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This article details a large-scale curricular design project in creating and implementing an MS/PhD in “Critical Game Design.” Curricular design and critical scholarship in the analysis and design of games are co-constitutive. Institutional structures build individual and institutional capacity, they legitimize scholarship, define boundaries of expertise, and contribute to imaginations of disciplinary purview. We reflect on what is at stake beyond the discipline itself in wider digital culture, particularly the spread of disinformation, related growth of anti-academic sentiment, and testing of the foundations of democracy. We examine our own complicity and articulate the space of the games classroom as a site of potential transformation.

How do materials and making come to matter in the messy practices of feminist teaching? This Lab Meeting shares examples of interdisciplinary work in feminist making and teaching across a range of contexts (AI portraiture, printmaking, quilting, musical performance, game design, theater, storytelling, and more) to extend the discussion of materials in feminist thought, a topic of long-standing importance in the field. As a group of theorist-practitioners, the contributors to the Lab Meeting share an interest in bridging the conceptual and material via a scrappy mode of making and inquiry that does not seek to remediate chaos but rather engage it, in all its complexities. Each contributor captures multiple interpretations of mess, making, storytelling, and education from a feminist perspective. Together, they offer insights into the liberatory promise of material engagements.

This article examines historical examples to illuminate a prehistory of the interactive reader in analogue media, tracing a rich genealogy that is helpful for understanding and designing current works such as augmented reality (AR) books. In addition, a set of generative design strategies to help shape current practice are discussed, based both on formal qualities and characteristics of historical examples and the authors’ own experiences as designers working in mixed reality over many years. Theoretical framing is provided to persuasively make the case for the relevance of historical works for designers today. From medieval manuscripts, to Renaissance medical texts, to seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century movable books, to the elaborate paper engineering of twentieth century and contemporary pop-up books, the history of the active reader and interactive book design is long and fascinating, and is presented here as an important and direct source of inspiration for digital designers today. Finally, recent interactive book projects designed by the authors are discussed and analyzed for both continuities and disruptions of historical interactive book design strategies, and a framework is presented for conceptualizing the postdigital interactive reader today.

Games are trouble. As faculty members in a Game Development program we are aware of the troubles. As inside–outsiders, given our status as queer women in the male-dominated Games field, both with interdisciplinary art-tech-humanities backgrounds as opposed to STEM, we are the ones commonly tasked with ‘fixing’ these troubles. This tasking comes to us in the form of both assumptions and requests about our providing particular types of education to others, both faculty and students, as fixes to Game-troubles: teaching the gender module; sitting on an LGBTQ+ committee; advising a particular student who is also outside the more comfortable purview of Games; and so forth. While our labor is often assumed, it is not fully valued, evidenced by the ways in which it is chronically under-resourced. And, given this lack of sustainability, our labor is not effective in the ways we intend. Often, our fixes only serve to a fix ourselves, further cementing us as outsiders. Our fixes are diluted until they become performative gestures, absolving others of the need to act, but changing little else. Acting ‘in a fix’ is something we no longer wish to do. Instead we untangle and re-tangle in a new way, drawing on the work of Feminist New Materialists (Ahmed, 2008; Alaimo, 2016; Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Barad, 2011; Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Coole and Frost, 2010; Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012; Grosz, 1994; Kirby, 1997) to develop imaginative new models for a more just and joyful future Games pedagogy. We share not only our research on this topic, but also invite you into our own intimate experiences of play-making, foregrounding this as knowledge-making too. We offer these crossings between text and context, history and future Ahmed, 2008, memory and fiction as a speculative fabulation for future Games pedagogies. CC BY 4.0First Published February 22, 2022Corresponding Author: Rebecca Rouse, Department of Game Development, University of Skövde, Kanikegränd 3A, Skövde 541 28, Sweden. Email: rebecca.rouse@his.se

Drawing on the experience of a multiyear research project bringing transformative pedagogies to game design education, we provide a critical reflection on the lack of sustainability of the project. Upon examination, we see that some reasons behind this perceived failure are due to institutional systems of power that seek to neutralize transformative feminist pedagogy as performative repair, resulting in the maintenance of existing curricula. Instead of fully engaging with transformative pedagogies, these teaching and learning methods are used as tools to provide a cursory fulfillment of the deep need for social justice education in games. We examine the ways in which structures and systems continually devalue and de-resource pedagogical work, specifically pedagogies that are centered in feminist, anti-racist, and critical approaches, as well as our own complicity within these oppressive structures at times. We draw connections with relevant disciplinary perspectives on higher education, and conclude by offering a framework for understanding the pitfalls that can hamper work with transformative pedagogical aims, characterized by the types of labor used to maintain the status quo, as well as a set of recommendations for moving beyond the frame of repair to sustainably and radically disrupt dominant pedagogies in games and related disciplines. CC BY-NC-NDCatalyst is a Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) affiliated journal.

The nature of ‘reading’ different types of texts, across all media, is fundamentally beholden to the concept of ‘literacy’. The concept of literacy is well established in media studies – from books, to film, and visual, performing and interactive arts – and as such it has a wide range of applicability. All forms of media constitute a semiotic milieu in which signifiers and codes mean different things depending on the form’s unique language and the contexts and manner in which individual participants, or “readers”, approach them. In the field of digital games research, literacy is commonly defined as a narrower concept that refers to the ability to identify affordances and interact with game components with a high degree of confidence. This focus on capability is understandable to a degree: the unique aspect of games as a medium is often considered to specifically be its interactability, and thus being able to interact becomes synonymous with being ‘game literate’. In this paper, however, we will both describe how literacy in games would benefit from a more nuanced, transhistorical view of interactability, as well as provide examples from many kinds of media beyond games to demonstrate that interaction literacy is neither novel nor unique to the medium of games. Understanding this rich history would provide a broader foundation of referential literature for game scholars to use when discussing the concept of game literacy and the interactability of media in general. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).

As digital technologies have become more integrated in museum and cultural heritage contexts over the past decade, digital museums enter a new phase of coming into their own. This opens up opportunities for the incorporation of cutting-edge multiplayer gaming technologies and immersive mixed reality (MR) systems. To support nuanced and original engagement with the newly pervasive nature of the digital in museums, an interdisciplinary group of international researchers, designers, and museum professionals have established a new network: the Designing Digital Heritage Network (DDHN). The network operates to support research, design production, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the development of innovative new pedagogies and programs to ‘design’ the postdigital curators of the future. This paper outlines the mission and vision of the DDHN, and suggests initial directions for future research in the postdigital heritage field focused on interdisciplinary, performative, and game design approaches to production and exhibition.

We explore design strategies for mixed reality (MR) in relation to Milgram's definition, which has been central to its development in the past 20 years. We argue for the need to rethink the technical focus of this definition in order to capture the experiential dimensions of MR and offer a humanistic framework for a growing class of experiences that we label MRx. We list three characteristics of MRx applications (esthetic, performative and social) and provide a context for the three subsequent articles in this special issue.

In this article, we bring together the lenses of media studies, performance studies and social interaction offered in the other essays in this special issue and discuss their collective contribution towards a more nuanced understanding of MRx. We illustrate this capacity by a brief critical review of a recent MRx environment: Megaphone. We suggest how the lenses can also contribute to a design vocabulary for future MRx experiences.

This article provides one component of a new interdisciplinary, humanities-based framework for MRx design and criticism along with Engberg and Bolter's article, “MRx and the Aesthetics of Locative Writing and JafariNaimi's article, “MRx as a Participatory Platform. As defined in the introductory article for this series, MRx experiences are conceptualised as site-specific; hybrid; and aesthetic, performative and/or social. This article develops a performance studies and theatre history perspective on MRx. By outlining historical examples relevant to contemporary MRx practice, a set of best practices are derived. These strategies are conceptualised as central questions, which are then applied in the analysis of four examples of recent MRx works, along with suggestions for how these strategies may be used during the design process.

Given mixed reality’s (MR) unique status as an emerging medium that incorporates both the physical and the virtual in hybrid space, it is a particularly interesting field in which to study the design process as a whole, and interactive narrative design in particular. How prominently does story figure in MR design? What kinds of stories are being told? As MR tools become more accessible, the field is opening up to a wider variety of practitioners. However, the full breadth of methods and techniques being brought to bear in design for MR has not yet been studied. This paper presents findings from an interview study with fifteen leading MR designers, and describes the multiplicity of approaches they use. These approaches are presented as a matrix, composed of a opportunistic—deterministic spectrum (based on designs planned in advance vs. improvisation), and a storytelling—sensationalizing spectrum (based on designs aimed at narrative creation vs. development of a sensory experience).

This analytic brief presents the results of a quantitative analysis of the socioeconomic characteristics of the beneficiaries of international remittances in Guatemala. The analysis is based on household survey data from the 2014 Encuesta de Condiciones de Vida (ENCOVI, for its Spanish acronym), which was carried out by the National Institute of Statistics of the Republic of Guatemala. The survey has a sample size of 11,536 households (54,822 individuals) and is representative at the country, urban and rural level as well as for all departments of Guatemala.

This analytic brief presents the results of a quantitative analysis of the socioeconomic characteristics of the beneficiaries of international remittances in Honduras. The analysis is based on household survey data from the 2014 Encuesta Permanente de Hogares de Propositos Multiples (EPHPM, for its Spanish acronym), which was carried out by the National Institute of Statistics of the Republic of Honduras. The survey has a sample size of 5,593 households (24,023 individuals) and is representative at the country level as well as for urban and rural areas. The survey covers all departments of Honduras except for Gracias a Dios y Islas de la Bahia.

This analytic brief presents the results of a quantitative analysis of the socioeconomic characteristics of the beneficiaries of international remittances in El Salvador. The analysis is based on household survey data from the 2013 Encuesta de Hogares de Propositos Multiples (EHPM, for its Spanish acronym), which was carried out by the General Directorate for Statistics and Censuses (DIGESTYC, for its Spanish acronym) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs of El Salvador. The dataset is made up of 21,086 households (81,865 individuals) and is representative at the national, departmental, urban, and rural levels, as well as for the San Salvador Metropolitan Area and the country's 50 largest municipalities1. The high standards for quality applied to the design and implementation of the EHPM allow for disaggregated analyses of the characteristics of remittance beneficiaries and reliable comparisons between the remittance beneficiary segment and the population at large. The statistical analysis for this brief was performed using the standardized version of the EHPM dataset contained in the Inter-American Development Bank?s Harmonized Household Survey Databases for Latin America and the Caribbean (also known as Sociometro-BID).