Community, Socialisation, and Empowerment in Cultural Game Jams with Youth Citizens

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.34190/ecgbl.18.1.2812

Keywords:

cultural game jam, youth citizens, transdisciplinary, epistemic collaboration, empowered participation

Abstract

This paper examines social and collaborative elements of Cultural Game Jams developed and implemented in the large-scale Europe Horizon research and innovation project, EPIC-WE: Empowered Participation through Ideating Cultural Worlds and Environments (2023-2026). The project explores and develops transdisciplinary collaboration and co-creation across cultural heritage institutions, creative industries, higher education institutions, and youth citizens (ages 16-25) towards Cultural Game Jam interventions across three European sites: Óbidos (Portugal), Hilversum (Netherlands), and Aarhus (Denmark). The Cultural Game Jams are held at cultural heritage sites and are aimed towards value-sensitive game design and youth empowerment. This paper explores Cultural Game Jams as a potential format for enabling and developing youths’ empowered participation, communality, and cultural socialisation by analysing the first Cultural Game Jam (2024). Framed by a Design-Based Research methodology and guided by experimental and short-term ethnography and design experiments, the analyses draw from qualitative empirical material, e.g., interviews, participatory observations, field notes, and the Cultural Game Jam participants' reflective process and design documentation. The analyses illustrate how co-creating games within cultural heritage contexts can develop youth perceptions of community, cultural socialisation processes, and individual/collective empowerment. Furthermore, the paper offers insights into the co-creation of games as new expressions of cultural heritage through epistemic collaboration and cultural participation in game jams while discussing possibilities for enabling new experiences of empowered participation, social learning, and community among youth citizens.

Author Biographies

Kim Holflod, Aarhus University

Kim Holflod is a postdoc at The Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, and an assistant professor at University College Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds a PhD in playful higher education, and researches playful and relational methodologies and pedagogies, speculative futures in higher education, and collaborative practices across disciplines and sectors.

Rikke Toft Nørgård, Aarhus University

Rikke Toft Nørgård is an associate professor at The Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, whose research focuses on the complexities and interrelationships of higher education, theory and philosophy, hybrid education, speculative design, and higher education futures. Nørgård is the project coordinator of the Horizon Europe project EPIC-WE (2023-2026).

Eva Eriksson, Aarhus University

Eva Eriksson is an associate professor in Interaction and Experience Design at Aarhus University, with a PhD in Interaction Design from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. Principal investigator in several research projects at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Child-computer interaction, interaction design, participatory design, and public knowledge institutions.

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Published

2024-10-07