot Study
Media Release & Intellectual Property Documents
Please read this information carefully, and sign and date the forms at the prompts below

1.Informed Consent

These workshops are part of a research study. Please read over the Study Info Sheet for
details; you should have received this in your welcome email. A summary of the study is
provided here:

1. Being in this research study is voluntary – it is your choice.

2. You are being asked to take part in this study because you are an
educator/youth worker, or a young adult (age 18-25) interested in gaming and
game design.

3. The purpose of this study is to design learning activities to nurture critical
game literacy. Your participation in this study will last until the end of the second
workshop session, which will probably happen sometime in the fall or winter of
2021. Activities will include critical game literacy workshop activities, playing
games, designing games, doing interviews/focus groups, sharing your design
ideas with your communities, and filling out questionnaires, with observations and
photo/video recording of these activities. Videos of workshop sessions will be
shared with fellow participants to support reflection and accessibility.

4. There are risks from participating in this study. The most common risk is
discomfort from discussing sensitive topics. More detailed information about the
risks of this study can be found in the study info sheet.

5. The possible benefits to you for taking part in this study may include
learning game design skills from game designers, working on your own game
ideas, and learning to play games more critically and consciously. Educators and
facilitators may develop new curriculum ideas for their classes, learning spaces,
and organizations. Overall, we hope to learn how to better support people in
designing and playing games that challenge oppression and support liberation.

2.Intellectual Property Forms

a. You will retain intellectual property rights to your own
creations and will share rights if we co-invent
something.

264

If I create a game or other work of media on my own as part of this study, or if I
bring a work of media I am already working on to the workshops to share, I will
automatically retain ownership of this work, meaning it is my intellectual property.
Participating in these workshops will not limit my ability to share what I create for
free or to commercialize it as part of a business.

I do not need to ask permission from USC, the research team, or the Center for
Empowered Learning and Development with Technology (CELDTech) to freely
share or commercialize my own work. These entities will not automatically
provide support to help me share or commercialize my work, but I can reach out
to researchers and fellow participants if I am interested or have questions about
this process.

If I collaborate with a researcher or designer from USC to create a new work of
media or technology during this study, I will automatically share intellectual
property in that new work with the person(s) I collaborate with, CELDTech, and
USC. All of these parties would negotiate together whether and how to
commercialize it, and / or whether to make it available to people for free.
_______________________________
Authorized signature
_______________________________
Print Name
_______________________________
Date

b. Your own creations will not represent USC, the Center
for Empowered Learning and Development with
Technology (CELDTech), or any other participants in
the study, and we are not responsible for any damage
or harm that your creations may cause to anybody.

I agree to fully indemnify, hold harmless and defend the University of Southern
California, CELDTech, the researchers and facilitators in the study, all other
participants in the study, and any affiliated parties from and against all claims,
demands, actions, suits, damages, liabilities, losses, settlements, judgments,
costs and expenses (including but not limited to reasonable attorney’s fees and
costs), whether or not involving a third party claim, which arise out of or relate to
works of media and technology that I create during the course of this study.
_______________________________
Authorized signature
_______________________________
Print Name
_______________________________

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Date

c. We will attempt to publicly share works you create, as
well as documents and ideas you express during the
study for purposes such as research, outreach, design,
and education. Please indicate below whether you wish
to be credited by name or by pseudonym. Unfortunately
we cannot guarantee publication or public recognition.

I hereby grant researchers involved in this study and the University of Southern
California Center for Empowered Learning and Development with Technology
(CELDTech) permission to share works of media, ideas, and information I
generate during this study in any form or format and in any manner, throughout
the universe in any medium now known or hereafter developed, without
compensation or obligation to me. Such uses can include research, publicity,
outreach, transmission and distribution of study data, or any other lawful purpose.
I further understand and agree that researchers, CELDTech and USC are under no obligation to
use my information for any purpose. The rights granted in this
agreement are not revocable.

I wish to be credited by the following name: _____________
I wish to be credited by the following pseudonym: _____________
_______________________________
Authorized signature
_______________________________
Print Name
_______________________________
Date

3.Photo and Video Release Form
I hereby grant researchers from CELDTech permission to photograph and take videos of me
while I participate in this study. I also grant study researchers and CELDTech permission to use,
display, copy, and publish my name or pseudonym, any photographs, video or likenesses of me
in any form or format and in any manner, anywhere, in any medium now known or hereafter
developed, without compensation or obligation to me. Such uses can include research, publicity,
outreach, transmission and distribution of study data, or any other lawful purpose and
CELDTech may sublicense its rights to others, including individual researchers and staff within
CELDTech.

I agree that the researchers and CELDTech will be the exclusive owners of all rights, including,
but not limited to, all copyrights, in and to such film, photographs, or other recordings or
renderings of my likeness or image (the “Images”). They may crop, alter or modify any images
at their discretion.

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I hereby irrevocably release and discharge CELDTech, USC, and their subsidiaries, affiliates,
agents, successors, legal representatives, assigns, and those acting for them or on their behalf
from any claim or liability (including, without limitation, defamation, invasion of privacy or
right of publicity) based upon any use of my name, pseudonym, or images.

I further understand and agree that CELDTech and the researchers are under no obligation to
use my name, image or likeness for any purpose. The rights granted in this agreement extend
to USC, its subsidiaries, affiliates, agents, successors, legal representatives, and assigns and
those acting on its behalf. The rights granted in this agreement are not revocable.
_______________________________
Authorized signature
_______________________________
Print Name
_______________________________
Date

4. License Info for Kai UnEarthed

As part of the study, you will play a game called Kai UnEarthed. It is an incomplete version not
yet ready for release. Please do not share the software with anyone. However, you are free to
create media based on it during or after this study.
---
I understand that Kai UnEarthed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
4.0 International License. (CC BY-SA 4.0). Under this license, I am free to copy and redistribute
material (e.g. screenshots and videos) from Kai UnEarthed in any medium or format and to
remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as I
give appropriate credit to the game’s designers, provide a link to the license, and indicate if
changes were made. I may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests
the creators of Kai UnEarthed endorse me or my use. If I remix, transform, or build upon the
material, I must distribute my contributions under the same license as the original. I may not
apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the
license permits.

I understand that the version of Kai UnEarthed I will be provided is not final and is not ready for
release, and I agree not to share the build (the game software application) with anyone without
permission from the game’s designers. I am still free to share and remix images and videos
from the game, or to create my own works of media based on it or inspired by it.
_______________________________
Authorized signature
_______________________________
Print Name
_______________________________
Date

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Appendix I: Curriculum Co-Design Protocol

This is a semi-structured protocol; researchers will generally follow the line of
questioning outlined here, but will also engage in informal discussion with co-designers and
community stakeholders to build rapport, brainstorm together, and plan the curriculum for the
critical gaming workshops.

Intro:
“Thank you for participating in this discussion. We know your time is valuable and
limited, and we really appreciate it. The purpose of this project is to design online spaces where
young people can hone their critical game literacy – their ability to play, modify, critique, and
make games in ways that can help liberate their communities from oppression. Today we’ll be
discussing that and I’ll be taking notes that might inform how we plan the project.
Please take some time to review the study info form we sent you if you want.
Do you have any questions before we begin?
Does all of that sound ok? Do we have your consent to start?”

Possible questions:

If relevant: Please describe the work you do with young people

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- If they do work involving game literacy, could ask follow-up questions like:
o What are some things that usually go well in gaming workshops and game jams?
What are some challenges? Some things we should look out for?
o What are some things you’ve learned doing this work that you’d like to share with
us?

What do you think is important to prioritize and center in a critical game literacy
workshop?

What do you think young people will be most interested in learning, and why?

We had emailed you a link to Kai UnEarthed, the game about young people living in
unpoliced futures. In our workshops we want to invite people to play this game to reflect on the
kinds of futures they want to build and fight for, and also as an inspiration to encourage them to
make their own games imagining futures free from systems of oppression. Do you have any
suggestions for how we might do this? Any other ideas for how Kai UnEarthed could be used in
learning experiences and workshops? Are there any ways that it might relate to the work you and
your community/ organization are doing?

For people who consider themselves Afrofuturists:
-what does Afrofuturism mean to you?
-what are some of the points of synergy and tension you see between Afrofuturism and
gaming?
-What would you like to see in the design of Afrofuturist games?
-What would you like to see in learning spaces that support young people in creating
Afrofuturist games and stories?

270

We shared with you a draft outline of the curriculum we’ve brainstormed for the critical
gaming workshops. What do you think about it so far? What would you add/ change/ remove and
why?

Is there anyone else you think we should talk with as we work on this project? Anyone
whose work we should read/ watch/ play/ engage with?

If relevant: Would you like to collaborate on this project? If so, how?
-note: may need to ask follow up questions to assess if their organization is
supportive of them being involved, whether they want to be involved as an individual, or
whether their whole organization wants to collaborate; whether there are other people we need to
talk to in the organization to build trust or gain permission to collaborate, etc.

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Appendix J: Kai UnEarthed Design Process Reflection Protocol
This is a semi-structured protocol; I will generally follow the line of questioning outlined
here, but will also engage in discussion with participants (who are my co-designers, peers, or
mentors), reflecting together on the design process and discussing themes that emerge through
the conversation.
Intro:
“Thank you for participating in this interview. I know your time is valuable and limited,
and I really appreciate it. The purpose of this project is to design online spaces where young
people can hone their critical game literacy – their ability to play, modify, critique, and make
games in ways that can help liberate their communities from oppression. Today we’ll be
discussing how we did this while making Kai UnEarthed, and I’ll be recording the conversation.
Please take some time to review the study info form we sent you if you want.
Do you have any questions before we begin?
Does all of that sound ok? Do we have your consent to start?”

Possible questions:

What are some highlights of your experience working on Kai UnEarthed? Particularly
meaningful moments?

272
How would you describe our design process in your own words?
Possible follow up questions:
-in particular, how would you describe our narrative co-writing process?
-how would you describe our worldbuilding process? What does world building
mean to you, and how does it relate to narrative? To game mechanics? To social change? How
can designers find the right balance between world building and character-driven narrative?
-how would you describe our coding, engineering, and UI/UX design processes?
-how would you describe our playtesting?
-how would you describe our processes of releasing the game and building a
social media presence/ metagame around it?

Follow up questions, if not mentioned already:
-In your opinion, what are the strengths of our design process?
- What were some challenges we faced? How did we try to meet them? What do you
think we could have done differently?
-What were some aspects of our social contexts that supported us in this design work?
(e.g. how was it affected by our experiences in our classes, what was going on in the world, etc.)
-What were some aspects of our social contexts that limited or challenged us?

What are some strengths of Kai UnEarthed in its current iteration? What are some of its
limitations?

273
What are some things you learned while working on this project, and how did you learn
them?
Follow up questions. What/ how did you learn…
- About yourself?
-About games and interactive media?
- About design?
-About society and social change?

We’ve talked about attempting to center queer people and BIPOC folks in the game.
From your perspective, how, if at all, did we do that? How didn’t we? What could be done
differently in the future?

How would you describe the ways we related to each other during the design process?
-possible follow up questions: How did we communicate? How did we build on
each other’s ideas? How did we support each other through challenges? Are there any things you
wish we had done differently?
- How do you see our identities, experiences, and social positionalities affecting our
design process and how we relate to each other in terms of race, class, gender, ability, etc.?
What, if anything, could we have done better?

How, if at all do you consider our project and process to be Afrofuturist? How, if at all,
do you consider it to be Solarpunk? How, if at all, do you consider it to be abolitionist? We

274
have used these terms to refer to the project, I am curious what they mean to you now looking
back on it.

If you were to support young people in trying to do the kind of design work we’ve done,
what would you do? What do you think it would be important to prioritize?

How do you hope people will engage with Kai UnEarthed now? In the near future? In the
distant future?

How does Kai UnEarthed relate to other projects you are working on, or your overall
process of learning and growing as a designer? What is next for you? What are you excited
about?

275

Appendix K: Pre- and Post-Assessment
(Note, this shows the post-assessment; the pre-assessment has the same exact
items, but without questions 4 and 5)

* Required

1.
Email
*
2.

Name
*
3.

Are you interested in continuing to participate in the Critical Game Jam moving forward?

4.Are you planning on attending the winter sessions and sharing a critical game design or critical
play project with the group?

5.Jaymon, Matthew, and Brendesha will be analyzing the data we collected during the game jam to
learn how to design better critical game literacy learning spaces (among other research questions).
Olivia, KB, and Matthew will be analyzing it to learn how to improve Kai UnEarthed. Are you
interested in helping with these analyses? (this might require doing some additional training)

Please complete this questionnaire so we can get a sense of the critical game literacy skills you
learned this week (we will compare your answers now to your answers before the workshop started).
This is not a quiz, and will not be graded or tied to compensation. Please feel free to be open and
honest - we are not here to judge you, only to use your answers to learn how to improve the Critical
Game Jam workshops in the future. For the following questions, please choose the answer that best
represents whether the statement applies to you.

(Pre-assessment text: Please complete this questionnaire so we can get a sense of the critical game literacy
skills you currently have. This will help us develop a learning experience that can build on these skills. This is
not a quiz, and will not be graded or tied to compensation. Please feel free to be open and honest - we are not
here to judge you, only to use your answers to design a better workshop )

6.I critique racism and inequality in games by streaming gameplay
*
Mark only one oval.

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0. Strongly disagree
1. Disagree
2. Slightly disagree
3. Slightly Agree
4. Agree
5. Strongly Agree

7. Please describe your experiences with this

8. It's difficult to critique racism and inequality by writing and sharing stories/art/memes I have made
about games
*
Mark only one oval.
0. Strongly disagree
1. Disagree
2. Slightly disagree
3. Slightly Agree
4. Agree
5. Strongly Agree

9.Please describe your experiences with this

10.When I experience racism in a game, I talk with people I trust about what to do about it
*
Mark only one oval.
0. Strongly disagree
1. Disagree
2. Slightly disagree
3. Slightly Agree
4. Agree
5. Strongly Agree

11.Please describe your experiences with this

12.I make my own games that challenge racism
*
Mark only one oval.
0. Strongly disagree
1. Disagree
2. Slightly disagree
3. Slightly Agree
4. Agree
5. Strongly Agree

13 Please describe your experiences with this

14.I have changed (or “modded”) a game to make it more relevant to my community and culture.

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*
Mark only one oval.
0. Strongly disagree
1. Disagree
2. Slightly disagree
3. Slightly Agree
4. Agree
5. Strongly Agree
15.

Please describe your experiences with this

16.I create media (including videos, games, social media content) that represent my racial-ethnic
group in a positive light.
*
Mark only one oval.
0. Strongly disagree
1. Disagree
2. Slightly disagree
3. Slightly Agree
4. Agree
5. Strongly Agree

17.I can use technology to solve problems in my community.
*
Mark only one oval.
0. Strongly disagree
1. Disagree
2. Slightly disagree
3. Slightly Agree
4. Agree
5. Strongly Agree

18.I understand how to use media to serve my community.
*
Mark only one oval.
0. Strongly disagree
1. Disagree
2. Slightly disagree
3. Slightly Agree
4. Agree
5. Strongly Agree

19. I look for media with positive representations of my racial or ethnic group.
*
Mark only one oval.
0. Strongly disagree
1. Disagree
2. Slightly disagree
3. Slightly Agree
4. Agree

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5. Strongly Agree

20. I do not try to support media (including films, TV) that represents different types of people in my
racial-ethnic group.
*
Mark only one oval.
0. Strongly disagree
1. Disagree
2. Slightly disagree
3. Slightly Agree
4. Agree
5. Strongly Agree

21.I participate in protests or boycotts of companies that have racist practices online.
*
Mark only one oval.
0. Strongly disagree
1. Disagree
2. Slightly disagree
3. Slightly Agree
4. Agree
5. Strongly Agree

22.I create or post material that uses my racial-ethnic group’s language (including African American
English or Spanish).
*
Mark only one oval.
0. Strongly disagree
1. Disagree
2. Slightly disagree
3. Slightly Agree
4. Agree
5. Strongly Agree

23.I use the internet to highlight the contributions of people from my racial-ethnic group
*
Mark only one oval.
0. Strongly disagree
1. Disagree
2. Slightly disagree
3. Slightly Agree
4. Agree
5. Strongly Agree

24. Describe an aspect of a game you have played that supports oppression, and analyze how the
game supports this form of oppression. (Please choose one or more of the following forms of
oppression: racism/white supremacy, sexism/patriarchy, exploitation of workers, ableist
discrimination against people with disabilities, or heterosexist oppression of lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual people)
*

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25. Please describe steps you could take to make your own game that could challenge this form of
oppression
*

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Appendix L: Critical Imagination Questions
Pre-Workshop Questions:
Please record yourself answering these questions over video and please send the video
to [email redacted]. Thanks!
Do you have a favorite game, movie, or TV show about the future? If so, what do you
like about it?
What do you think of when you imagine your future and your descendants’ future? This
could be 5, 10, 50, 150, 300 years from now, your choice.
What do you think of when you imagine the future of our society in general? What do
you think things will be like in terms of race relations, work, technology, and culture? This
could be 5, 10, 50, 150, 300 years from now, your choice.
Are there any games or play experiences that shape how you imagine these scenarios? If
so, how?
Where do you see yourself (e.g., as a student or in the workforce) in the next 1-3 years?
Have you participated in any movements, protests, activism, organizing, or other efforts
to change society? If so, please describe your experiences.
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Could you imagine participating in these kinds of activities in the near future? Why or
why not?
Do you have any questions or anything you’d like to share?
Post-Workshop Questions:
Please record yourself answering these questions over video and please send the video to
[email redacted] using Google Drive or another sharing service. We recommend breaking this
up into separate videos (e.g. one for each set of questions). Thanks!
1.Follow up questions about your contributions to participatory design activities:
Can you please tell us a little bit more about your thoughts and feelings behind one of
your responses to the prompts this week?
Was there something that someone brought up in one of the sessions that you would like
to expand on? What do you think about it? How could it be developed further?
Think of something you’ve imagined during this workshop that really challenges the way
things are right now in society. What would need to change to make that a reality? What can we
all do to make that change happen?
2.Questions about the game jam activities we have engaged in so far:
What activities so far have you liked most, and why?
Which ones have you liked least, and why?

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Which ones do you think best support the goal of learning and developing critical game
literacy (the capacity to play, mod, and design games that challenge systemic oppression)?
Which ones do you think should be used in schools, colleges, online spaces, and
programs in the future? Why?
Is there anything you would add or change about these activities ?
Do you have any ideas for other critical game literacy learning activities?
3.Questions about the group dynamics in the workshop so far:
- Do you feel like you have been able to contribute to your full potential? Why or why
not?
-Do you feel like you have power and agency to shape the conversation and design
process? If so, can you please provide an example of a time when you did that. If not, what are
some obstacles in the way of that?
-What could be improved next time?

4. Critical imagination follow up questions (some of these are similar to what we
asked you at the beginning; we’re interested in seeing if your thinking has changed, and if
so, how)
What do you think of when you imagine your future and your descendants’ future? This
could be 5, 10, 50, 150, 300 years from now, your choice.
What do you think of when you imagine the future of our society in general? What do
you think things will be like in terms of race relations, work, technology, and culture? This
could be 5, 10, 50, 150, 300 years from now, your choice.

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Where do you see yourself (e.g. as a student or in the workforce) in the next 1-3 years?
Were there any skills you learned this week that might support you in meeting your goals for
yourself?
Could you imagine participating in efforts to change society (e.g. movement, protests,
activism, organizing, etc.) in the near future? Why or why not?
Has participating in this workshop changed how you think and feel about the possibility
of acting to change society? If so, how?
Can you imagine a future where Black, Latinx, native, and LGBTQ people are thriving?
If so, what would it be like? If not, why not?
Can you imagine a world where nobody has more power because of their race, class, or
gender, and people take care of each other's needs instead of working to make a profit for rich
people? If so, what would it be like? If not, why not?
Wrap up:
Please share anything else you would like to add

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Appendix M: Kai UnEarthed Playtest Protocols

Playlist prep checklist:
• Please make sure you have enough storage space to record up to 2 hours of the Zoom
breakout room you will be hosting. It will be about 6-8 gigabytes. If this is not possible,
please let Matthew know ASAP.
o Please open your Zoom desktop client app, go to the Zoom menu, then
Preferences. Click on "Recording,” and Make sure your recording settings look
like the attached image (Figure M1). Please select a folder to store your
recordings that is on a hard drive with enough space. Make sure it is not a folder
in OneDrive, Google Drive, or any other cloud sharing service because that might
overload your internet connection.

Figure M1
Zoom Settings for Playtesting

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• Make sure your computer is charged and your internet is working.
• You may want to print these instructions if you can.
• Have a physical notebook and pen handy in case you want to jot down notes and get
overwhelmed by all the windows
• Plug in and test headphones. If you haven’t been using headphones on Zoom so far, you
may want to log in early to the Zoom room to make sure all your audio permissions are
set correctly.
• Review these slides on how to conduct a playtest
• Review our research questions for this playtest so you can focus your notes on answering
them:
• How, if at all, do participants express critical/speculative imagination during and
after their participation in the game ?
• How, if it all, do they play with the various activities and components of the
game, particularly the writing components?
• How can the game be improved to better support these goals?
• Please review our experience goals: that players will feel like their decisions and their
interactions with the artifacts in the game matter. We also want them to feel like they can
add to the game (e.g. in the journal). Please focus on how, if at all, this goal is being met.
• Please take a look at the instructions participants received for setting up the game and
preparing for the playtests. Please review them so you understand the context.
• If you haven't already, please download the game yourself, set it up according to those
instructions, and play it a bit so you know what to expect. This will prepare you to help
participants if they get stuck. In particular, you may need to help them figure out how to
annotate the journal and how to switch between applications. If you don't have space to
download the game and to record, please prioritize recording. You can also visit our
website or play some of the text-based version to prepare.
• Begin recording before we go into breakout rooms and let Matthew know if there are any
issues
• There is a chart below showing which player(s) you'll be paired with. KB will assign you
to a breakout room with that player after we set up and practice a bit all together. Please
let me know if these pairings work for you, or if you have suggested changes.
• Once you’re in breakout rooms, please do the steps on the Playtest opening checklist
below

Player Playtest lead Notes

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Playtest opening checklist:
• Please communicate the following to the participants:

-Remind them that we are assessing the game itself, not how they play it. There is no
right way to play. It’s ok if they get stuck or confused.

-However they engage with it, it will help us improve the software later by showing us
how people play with it.

- This is how games are made in the tech industry too, and being a playtester is an
important role and a gateway to other design roles.

-Remind them that this is a draft prototype and might have bugs or other problems. These
are not their fault. We won’t be offended if you point them out.

-Thank them for their time.

• Ask them to share their screen with computer sound, not optimized for video clips.
• Arrange windows on your screen so you can see their face on Zoom, their screen share
window, and your notes in this document. If you have a second monitor, you can use it,
we just don’t want the players to do that.
• Check to make sure you can both hear each other talking and the game audio at the same
time. Ask them to press V to adjust the volume to a level that’s comfortable for both of
you.
• remind them to think out loud as they play, and invite them to click Start
• The game software will prompt the players to review some of the setup tasks in case they
got stuck and did not bring it up in the larger session. Please help them troubleshoot if
they have trouble annotating the journal or switching between the journal and the game
app.
• The game tells players they won’t be able to do all of the journal prompts for this playtest
(e.g. the ones about tearing the page or poking a hole through it.) You may want to
remind them of this when they get to those prompts if they get stuck on them - just invite
them to imagine doing that activity, or to write whatever they want on that page.

• If the forest ceremony scene is too choppy or slow to navigate you can invite them to skip
it, to quit the game, and to simply choose writing prompts in the journal on pages 24-paqe
35. Please tell them these are writing prompts that artifacts in the forest would give them.
When they’re done, they can restart the game and click “skip to Time Tunnels” on the
start Menu to see how the game ends.

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• If they are not done playing by 5:20, please ask them to wrap up and transition into the
interview questions below. We will return to the main group at 5:45 for 15 minutes of
group discussion.

Playtest Notes:
Participant mame(s):

Researcher(s) names:

Date:

Start Time :

End Time:

Version of software (Text-based or Multimodal):

Version of the journal (Print or on-screen):

Computer/ Device participant is using:

Single player or multiplayer mode:

Scene the player(s) ended on:

Major problems that came up:

Notes by scene and questions to ask -
If you write notes that are more your own analysis or reflection, please write them in italics.

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Notes and questions by scene Notes and questions for all scenes
Opening and onboarding notes:

General notes:

Do they engage with both the game and the notebook?
How is the transition back and forth between the two?

notes on what they do (e.g. what
they click on, what choices they
make):

Moments when they get stuck or
frustrated with something:

(If applicable) -group dynamics
and the content of discussions and
interactions as participants share
their decisions and what they’ve
created in response to the game:

moments where players seemed to
focus on key decisions. What

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Abolition Playfield notes:

General notes:

decisions did they make? How did
they deliberate about them? Feel
free to ask people follow up
questions about this :

-questions to ask them after (or
during if it’s very important):

Remember to ask them
to think out loud

Kai’s bathroom notes:

General notes:

Conversation with Mars notes:
General notes:

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Forrest ceremony notes:

NOTE: if the forest ceremony scene is too
choppy or slow to navigate you can invite them to skip
it, to quit the game, and to simply choose writing
prompts in the journal on pages 24-35. Please tell them
these are writing prompts that artifacts in the forest
would give them. When they’re done, they can restart the
game and click “skip to Time Tunnels” on the start
Menu to see how the game ends.
General notes:

Did the player have trouble navigating with the
W,A,S,and D keys and the mouse?

Which artifacts did they find?

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Did they write responses in their journals to the
artifacts?

What body language and affective cues do they show as
they write ?

How long does each prompt take?

Did they find the grave site?

Do they notice that their choices impact the user
interface in the forest and the eventual outcomes in the
final game scene (the “time tunnels”)?

Time tunnel notes:

General notes:

Ending notes:

Which ending did they reach?

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How did they react to the ending?

Post-Interview questions and notes (feel free to add and alter
questions based on what you noticed in the playtest)
Intro:
-Thank you for playing the game and sharing your thoughts about your process. Now we’re
going to do an interview with some questions about your experience during the game. The goal
of this is to get a sense of how people play the game so that the designers can improve the game
in future versions. There aren’t any right or wrong answers to these questions, and nobody will
be offended if you have criticisms of the game; the game designers are used to the process of
getting feedback.
-Do you have any questions before we begin?
-Are you okay if we start the interview?
Possible questions, with transitions from each block to the next:

Questions about their experiences playing
-What was fun about the game? What wasn’t?
- Did you feel like your decisions were meaningful? Why or why not?
-What informed your decisions/ why did you decide to make the choices you made? (the
interviewer might ask here about specific decisions the participant made in the game and why
they made them)
- What did you think the game was about, in your own words?
-What did you learn from it?
-What parts of the story made you feel involved in Kai’s world? What didn’t?
-Was there any part that felt confusing or places you felt stuck?

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Questions about the analog notebook component of the game:
-How did you feel about drawing and writing in the notebook while playing?
-Why did you choose the particular questions you chose in the forest?
-How did you choose to write/ draw what you did in response to those questions?
- Interviewer might ask specific follow up questions about notebook entries the participant made
during the game

Questions about critical imagination
-Does playing the game change how you imagine the future? If so, how? (this is intentionally
open-ended, but the following questions can be posed as follow-ups if needed to sharpen the
discussion):
-How is the game different from stories about the future that you’ve seen in games, TV
shows, movies, etc.? What do you think about that?
-In particular, how does it feel to play a game about a future where Black people, queer
people, and indigenous people are thriving?
-How does it feel to play a game about a future where some of the dreams of
revolutionary movements have become real?
-Do you think playing this game will change your behavior in real life? If so, how?
-Does the game motivate you to fight for / build a better world for your descendants? Why or
why not?
- Does the game change your perception of everyday objects like the 21st century artifacts in the
game? If so, how?
-Does playing this game change how you think about other games? If so, how?
-After playing this game, can you imagine games that you might design about future worlds like
Kai’s? If so, please describe these games and these worlds
Moving forward questions:
-What do you think should be changed in future versions of the game?
- Do you think a future version of this game should be used in schools? Why or why not? If so,
how?
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-Would you be interested in participating in the development of this game or games like it? Why
or why not?
Wrap up:
-ask if they have any questions
-thank them
Follow up after the playtest:
-ask the participant to save their annotated journal and to email it to [email redacted] with the
subject “journal”
-make sure the recording saves
-compress and share it with [email redacted] on Google Drive
-share this document (your playtest notes copy for each playtest) with [email redacted] on
Google Drive
-please alert Matthew and Olivia if anything came up that you think we should address (e.g. a
major bug)
-if you can, within 24 hours please go back and fill in things you wrote in shorthand, and try to
flesh out the notes
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Appendix N: Toward a Case Study on Game Jams as Teacher Education
For some of the Critical Game Jam participants – Madu, Mims, and Gabriel - critical
game literacy learning supported their development as teachers. This is technically not a theme
of the study according to reflexive thematic analysis because it was not present across most of
the participants, but it would answer RQ 1 if a different analytic method were applied. In the
future, a case study could be written focusing on how these participants developed as educators
during the Critical Game Jam.
For example, when Gabriel encountered Abolition Playfield in Kai UnEarthed, he spoke
highly of his mom who is a public-school teacher working with youth facing incarceration in
Brazil. At the time, he was despairing about the possibility of becoming a teacher, but by the end
of Level Two he had recommitted to this goal and was excited about it (this might be related to
the defeat of Bolsonaro, I might try to interview him to discuss that). He imagined ways to use
gaming and game design in the classroom, which he was careful to contrast with gamification,
and began to teach a version of Michelle’s character design workshop with his cousin. At the end
of Level Two, he expressed a vision of critical pedagogy focused on solidarity with working
class Black students who he saw as potentially revolutionary (he mentioned in particular that he
thought the younger generation was more opposed to heterosexist/homophobic policies).
Over the course of the study, Madu moved closer to graduating from USC with a film
production degree, but began to question colonial and capitalist production practices in the film
industry while developing as a critical arts educator and teaching artist. Influenced by the game
jam and other experiences, they began to modify film and storytelling practices into a playful set
of learning experiences influenced by griot practices from their Nigerian culture. They began to
apply this design vision through VR storytelling workshops with adolescents in their home town
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in the Inland Empire between the two game jam sessions, and I gave them feedback on these and
helped him apply for grants to support them. As mentioned in Chapter Five, the role-playing
game they playtested in Level Two could be used in the classroom, and they planned to
implement Mims’ and my feedback on it in a new iteration in the afterschool program where the
currently teach in a large Southern California public school district. At the end of Level Two,
they said their goal for the future is to be “designing curriculum and testing out like experiences
when it relates to as it relates to the classroom or any environment that can be turned into a
classroom.” In other words, they are aiming to do the same kind of education research we did
together for this study.
Mims began and ended the study as a working teaching artist with an impressive
interdisciplinary portfolio and a range of contacts with arts educators around the world. She
developed her ability to facilitate play and games as part of this practice. Multiple participants in
the study thought her Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game should be used in classrooms;
for example, Nathann discussed how it could be used in Socratic seminars. Mims and I have had
extensive conversations about how this could happen. When Madu was playtesting the game,
they improvised additional scaffolding they suggested adding to it in order for it to support the
high school students in their afterschool program, and improvised (role played) a demonstration
of how they would teach with it. Mims also created a prototype of a unit-long critical
worldbuilding curriculum incorporating the game, which I analyzed as part of the study data, and
we are drawing from this study’s findings to apply for grants together to develop this prototype
into a digital platform. She said the current education system teaches people how to follow
directions based on what currently exists, and she wants people to imagine something different to
break that mold.
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In the game jam, these participants and I designed, played, and learned together as fellow
teaching artists. This demonstrates the relevance of participatory game design research to critical
teacher education. The study also helped me define my own vision as a teaching artist as I
applied to teach in university-level game design programs. Future studies could involve arts
educators – including people who teach game design – conducting game and curriculum jams
together, posing research questions about our pedagogical and design practices and how to
iteratively improve them.
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Appendix O: Level Two Prompts and Process
Dear critical game jam participants,
As we mentioned this summer, we are going to have a second round of the Critical Game Jam
where you share your work on the games you began to imagine this summer, and give each other
feedback on them.
Based on your questionnaires and responses to my emails this fall, I am assuming that it will be too
hard to coordinate our schedules to do another week of synchronous workshops. So instead, we are going
to do this second round of workshops asynchronously so you can each work within your own
schedule and whatever sense of time feels best for you.
The second round will involve creating videos documenting your games (or playable
prototypes if you can), sending these to the group, and then giving each other feedback on them. At
the end, you’ll reflect on the overall process through final questionnaires and self-video
interviews. If you complete all aspects of the projects listed below you will receive another $100 to
compensate for your time and effort. What you create might be included in the ongoing research
we are doing around critical game literacy and Afrofuturist development.
So far I have been sensing there is not much interest in synchronous workshops to co-work on your
games or to think through design issues together. If you are interested in that, please let me know and I
can facilitate some sessions. I haven’t heard back from folks at Unity about workshops on digital
prototyping and technical skills, but I’d be happy to share what I know if you want some 1:1 or small
group tutoring around Unity and C# coding; I can also point you to helpful online resources. If you have
any questions, concerns, or suggestions, please let me know. Also, I’d be happy to be a reference or to
write a letter of recommendation if you are currently applying to jobs or graduate school.
Thanks again for your participation so far, and I’m looking forward to learning more about your games
and your design process!
In solidarity,
Matthew, in consultation with Dr. Brendsha Tynes and CELDtech.
Critical Game Jam Level Two: Detailed Instructions
A. By July 1, 2022, please create a 10-40 minute video pitch expressing your idea for a game that
challenges systemic oppression and contributes to Black liberation/ abolitionism.
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This could be any kind of game, it doesn't have to be a video game. This is a pitch to your community
(e.g. friends, family, fellow gamers, classmates, activists, people who share cultural and political affinities
with you, etc.). It is not a pitch to video game industry executives, and you do not need to focus on
making the game marketable in the current capitalist society. Think about what kind of game you would
make if you were not limited by the current system.
Please include the following elements in your video:
A1) Your experience goal(s) for your game: what you want players to experience as they play
A2) Any concept art, design documents, or prototypes you have made of the game. If possible, please
submit a playable prototype with instructions for how to download and play it (I recommend zipping it
and uploading it to Google Drive). If that is not possible, you could submit a video of yourself interacting
with a prototype you are working on, and a description of your design process. Or you could include a
video of how you would go about making such a prototype in the future if you had the necessary team,
resources, time, etc. Remember, a prototype can be a very rough version of a small part of your game
showing a core mechanic or interactive concept; it does not have to have polished art or audio.
A3) If your game includes narrative and worldbuilding, please describe its world: how is it different from
our current world? How do people inhabit it? How do they meet their needs and their desires? How do
they make decisions and navigate conflict? How does it embody Black liberation/ abolitionism? For
example, how does it draw on Black history and the freedom dreams of past movements? How do Black
people learn and develop in ways that express their joy, aliveness, and full humanity? How does it build
on Black peoples’ technological ingenuity, possibly including forms of spirituality? Please give us a taste
of what the world looks like and sounds like even if you don’t have it all designed yet - you can include
concept art sketches or artistic references from other media to give a sense of what you have in mind.
A4) What would need to change in society to make it possible to fully produce, distribute, and play your
game widely? Describe a near-future world where your game can be produced and played well, where it
would be fun and people would be interested in it. What would we need to do in the short term to make
that world a reality?
A5) What longer-term changes in society do you hope your game can help you make (e.g. ending police
and prisons, slowing global warming). After people play your game, what would they be able to do in the
real world? How would your game help them liberate themselves and their communities from
oppression? In particular, how would your game contribute to movements for Black liberation/
abolitionism? How might it support Black people in learning and developing, in ways that express their
joy, aliveness, full humanity, visions of future selves, or liberated Afrofutures? We recommend using the
Afrofuturist Development Framework as a guide to presenting your ideas on this question.
A6) Please end with some questions you would like people to answer as they give you feedback
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Please send this video work to Matthew at [email redacted] and I will share it with everyone else
participating and will match you up with someone to give you feedback. You can either send one large
video or a series of smaller ones in a Google Drive folder.
If you need additional time beyond the deadline, please let us know early on so we can plan
accordingly. The main reason for having a deadline is to make it easier to coordinate giving feedback to
each other.
B. Please watch at least one other person’s pitch video(s) and give them feedback. I will assign you
someone to make sure everyone gets feedback, so if you have a preference for who you want to engage
with please let me know. If they uploaded a playable game, please video record yourself playing it
and thinking out loud as you do, similar to what you did when you played Kai UnEarthed this
summer. Then video record yourself giving them feedback on their work, including the following:
B1) Please identify moments when you experienced (or imagined experiencing) the experience goal the
designer set. What elements of the game supported that experience? What elements got in the way of it?
What could be improved to further meet this goal?
B2) Please give them feedback on their prototype or concept art/ design documents. Based on what you
see so far, how are you imagining the game? What do you notice about it? How would you describe it in
your own words?
B3) Reflect on the world of their game, and imagine linking it to the world of your own game. For
example, you could:
-identify something in their game that would be a positive fantasy for characters in the world of
your game
-identify something in their game that would be a nightmare for characters of your game
-identify characters in their game who could become friends with characters in your game. What
about the two worlds are compatible enough for them to connect like that? What would they do together?
-identify characters in their game who would become enemies with characters in your game.
What would cause conflict between them?
-imagine ways the world of their game might be a hallucination for characters in your game,
similar to how our world today was a hallucination for the characters in Kai UnEarthed.
B4) Reflect on what they said would need to change in society over the short term for them to be able to
produce and distribute their game. If possible, connect that to changes that you think would need to
happen to make it possible for you to develop and release your own game. Then discuss what we could do
together to make those changes in society.
B5) Reflect on the broader and longer-term social changes the designer wants to make through their
game. Describe ways you imagine their game supporting these changes, and suggest any other ways their
game might help them make these changes that they may not have imagined themselves. Please focus
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particularly on how the game might contribute to movements for Black liberation and the creation of
liberated Afrofutures.
B6) Please do your best to answer any of the questions the designer asked you if you haven’t already
B7) Please read the Afrofuturist Development framework, which you can download here. Please note
aspects of the design you are giving feedback on that are consistent with the principles of this framework
- please give direct quotes or descriptions of visuals from their game when possible. Then please note
ways that the design could be improved in future iterations to embody more aspects of the framework.
Please send this video to the designers and to Matthew ([email redacted]). Again, you can break it into a
series of smaller videos in a Google Drive folder if you prefer.
C. Please fill out a final post-game jam questionnaire we will send out, similar to the one you did
this summer
D. Please send a video answering some final questions we will send, prompting you to reflect on
the overall process of the critical game jam. This will be similar to the one you sent reflecting on the
summer sessions, but shorter. We will send you questions to answer closer to that moment.
Once Matthew receives all four parts of this project ( A, B, C, and D ) , we will send you a $100 gift
card similar to the last one we sent to compensate you for your work.
In addition, please let Matthew know if you are willing to help curate and analyze these videos (and
creations from the summer game jam) for presentation online and at possible conferences, festivals, or in
publications. This is not required for receiving the compensation, but the game jam is a participatory
process and the end result will be much stronger if we collaborate on it together.
We are thinking of making some of the videos available on a Youtube channel and some of the playable
game prototypes available on https://itch.io/ Please let us know if you have any other suggestions for
how to share your work.
In the summer, you signed paperwork regarding your work in the game jam, and how we might share it
publicly. All of that paperwork will apply to this new set of activities and videos as well, and I emailed
you copies to review if you want. If you have any questions or concerns about this, please contact [email
redacted]

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Good luck with your design process, and please reach out if you want to brainstorm ideas, get feedback,
or strategize about technical issues. I’m here to support you, and I hope you can support each other as
well.

303
Appendix P: Participant Profiles for the Cohort of Young Adults

304
Cam Wade (they/them and
he/him)

Age: 21

Race: Black/ African
American

Gender: Non-Binary

Highest parental degree:
High School
Cam was an English and Gender Studies major at Mercer
University, taking critical media literacy classes. They served
on student government, where they were on a subcommittee in
charge of implementing cultural education, equity, and
awareness events on campus. They also served on the
interfraternal council as director of Diversity, Equity, and
Inclusion, “gauging attitudes and culture” in the fraternities and
designing workshops to implement more equitable and
inclusive processes. They participated in debate and won Top
Speaker two years in a row focusing on arguments around how
anti-blackness “magnifies and operationalizes” patriarchy and
sexism within processes of racialization; they received feedback
saying they are “a friendly debater, but I'm also very committed
to just like opening up the space and allowing people like time
and space they need to say the things they like want to say,
especially like Black individuals since um I am Black.”

Games they play: role-playing games such as Persona 5,
Dragon Age, The Tales Of franchise, Final Fantasy, and the
like.

Why they wanted to join the game jam: “I am looking at
pursuing a PhD in media studies to be able to focus analyzing

305
video games as a form of cultural production vis-à-vis critical
game studies. Participating in this workshop would help me
significantly because I want to be an academic-practitioner,
meaning I want to critically analyze and think through games,
while at the same time being able to create my own video
games to see the kinds of video games that I think are necessary
for thinking through various systems of oppression.”

306
Cecilia (they/them)
Age: 26

Race: mixed white/Mexican

Gender: non-binary

Highest parental degree:
Graduate School
Cecilia has a lot of community organizing experience with LA-
based abolitionist and social justice organizations

-They have done abolitionist design work with Jail Bed Drop
and other projects, and did animation for the Afrofuturist film
Neptune Frost.

Games they play: mostly board games

Why they wanted to join the game jam: “I am working on an
abolitionist game with Brianna Mims and co. and would love to
gain some game design skills! “

307
Gabriel (he/him)
Age: 25

Race: self-identifies as
Latino (Brazilian) and
seems to also identify with
the Black community in
Brazil. In a Zoom breakout
room, he said how in Brazil
he is considered Black but
in other places he is not.

Gender: Man

Highest parental degree:
Graduate School
Gabriel lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil. At the time of the 2021
sessions he was a game development student at Unisinos. He
had studied three years of geography at a public university, then
got a job and enough money to pay for a private school degree
program in game development. He wanted to be a 3D digital
game artist but he also still longed to teach critical geography.
He was involved in organizing to prevent Bolsonaro’s right-
wing coup attempt: “last year, and the beginning of this year
was something completely crazy here. Like we have almost a
civil war in Brazil, things were quite messy.” He thought that
the pressures of this situation made it hard to participate fully in
the Critical Game Jam, but he also drew inspiration from these
struggles in his participation.

Gabriel taught himself to speak English; he had not spoken it in
“many years” before the game jam. He encouraged people to
ask him for clarification if needed, and people encouraged him
to ask them to pause and clarify as well.

Games he plays: action-adventure genre games

Why he wanted to join the game jam: “Because I really believe
in the necessity of the subject of the game jam.”

308
Jomih (they/them)

Age: 22

Race: Black

Gender: Non-binary

Highest parental degree:
High school

Self-identifies as a person
with disabilities.

Jomih said “I was born and raised in LA and have experienced
police brutality multiple times throughout my 22 years.” They
were active in organizing against police brutality and they used
digital literacy skills to build affinity around intersecting
identities and liberation movements in online spaces.

Games they play: Minecraft, GTA, Animal Crossing, Sims,
Overwatch. They particularly enjoy open world games with
few objectives.

Why they wanted to join the game jam: “I would like to
participate in this workshop for one because I’m curious about
the future of gaming and how race and the gaming world can
overlap and also because I constantly dream of a world that was
described in the posting and I am overly joyed to experience
such.”

Right before the game jam they had a bad experience with
“fake organizations within LA,” especially on a project where
Black participants were treated insensitively during the George
Floyd rebellion. Because of that, they said they were
“hyperaware and hypercautious about how I work with people

309
especially non-black or white individuals or, um, cishet
individuals.”

310
Light Bird (they/them)
Age: 22

Race: Afro-Multiracial

Gender: AFAB
13
; non-
binary

Highest parental degree:
Graduate School
Light Bird (pseudonym) was an undergraduate studying the
social contexts of science and technology an Ivy League
university. They said “I lived with like a variety of
intersectional identities. I’m multi racial often read as Black.
I’m non-binary and pansexual. I identify as neuro diverse. I
have experience with trauma um I have a pretty textured with
familial background um and was raised by uh disabled
individuals… My father and my fathers father both put their
lives on the line for human right they grew up in the apartheid
state and my that’s my that’s my paternal line. And my
maternal line, they are hippies and um they were dealing
marijuana, street doctors or something.”

Games they play: checkers, mahjong, chess, Super Smash Bros
on Wii, Mario Kart on Wii, Pokémon Ruby Red on GameBoy,
Homescapes the app. They said “I’d love to explore more
games but haven’t had the financial means or resources to do
this! “

Why they wanted to join the game jam: “I would like to
connect with bright minds who see the utility in engaging
diverse perspectives when creating games. I’d like to learn
more about the critical thinking behind game development and

311
game theory. I’d like to feel empowered to use game and tech
development to be a more informed citizen and a more
engaging student-educator.”

13
AFAB is an acronym that stands for “assigned female at birth”

312
Madu (they/them)

Age: 21

Race: Black

Gender: Man (this is how
they self-identified in 2021,
but it might have changed
by Level Two because they
used they/them pronouns at
that time)

Highest parental degree: 2-
year college, Graduate
School

Madu was a USC film production student who grew up in the
Inland Empire in California (Ontario). Their cultural
background is Nigerian, and they have training in documentary
film and producing. In their application they said “I tried to
imagine a Black Utopia 2020 summer after speed reading a
bunch of Black speculative works. I based it off of Soul City,
Floyd McKissick attempt at a real Utopia in North Carolina. I
worked with an architect to try to design what that place would
actually look like. I wrote short stories that fit into the imagined
world. The process of imagining this world was liberating.”

Games they play: Indie VR art games. They also watched
playthroughs of Stanleys Parable and The Beginners Guide.

They joined the game jam because: “I have never been in a
virtual playground with people that want to build towards a
Black utopia. I am excited to experience this form of freedom
space.”

Mims (she/her)

Race: Black

Mims is an artist, abolitionist, and facilitator from Jacksonville,
Florida based in Los Angeles. She has trained and performed in
many different dance forms for several years. Her work, which
spans across the disciplines of fashion, dance, advocacy,

313
Gender: Woman facilitation, curation, and direction, is rooted in self and cultural
explorations, healing, and shifting culture alongside policy to
create sustainable change. She experiences the body as a site of
liberation and uses that information as a guide for organizing,
facilitation, and all of the art she creates. Mims is a graduate of
the University of Southern California where she studied Dance
and NGO’s and Social Change. She was involved in the Jail
Bed Drop abolitionist art project before imagining and leading
development of the Untitled Abolitionist Worldbuilding Game.

Games she plays: The Sims and tabletop worldbuilding games

She joined the game jam to playtest her game and improve it
based on feedback.

Her portfolio can be found here:
https://www.bjmims.com/about

314
Nathann (he/him)
Age: 21 years old

Race: Black

Gender: Man

Highest parental degree: High
School

Nathann was a computer science game design student at UC
Santa Cruz; he had taken critical literacy classes like Madeline
Lane McKinley’s “Critique of Everyday life” and critical game
studies classes with Micha Cardenas. He was a senior at the
time, applying to jobs in the game industry and to graduate
programs in game studies/ game design. He has done game
jams before at UCSC. Nathan runs the Thought Essay YouTube
channel which connects game experiences to “real life
experiences,” “communicating the legitimate theme that is
important for other people to know or is important for me to
know.” He was already doing thematic analysis of his critical
game literacy learning experiences, so his pre-and post-videos
felt less like answers to interview questions and more like video
essays in their own right.

Games he plays: Action-Adventure games like God of War, The
Last of Us, Infamous, etc. He also plays alternative games like
Celeste and the Long Dark to learn new game mechanics.

Why he wanted to join the game jam: “The willingness of these
workshops to incorporate critical analysis into the fundamental
process of world creation is what excites me the most.”

315
Reginald (he/him)
Age: 22

Race: African American

Gender: Male
Highest parental degree: High
school, 2-year college, 4-year
college
Reginald was a game design student at the University of Washington
doing an internship in the game industry. He has participated in game
jams in the past. In his Zoom background during the game jam he had
an image of a character it looked like he might have designed. He
likes horror movies and games, including dystopian portrayals of the
future like Black Mirror.

Games he plays: First- and third-person shooter games, “grinding
games”

Why he wanted to join the game jam: “I'm applying for jobs in game
development and I could use an opportunity to expand my portfolio.
I've also wanted to make a game like this for a while now.”

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Asset Metadata

Creator Coopilton, Matthew W. (author)

Core Title Critical game literacies and Afrofuturist development

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Urban Education Policy

Degree Conferral Date 2023-08

Publication Date 08/03/2023

Defense Date 05/01/2023

Publisher University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag abolitionism,Afrofuturism,Afrofuturist development,computational media,connected gaming,constructionism,critical digital literacies,critical game literacies,critical literacies,design principles,design-based-research,education psychology,game design,game-based learning,Games,Interactive Media,Learning and Instruction,learning sciences,literacies,media literacy,OAI-PMH Harvest,sociocultural theory,video games,videogames,young adult learning

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tynes, Brendesha (committee chair), Corwin, Zoë (committee member), Garcia, Antero (committee member)

Creator Email criticalgameliteracy@gmail.com,mwhamilt@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC113296568

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