When we engage with games and play, what do we learn? This seemingly simple question has revealed itself to be startlingly complex. Digital games and play are an increasingly ubiquitous and integrated part of our lives. Whether it’s learning a language or trying to navigate an educational platform, people are making game-based choices every single day.

Playful Engagements is a workshop series and forum designed to make these processes of games-based learning more visible and explore how games are being used as teaching and research tools. Each workshop features talks by experts directly involved in using pedagogies, research methods or design practices heavily influenced by games and play. After a talk providing a walkthrough of the speaker’s chosen game-based methodology, attendees will engage in a play session featuring a diverse range of games. Each session ends with a group discussion and optional survey.

Please join us!

Playful Engagements Team

Alexander Ross

Dr. Alexander Ross

Assistant Professor, Univerity of British Columbia, School of Information

I am a critical communications scholar, with a focus on media theory and the political economy of communication. My research is interdisciplinary and focuses on how communication systems and infrastructures impact the development of new media industries and cultural production. My research has mainly focused on digital platforms and the role they have played in expanding the popularity, reach, and influence of highly volatile contingent commodities. The next phase of my research is grounded in broader questions of contingency and ephemerality in media and communication, exploring these issues within a critical Indigenous context.

Bryn Shaffer

Bryn Shaffer

PhD Student, University of British Columbia, School of Information

I am a PhD student at the UBC School of Information, and graduate fellow with the UBC Critical Play Lab. My research explores video games in critical pedagogical and research contexts with a focus on user engagement, anti-capitalism, and Horror. In particular, my work examines how video games engage with the social, environmental, and labour impacts of late-stage capitalism.

Funding

This project is funded by a Catalyzing Engaged Digital Scholarship Grant (CEDS) from Scholarship in the Arts (DiSA) and the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia.