Playful by Design 2021

Games @ Illinois: Playful Design for Transformative Education

 

The Games @ Illinois: Playful Design for Transformative Education Initiative supports the growing number of projects and programs across the University of Illinois campus that are seeking to work at the dynamic intersection of play, immersive technologies and interactive design.

Beginning with our new interdisciplinary undergraduate minor in Game Studies and Design, we are working towards a suite of academic certificate and degree programs that will establish Illinois as the locus for innovative game studies research and transformative game design. Creating an interdisciplinary game studies community and supporting games and apps that have been created at Illinois will also put the university in a strategic position to attract external partnerships and become a national leader in these fields.

The faculty members in our game studies community come from all across our campus, with intersecting research and teaching interests which include the development of virtual, augmented and extended reality technologies, the design and evaluation of playful learning environments and classroom pedagogies, and the study and design of games. We understand ‘games’ most broadly to include interactive media intended for entertainment, education, and social transformation, data-driven simulations for social science and STEM research, and humanities-and-arts-focused interactive narratives, performances, and visual expressions.

Playful by Design 2021 Symposium

The 4th Annual Playful by Design Interdisciplinary Game Studies Symposium is underway!

See the Symposium Overview, and check out the schedule!

IPRH Research Cluster

Playful by Design
Interdisciplinary Games Studies @ Illinois

  • 2017-2018

    During the 2017-2018 academic year, with the support of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH)  the Playful by Design: Gaming Pedagogies, Digital Literacies & the Public Humanities Research Cluster mapped the perimeter of an interdisciplinary game studies community comprising faculty, staff, and students from more than a dozen units around campus who make a play games, people who teach game design, use gaming pedagogies in the classroom, develop digital learning environments and virtual worlds, and do research on games, gaming and gamers from every possible disciplinary angle. Inviting members of the CU community to join us, we visited playful spaces across campus, sharing experiences, research and ideas.

    IPRH Playful by Design Research Cluster organizers:
    Judith Pintar, jpintar@illinois.edu
    Randy Sadler, grsadler@illinois.edu

  • 2018-2019

    In our second year as an IPRH Research Cluster, we changed our subtitle to reflect the central, focused goal that emerged from last year’s reflections. We will be moving towards transforming our community into an Interdisciplinary Game Studies Network combining existing and new academic programs, campus events, and research initiatives. We recognize the need to provide to our students training in the kinds of collaborative and interactive design work that, along with other digital fluencies, will be increasingly necessary for the employment opportunities of the future, and not just for students who want to work in the game industry itself.

    Image of Dan Cermak talking about board games to an attentive crowd.

Playful by Design was initiated with the support of
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH)

Foundational Themes

IPRH Research Cluster Playful by Design 2017-2019

  • Themes

    In its second year as an IPRH Research Cluster, Playful by Design began working on proposals for a variety of game studies and design related courses and academic programs. We organized the 2nd Annual Interdisciplinary Game Studies Spring Symposium that built upon the excitement of the first. But we didn’t lose sight of our original guiding themes of Empathy, Fluency and Inclusion.

  • Empathy

    We are faced as educators with the task of helping our students come of age in a world increasingly marred by racism, intolerance, greed, and grotesque inequalities. How can games and playful educational spaces, both online and off, be designed to facilitate empathy and emergent solutions to complex social problems?

  • Fluency

    The need to support students in the attainment of multiple fluencies becomes more, not less, important in the age of the internet since social media has reproduced our cultural silos, while the world’s problems and its solutions are all global in scope. How can playful pedagogies facilitate translation, and the attainment of digital, cultural and linguistic fluencies?

  • Inclusion

    Can encouraging and supporting educators at multiple levels in the teaching of game authorship and design diminish the class divide between creators and consumers of digital media? How can public humanities projects, including collaborative game development, be designed to foster empathy, civility, and social justice in our society?