Games & tech for education and social change
Recently I was lucky enough to chat to Rosemary Murphy from the ABC about playing miniature games – specifically Bolt Action, in an article about the Australian Bolt Action teams travelling to the UK to compete in the World Team Championships this year! Australia has two teams competing this weekend – good luck!
You can read the article in full here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-26/miniature-tabletop-game-bolt-action-world-championship-event/105204998
Last week Erik Champion and I were honoured to Co-Chair DiGRA Australia, the national games research conference.
It’s the first time the conference has been held outside of the Eastern states and we were so proud to host here in Adelaide! Thanks so much to all our wonderful volunteers from UniSA, Flinders and UoA who really made the conference come alive!
As well as a traditional track, the conference also featured an Experimental Track with lots of games and demos on display for attendees to play.
This month I was lucky enough to be featured in The Bunyip (the Gawler area’s local newspaper)’s Humans of Gawler section by the amazing Daniel Down, about growing up in the Gawler area and creating games!
We even found the time to chat about Life (Re)Sounding and some of the ways in which it communicates some of the challenges growing up neurodivergent in a world made for neurotypical people. Thanks for the chat!
Photo Credit goes to Daniel Down: https://www.instagram.com/djd79/?hl=en
We are proud to announce that the 2025 DiGRAA National Conference will be held from Wednesday, February 5 to Friday, February 7, at the University of South Australia, City West Campus in Adelaide. Registration is free, and all are welcome!
Get your tickets here: https://events.humanitix.com/digraaustralia-2025-national-conference
Event Details:
Hosted by DiGRA Australia and the University of South Australia, this three-day hybrid conference invites game researchers, critics, designers, developers, artists, and enthusiasts at any career stage to come together and engage with the diverse and dynamic world of Game Studies. This year’s theme, “Communities of Practice and Play,” focuses on the roles, experiences, and cultures surrounding games and gameplay. Both in-person and online participation options are available, making the conference accessible to all interested in hearing about, and discussing games, players, and gaming culture.
What to Expect: Attendees will experience a range of presentations, interactive discussions, and engaging exhibitions. Alongside traditional talks, the Experimental Track will showcase creative, interactive works—from digital games to tabletop card games that invite hands-on exploration.
Highlights Include:
Important Information:
Recently, my colleague Dr Michele Jarldorn and I were lucky enough to write a chapter for the wonderful book Ludic Inquiries into Power and Pedagogy in Higher Education edited by Ameilia Walker, Helen Grimmett and Alison L. Black.
There are so many amazing chapters in this book, written by so many cool people and discussing games’ interactions with social power, and the different ways in which games and play impact higher education and social learning.
Our chapter was titled Cards Against Academia: Playing the game of ‘opportunities’ through a feminist friendship lens and for this chapter we created the first iteration of a card game exploring promotion in academia, and playtested it together. The abstract is below:
Abstract:
This chapter explores the experiences of two early career female academics through game design, development, and game play. The work seeks to challenge and disrupt the conventional norms of academia by exploring the competitive dynamics of working in higher education through the lens of care and feminist friendships. The game, Cards Against Academia, deploys various game design mechanisms to demonstrate structures of inequality and systems of oppression women in academia experience. The chapter uses duoethnography as a method to think through alternative activist possibilities for women to work in collaboration and proposes that this feminist activism of care is a politically disruptive activity.
Recently, we were lucky enough to have some wonderful news articles released discussing our game Life (Re)Sounding. One of my favourites recently was this article published by The Canberra Times by Katelyn Catanzariti.
The article really captures some of the ways in which the game has been designed to communicate aspects of neurodiversity whilst acknowledging that every neurodivergent person is unique. I particularly loved this quote in the article from Sarah Langston, president of the Australian Neurodivergent Parents Association:
“I think anything that supports the development of empathy and real connection with the neurodivergent experience is useful, because I think what we often see is a lack of people ‘getting it’. It takes it away from the abstract and into the personal.” – Sarah Langston
If you’re interested, you can read the article in full on the Canberra Times website: https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8777111/video-game-builds-empathy-for-neurodivergent-experience/
I have recently completed a Professional Certificate of Neurodivergent Affirming Practices through the wonderful DivergAntz Collective.
The course explored “Neurodivergent Affirming Practice, Autism, ADHD, Neuroception (the brain), Sensory Registration, Profiles and the impact of sensory registration on coping strategies and maintaining a state of regulation”.
I found it really useful, the most interesting thing for me was exploring the research and sources behind the concepts and ideas explored. Thanks to the DivergAntz team for creating such an awesome course!
If you’re interested in completing the course – which I highly recommend! You can check it out here: https://divergantz.com.au/education
Digital Creativity – Special Issue: “Creative Digital Escape Rooms”
Special Issue Editors: Erik Champion, University of South Australia, erik.champion@unisa.edu.au and Susannah Emery, University of South Australia susannah.emery@unisa.edu.au
While they are increasingly popular in urban settings, digital escape rooms can be experienced physically, digitally, virtually, or in hybrid form, inside or outside (Lucarelli 2019), or a combination of both. Their potential as learning environments has been well-researched (Makri, Vlachopoulos, and Martina 2021; Charlo 2022), as has their potential for a range of domains: engaging audiences with museum and gallery collections (Smith 2017; Antoniou, Dejonai, and Lepouras 2019; Back et al. 2019; Schaffman 2017), showcasing tourism attractions (Pakhalov and Rozhkova 2020) or even visualising big data (Lior 2020).
They have also been used to test educational techniques (McFadden and Porter 2018; Karageorgiou, Mavrommati, and Fotaris 2019; Pozo-Sánchez, Lampropoulos, and López-Belmonte 2022) and allow the training of unlikely skills and concepts, such as computer programming (Yllana-Prieto, González-Gómez, and Jeong 2023). They can integrate analogue and digital content (Krekhov et al. 2021), exist purely in the virtual realm (Pozo-Sánchez, Lampropoulos, and López-Belmonte 2022), or combine human-driven, mechanical or “smart” interaction and sensory devices (Karageorgiou et al. 2021).
But what makes a creative digital escape room? How can creative experiences be shared? How can creative content be explored and appreciated? How can creative decision-making, insight, and teamwork be fostered and encouraged? Are there digital escape rooms that allow themselves to be creatively reframed, reconfigured, or otherwise modified or extended?
We are equally open to submissions on hybrid (digital and physical) escape rooms, virtual escape rooms, and escape rooms that redefine, provoke or extend stereotypes and conventions of escape room design.
Examples include but are not limited to:
Creative content, creative design, creative user input, or creative experiences arising from digital escape room design;
The implications of different genres, platforms, equipment or the mode of delivery on creative engagement;
Trends, relationships, and influences relating to digital escape room design;
The dynamic relationships between tools, interaction, surroundings, and environment;
Design tools and design methods;
Historical, pedagogical, and/or auto-ethnographic accounts of digital escape rooms;
Critical reflections and interventions on the relationship of digital escape rooms, changing social phenomena, culture, and creativity;
Accounts and analyses of engagement and evaluation of digital escape room experiences.
Submission requirements:
Submission to this special issue is a two-stage process. Authors interested in contributing are invited to submit an extended abstract (500 words) for review. The extended abstract should include the following information: (1) Name of author(s) with email addresses and affiliation, if applicable, (2) Title of the paper, (3) Body of the abstract, (4) Preliminary bibliography, (5) Short bio(s). Please email abstracts directly to the editors listed below. Authors whose abstracts are accepted will then be invited to submit a full paper (up to 7000 words). Full papers will then be double blind peer reviewed for acceptance into the special issue. Note that acceptance of an abstract alone does not imply acceptance for publication in the journal. Upon acceptance of the abstract, you will be sent further authors’ guidelines based on the Digital Creativity guidelines (Instructions for Authors) at https://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/NDCR.
Important Dates
Abstracts due: January 13, 2025;
Full papers due: March 31, 2025 – full essays due via ScholarOne;
Final versions due: June 30, 2025– deadline for final/revised articles;
Expected publication: End of 2025.
Submission method Please send extended abstracts as PDFs or any questions to erik.champion@unisa.edu.au and cc susannah.emery@unisa.edu.au
References
Antoniou, Angeliki, Marios Ilias Dejonai, and George Lepouras. 2019. ‘Museum escape’: A game to increase museum visibility. Paper presented at the Games and Learning Alliance: 8th International Conference, GALA 2019, Athens, Greece, November 27–29, 2019, Proceedings 8.
Back, Jon, Svante Back, Emma Bexell, Stefan Stanisic, and Daniel Rosqvist. 2019. The quest: An escape room inspired interactive museum exhibition. Paper presented at the Extended Abstracts of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts.
Charlo, José Carlos Piñero. 2022. “The Rise of Educational Escape Rooms: Designing Games as Formative Tasks.” In Handbook of Research on the Influence and Effectiveness of Gamification in Education, 143-63. IGI Global.
Karageorgiou, Zoi, Eirini Mavrommati, and Panagiotis Fotaris. 2019. Escape room design as a game-based learning process for STEAM education. Paper presented at the ECGBL 2019 13th European Conference on Game-Based Learning.
Karageorgiou, Zoi, Konstantinos Michalakis, Markos Konstantakis, Georgios Alexandridis, and George Caridakis. 2021. Smart Escape Rooms for Cultural Heritage: A Systematic Review. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the European Conference on Games-based Learning.
Krekhov, Andrey, Katharina Emmerich, Ronja Rotthaler, and Jens Krueger. 2021. “Puzzles Unpuzzled: Towards a Unified Taxonomy for Analog and Digital Escape Room Games.” Review of. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5 (CHI PLAY):1-24.
Lior, Solomovich. 2020. “Studying big data using virtual escape rooms.” Review of. International Journal of Advanced Statistics and IT&C for Economics and Life Sciences 10 (1):23-30.
Lucarelli, Vissia. 2023. “Creating an Escape Room in a Heritage Site.” Accessed 12 July 2023. https://www.museumnext.com/article/creating-an-escape-room-in-a-heritage-site/.
Makri, Agoritsa, Dimitrios Vlachopoulos, and Richard A Martina. 2021. “Digital escape rooms as innovative pedagogical tools in education: A systematic literature review.” Review of. Sustainability 13 (8):4587.
McFadden, Colin, and S Porter. 2018. Augmented reality escape rooms as high-engagement educational resources. Paper presented at the ICERI2018 Proceedings.
Pakhalov, Alexander, and Natalia Rozhkova. 2020. “Escape rooms as tourist attractions: Enhancing visitors’ experience through new technologies.” Review of. Journal of Tourism, Heritage & Services Marketing (JTHSM) 6 (2):55-60.
Pozo-Sánchez, Santiago, Georgios Lampropoulos, and Jesús López-Belmonte. 2022. “Comparing Gamification Models in Higher Education Using Face-to-Face and Virtual Escape Rooms.” Review of. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research 11 (2):307-22.
Schaffman, A. 2017. “Escaping the Mundane: Using Escape Rooms in a Museum Setting.” In MuseumNext: RISK. Melbourne, Australia: MuseumNext.
Smith, Amanda. 2023. “How to get millennials into your Museum with escape rooms.” MuseumNext, Accessed 12 July. https://www.museumnext.com/article/get-millennials-museum/.
Yllana-Prieto, Félix, David González-Gómez, and Jin Su Jeong. 2023. “The escape room and breakout as an aid to learning STEM contents in primary schools: an examination of the development of pre-service teachers in Spain.” Review of. Education 3-13:1-17. doi: 10.1080/03004279.2022.2163183
Our game Life Resounding has been released in Beta state! You can access it through the links below if you’re interested, we would love to hear your thoughts.
Life (Re)Sounding is a short game/interactive 5 track music album created using Unreal 5 and the MetaMidiToolkit. It is designed to raise awareness of how hard it is to exist as a neurodivergent person in a neurotypical world, by encouraging players to engage with slices of life of a neurodivergent person thrust into a world that was built for neurotypical people.
If you’re interested in finding out more about our game, you can watch the video below:
Recently my colleague George and I were lucky enough to speak to Channel 10 News about the work we are doing on Life Resounding.
The game is currently in Beta state meaning there might still be some bugs or issues that need to be ironed out. We would love if you could help us find them! If you like you can play the game for free on itch.io: https://likeglassgames.itch.io/life-resounding
I’m looking forward to speaking at the Games for Change Asia-Pacific Festival in Melbourne on the 4th of October! Together with Samuel Whiting we’ll be speaking about our game vignette LifeResounding designed to raise awareness of growing up neurodivergent in a world created for neurotypical people.
We would love to see you there! You can learn more about Games for Change Asia Pacific and see the schedule here: https://g4capac.org/festival-2024/
