WHO: Mikael Jakobsson (MIT Comparative Media Studies / Writing, MIT Game Lab), Richard Eberhardt (MIT Comparative Media Studies / Writing, MIT Game Lab)
WHAT: The Challenge
As part of MIT’s Media Lab, the MIT Game Lab runs workshops and teaches classes around the world on topics amplifying voices of underprivileged communities. We are proposing a series of workshops with researchers and communities focusing on board, card, and role-playing games that center the fight against oppression by designers representing historically oppressed groups including women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
WHY: Motivations & Intentions
Global history and culture are active playgrounds in these games, with varying amounts of respect given to the portrayed histories and cultures, largely affected by misconceptions in historical thinking and Western European bias. But there is a growing number of designers and developers challenging these misconceptions and mythologies head on. There is a global community of fans, designers, publishers, educators, historians, content creators, and other practitioners who advocate for playing historical games together critically. Online content creators in particular serve as critical counterpoints to game play, with lectures and panel discussions that pose questions around whose history and culture is represented, as well as how it is represented in-game through game mechanics and systems, visual representation, and outside of the gaming marketing and the greater gameplaying community itself. All of these community practitioners are actively playing with global history in a way that is only possible through games and is often best done with other people. This is a rich site for exploration that we want to pursue systematically and in dialogue with Global Humanities Initiative members in historical and cultural studies.
HOW: Methods & Tools
- Community Building and Education
- Host workshops that center around play as a primary activity, with discussion, interpretation, and ideation/design of new games as follow on research activities
- Audience engagement
- Develop wider audience for this multi-year study of board games and colonialism, workshops around cultural engagement in game design and game jams (game creation events)
- Connect academics with industry and greater community
HOW CAN I JOIN? Activities & Events in 2025
- May 2025: Field-defining Workshop: Games against Oppression
- Bring game designers from different countries to MIT to share their work with the MIT community and brainstorm about how to “change the game” in political and social hegemonies
- Fall 2025 and January 2026: Two Workshops on Game Creation
- Focus on diplomacy, peace-making, and cultural exchange
For further details, contact the project leaders.