New publication: Game Making, Hacking and Jamming

In this article, recently published in the Behavioral Sciences journal, Paul Wake and Chloé Germaine establish the affordances of game making, hacking, and jamming as critical practices in teaching and research. They explain the origins of this approach in specific teaching and research projects and consider their impact on scholarly practice. First, they interrogate the value of game making through a project in which students at the Manchester School of Architecture were tasked with exploring questions relating to Britain’s post-war power infrastructures through the creation of games (in place of traditional essays). These games were subsequently used to share research with the public. Second, the authors develop the concept of game hacking in relation to research practice, discussing its use as a way of creatively investigating designing for sustainability and as a practice for imagining alternative climate futures. Finally, the authors move from game hacking to a consideration of jamming through reflections on a participatory research project with young people, which sought to understand how board game play could support their climate action. There, game hacking became an anarchic process that enabled young people to interrogate the world and develop critical frameworks for speaking out about their experiences. Using game making in the HE classroom led the authors to employ hacking as a research method, which in turn prepared them to recognise and value the anarchic jamming that emerged in the participatory project with young people. That jamming experience has subsequently transformed how the authors approach both teaching and research, making them more attentive to moments of apparent unproductivity.

Keywords:

creative methods; higher education; research methods; critical design; critical literacy; game design; hacking; playful learning

This article represents research results from Work Package 6, Hacking Games to Reimagine Production.