playing---ideas (reboot)

playing---ideas

"TUTORIAL"


who still plays videogames?


525,600 minutes. How do you measure, measure a year?

RENT


With 3.2 billion people who play videogames (mobile, console, PC), there are more people playing videogames than users on Tic Tok and X combined as well as the number of Facebook profiles and YouTube users. In 2020, Steam1 reported that over 31.3 billion hours were spent playing Steam games2 – that's more than the watch time for the top 10 hits on Netflix in 2022 (~29 billion hours).

In addition, over 25 exabytes (one billion gigabytes equals one exabyte) of videogames were downloaded on Steam. There are 1.2 trillion Google searches in a year. Some math:


1 Google search = 1 megabyte (assumption)

1,000,000,000 trillion megabytes = 1 exabyte

Then, it follows that 25 years of Google searches would equal the size of videogame downloads in 2020 alone. There are more games downloaded today. This is one reason we focus on videogames as a way to play with critical theory.



1 Steam is one of the largest online platforms for purchasing and playing digital videogames.

2 This neither includes console (Play Station, XBOX, Nintendo) nor other online videogame platforms such as Epic Games, Humble, and GOG.

videogames are distractions
pedagogical3 openings

We wonder about videogames as spaces of action and reflection – praxis – upon the world in order to change it.4

  • In what ways can "fake" games discuss "real" issues?

  • What can pixelated games teach us about navigating a world where trauma is incessantly aired in the highest resolution?

  • In what ways can we (continue to) question and refuse education's choreographed apparatuses of coloniality, its methodologies, its origin stories (ife, 2021) via pixelated videogames?

Engaging in compelling counternarratives5 in videogame form, we witness the ways videogames fuse with critical theories to encourage dialogues on social phenomenon such as race, capitalism, colonialism, surveillance, and technology.



3 Pedagogy is a way of teaching

4 This is a reference to Paulo Freire's 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which positions students as not merely knowledge bank; rather, each student comes to learning with their own unique experiences, which can resonate in envisioning a just society

5 A counternarrative is a narrative the counters a dominant "master" narrative/ Quick example of this is the "Columbus discovered America" as a dominant narrative with Indigenous origin stories refuting discovery claims as counternarratives. A more technological example is the belief in technology innovation for convenience solutionism. Ruha Benjamin counters this in her book "The New Jim Code" demonstrating a simultaneity effect: there is innovation in new ways to confine communities. Counternarratives are essential to conceptualizing resistance strategies and dialogues.

new game+6



Our intent is to continue with a "new game+" to curate a living, accessible online archive of multimodal resources to share ideas via videogames. This "living" online archives is filled with videogames from Game Jams and our pixelated games, radio show episodes with independent videogame developers as well as digital magazines to further inspire community projects that continue to center equity and social justice for collective impact.



6 A "new game+" (pronounced "new game plus") refers to the option to play a game again after completing the main story and seeing the credits. "New game+" may transfer the learnings (legendary items too) from the first playthrough to a "new game." With all of these additional advantages and insights, the new game is called "new game+."