Teacher: Björn-Ole KAMM
Course Code: JK53001
This course engages with game design as a tool for transcultural learning and making research experienceable.
Educational game esign falls under labels like serious gaming or game-based learning so that the underlying approach seeks to create safe and immersive learning environments where the fun supports deep reflection and awareness-raising. The instructor has co-created games about social withdrawal (“hikikomori”) and neurominorities, where participants could learn through first-person experiences but metaphorically about the challenges of these groups with mainstream society. This course builds on the design principles behind these projects.
Taking cues from relational materialism and a transcultural approach to studying culture as ordering difference, this course offers a framework for analyzing societal actors, ranging from individuals to institutions and creating educational games about the interactions of these actors. The goal is to understand the decision-making as well as the mechanisms, embodiments, and performances employed by actors to reach their goals. Such goals and strategies are always in conflict with other ordering attempts, thus, always limited. Of interest are such orderings that actors are able to sustain and, of course, where they fail.
The picture of agents making a move and others a counter move, so that the outcome is not random chaos but that still no one has complete control, the metaphor of society or culture as some kind of game, framing social interactions as a game, asks to be taken seriously. Thus, this class includes a group project of designing a gaming simulation about a social or cultural conflict of the participants’ choosing, such as a card game about tourism and taxes or a role-play about climate change denial.
The course primarily addresses JDTS and MATS first-year students of the SEG and VMC foci. The course requires students to participate actively, do regular written homework, and occasionally work in teams.
Course Information
Module: Research and Advanced Studies
CATS Requirements: BA 3rd. year or above
Link to course material on PandA.
Day/Period: Wed/4
Location: 2演/Sem. 2
Credits: 2
Course Goals
First and foremost, students will learn step-by-step protocols for critically reading existing literature and studies, followed by a framework for analyzing cultural phenomena by focusing on describable attempts of ordering (discourses, institutions, embodiments) that produce these phenomena. Guided through the structured design process, students will learn to co-creatively design gaming simulations about the phenomena they have studied.
Course Schedule and Evaluation
For a detailed course schedule, please visit KULASIS or PandA.
To JDTS/MATS students: This course can be taken as either a reduced (4 ECTS) or a full seminar (8 ECTS). Please indicate your ECTS requirement to the teacher.
Students will have much flexibility in gaining points through various tasks they need to fulfill during the semester, such as actively guiding the discussion, translating course material into their own understanding, or presenting a topic in class. Evaluation depends on the number of fulfilled quests. For 8 ECTS, however, the term paper dungeon needs to be cleared.