Introduction: Toward Critical - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Introducción: Toward Critical
Game Design
James Malazita, Casey O’Donnell

Games and Design
En 2003, Brenda Laurel, game designer, researcher, and founder
of the women-centered Purple Moon game production company,
edited Design Research: Methods and Perspectives, a field guide for
aspiring interactive designers.1 The colorful volume approached
design practice and research systemically and featured theoretical
framings and interviews and reports from the field. These writings
covered an array of design activities, including gathering user feed-
atrás, ethnographic and photographic methodology, techniques for
material practice, and moving ideas and products through organi-
zations and within cultures and communities. The volume was
notable not only for its collection of diverse professional voices and
author identities but also for its conscious efforts at bridging games
and interactive design with the broader fields of design practice and
theory. Like the practices of engineering design before it,2 juego
development’s contemporary origins as an extension of the STEM
disciplines (en este caso, computer science and programming) y
the overlaps between game design and the “design disciplines,"
such as industrial design, architecture, and graphical arts, eran
minimal at best, often sharing only the nomenclature of “design”
and a practice that produced “stuff” as its outcome.3 In the preface
for the Design Research volume, media theorist Peter Lunenfeld notes
the need for the new “design cluster” of the 2000s to develop shared
though heterogeneous methods to “[participar] in the redefinition
of the design process away from the stand-along object and into the
integrated system.”4 Furthermore, echoing the calls of twentieth-
century design theorists László Moholy-Nagy, Henry Dreyfuss, y
Sir Christopher Frayling, Lunenfeld argues that the needed inte-
grations of critical and political reflection, historical context, socio-
logical and anthropological perspective, and interrogation of power,
as well as the general weaving of theory and practice, are sorely
missing in the “younger” interactive media design disciplines.5 “De-
sign research,” Lunenfeld argues, “can save the newest members of
the profession from the solipsism of youth—the never-ending al-
lure of exclusively designing for yourself and your friends.”6

Brenda Laurel, ed., Design Research
Métodos: Methods and Perspectives
(Cambridge, MAMÁ: CON prensa 2003).
James W. Malazita, “Translating
Critical Design: Agonism in Engineering
Educación,” Design Issues 34, No. 4
(Otoño 2018): 96–109.

3 Harvey Molotch, Where Stuff Comes
De: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars,
Computers and Many Other Things
Come to Be As They Are (Oxfordshire:
Routledge, 2004), 10-dieciséis.
Peter Lunenfeld, “The Design Cluster,"
in Design Research Methods: Métodos
and Perspectives, ed. Brenda Laurel
(Cambridge, MAMÁ: CON prensa 2003), 11.
Lunenfeld, “The Design Cluster,” citing
László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision:
Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design,
Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture
(North Chelmsford, MAMÁ: Courier
Corporation, 2012) 11; Henry Dreyfuss,
“Visual Communication: A Study of
Symbols,” SAE Transactions (1970):
364–70, 79; and Christopher Frayling, On
Craftsmanship: Towards a New Bauhaus
(Londres: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012).
Lunenfeld, “The Design Cluster," 13.

https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_e_00702

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James W. Malazita and Korryn Resetar,
“Infrastructures of Abstraction: Cómo
Computer Science Education Produces
Anti-political Subjects,” Digital Creativity
30, No. 4 (2019): 300–12; and Nassim
Parvin and Anne Pollock, “Unintended
by Design: On the Political Uses of
‘Unintended Consequences,’” Engaging
Ciencia, Tecnología, and Society 6
(2020): 320–27.
“AAA” is a games industry term that
describes large-scale, typically expensive
projects developed and released by major
publishers like Electronic Arts. These are
the Hollywood “blockbusters” of the
games world.
Jennifer DeWinter, Carly A. Kocurek, y
Randall Nichols, “Taylorism 2.0: Gami-
fication, Scientific Management and the
Capitalist Appropriation of Play," Diario
of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 6, No. 2
(2014): 109–27; and Carly A. Kocurek,
Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting
Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
10 Ver, Por ejemplo, Tracy Fullerton, cris
Swain, and Steven Hoffman, Juego
Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyp-
En g, & Playtesting Games (Boca Raton,
Florida: CRC Press, 2004); Mary Flanagan,
“Creating Critical Play,” in Artists Re:
Thinking Games, ed. Ruth Catlow, Bagazo
Garrett, and Corrado Morgana (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2010), 49–53;
Mary Flanagan, Daniel C. Howe, y
Helen Nissenbaum, “Values at Play:
Design Tradeoffs in Socially-Oriented
Game Design,” in Proceedings of the
SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems (2005), 751–60;
Mary Flanagan and Anna Lotko, “Anxiety,
Openness, and Activist Games: A Case
Study for Critical Play,” in Proceedings of
the Digital Games Research Association
International Conference (2009); Mary
Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum, “A
Game Design Methodology to Incorpo-
rate Social Activist Themes,” in Proceed-
ings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems (2007),
181–90; and Katherine Isbister, Cómo
Games Move Us: Emotion by Design
(Cambridge, MAMÁ: CON prensa, 2016).
11 Sebastian Deterding, “The Pyrrhic Victory
of Game Studies: Assessing the Past,
Present, and Future of Interdisciplinary
Game Research,” Games and Culture 12,
No. 6 (2017): 521–43.

Nearly twenty years later, the gaps that Laurel and Lunen-
feld identified between games and design remain. Games training
and early professionalization still largely occur in the context of
computational science programs, where concerns of usability, cul-
tura, and politics—even when they are taken seriously—are treated
as tertiary skills or foci, generally outside of the game developer’s
purview.7 Although public and internal playtesters form part of the
backbone of AAA development,8 playtesting and user testing are
often used instrumentally for bug-finding and balancing quality as-
surance, rather than as part of a recursive, co-designer or stake-
holder-led iterative design process. While game design practices
themselves have not progressed much in terms of thinking system-
ically about the effects of their products, the games industry has cer-
tainly shifted toward a systems-building model. From partnering
with or being acquired by companies like Microsoft and Facebook
(Meta) to using gaming technologies to build digital ecosystems that
determine content accessibility and farm data from users, juegos
will change collective futures of labor and of play. Our glimpses of
these futures have thus far confirmed Lunenfeld’s worries, con
“metaverse” spaces displaying dull techno-masculinist fantasies of
the future of office work, while ignoring the vibrant histories of col-
lective participation in persistent digital spaces.9

On the academic side, game production and critique have
developed into thriving research communities, but ones that are
largely siloed from each other, despite critical work by foundational
games scholar-designers such as Tracy Fullerton, Mary Flanagan,
and Katherine Isbister.10 Sebastien Deterding has described the cur-
rent formations of games in the academy as a Pyrrhic victory: el
success of scholars in the 1990s of establishing games as legitimate
objects of study means that “games studies” need no longer be its
own subdiscipline or community of scholars.11 Instead, games schol-
ars, bound by the epistemic, political, and institutional boundaries
of the academy, are incentivized to produce scholarship in forms
that are knowable and legitimate by their institutions. The easiest
way to do this, Deterding argues, is for researchers to cast their
games scholarship in the forms and vestiges of more established
disciplines, such that games and game design become the objects
or instruments of study, rather than the vehicles or processes of
investigación. The Gamesfield thereby reproduces the production/criti-
cism split. Tenure and job search committees, already concerned
with the disciplinary and epistemic fit of games candidates, son
likely to discount production work by scholars in the humanities
and social sciences, and inversely, critical work by scholars in the
computational sciences and development. Researchers in game
production face challenges when articulating the impact of colonial,

Problemas de diseño: Volumen 39, Número 1 Invierno 2023

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race-based, and gendered legacies of their “purely technical” field.
En cambio, researchers in games criticism risk being accused of
“selling out” when attempting to practice scholarly and political cri-
tique through game production.

Deterding has posited the incorporation of design methods
as a way to muddle through these epistemic and institutional ten-
siones, though this model is also fraught. Without thinking critically
about institutions as designed, a design-centric games curriculum
may only reinforce the modularized, consilience model of under-
graduate games education,12 one where students take courses in pro-
gramming, letras, and writing spread across different departments
and cultures on campus, perhaps complimented by a few interdis-
ciplinary games production classes.13 The modular framework mir-
rors the capitalistic models of the now-idealized “T-shaped” STEM
alumno,14 whose depth of expertise can be freely plugged into spe-
cialized labor slots, but surface-level understanding of multiple
subjects provides for agile or other flexible models of employment
that sustain hollowed-out businesses and institutions. Además,
although Deterding notes that design research has always featured
practical material engagement and its “critical corrective,”15 design
research has admittedly long struggled to bridge critical and polit-
ical work with its industry-facing curricular apparatus. We are thus
left with epistemic and institutional arrangements that not only con-
tinue the split between design research and games, and between
critical analysis and production, but also systematically limit the
ability to account for dimensions of power, carrera, género, capacidad, y
empire across our development practices.

Toward Critical Game Design
What is needed, we argue, are epistemic practices, material inter-
ventions, and institutional and noninstitutional systems that work
toward the deep synthesis of game design, cultural critique, y
reflective design research practices. These critical game design prac-
tices, like the research practices of Lunenfeld’s design cluster, would
necessarily be heterogeneous and in conversation with a longer his-
tory of critically engaged work.

Hasta la fecha, the use of the term “critical” in the design fields is
as varied as the fields themselves. Interaction designers Jeffrey and
Shaowen Bardzell categorize critical design as deriving from three
separate but overlapping intellectual traditions.16 First is the “capi-
tal C” Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, Marxist social scien-
tists and philosophers writing under the growing shadow of Euro-
pean fascism in the early twentieth century. For Frankfurt School
thinkers, particularly Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, el
entwinement of the state and capital through cultural industries

12 Georgina Born, “For a Relational Musicol-
ogia: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond
the Practice Turn: El 2007 Dent Medal
Address,” Journal of the Royal Musical
Asociación 135, No. 2 (2010): 205–43.
13 James Malazita, Rebecca Rouse, y

Gillian Smith, “Disciplining Games,"
Game Studies.

14 Emily York, “Doing STS in STEM Spaces:
Experiments in Critical Participation,"
Engineering Studies 10, No. 1 (2018):
66–84; Kathryn A. Neeley and Bernd
Steffensen, “The T-Shaped Engineer as
an Ideal in Technology Entrepreneurship:
Its Origins, Historia, and Significance for
Engineering Education,” in 2018 ASEE
Annual Conference & Exposition (2018).
15 Deterding, “The Pyrrhic Victory of Game

Estudios," 537.

16 Jeffrey Bardzell and Shaowen Bardzell,
“What Is ‘Critical’ About Critical
Diseño?,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI
Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems (2013), 3297–306.

Problemas de diseño: Volumen 39, Número 1 Invierno 2023

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led to new forms of social and ideological domination.17 A new Crit-
ical Theory, which combined formal conceptualizations of social
structure with linguistic, psychoanalytic, and semiotic readings of
literary studies and psychology, was needed to account for popular
culture and mass-produced ideology that traditional Marxist
thought was ill-equipped to diagnose. The Bardzells’ second trac-
ing of “critical” is more broadly encompassing of a long arc of
political and interpretive analyses of text, arte, diseño, and society,
contemporarily evidenced by such fields as science and technology
estudios, feminist analysis, and queer theory. Finalmente, “critical de-
sign” as developed and coined by industrial designers Anthony
Dunne and Fiona Raby casts a large umbra over criticality in design
contexts.18 As opposed to the more sociological and literary tradi-
tions in critical theory, critical design represents a material, specu-
lative, and internalist critique of the capitalist and market-driven
logics of industrial design in the academy and focuses on the cre-
ation of objects and exhibitions that stimulate debate or call into
question fundamental assumptions about the role of design in the
human world. Although Dunne and Raby have made explicit calls
for the contrary, “critical design” has become something of a short-
hand for multiple kinds of material design practices that reject or
question the field’s consumerist orientations.19

The influences of these three traditions are overlapping and
fraught across the design fields. Whether critical theory and read-
ings deserve a place in design education, and whether they substan-
tively change how design students imagine their practice and pur-
view are still open questions. Both the effectiveness and the politics
of critical design have been called into question, with Cameron
Tonkinwise, among others, arguing that Dunne and Raby’s specific
imaginations of critical design reinscribe the classist and neoliberal
values they claim to reject—that critical and speculative designs
are more about building a designer’s brand than acting in service
of better futures.20 Similarly, there remains the question of how
deeply integrative critical design practice and critical inquiry actu-
ally are, with Matt Malpass arguing that even in critical design, crit-
ical theory is often applied “strategically and sporadically, usando
concepts for inspiration and explanation rather than attempting to
construct a complete and internally consistent argument.”21

Design’s tensions between critical analysis and material prac-
tice, as well as their relative merits in the institutions and goals of
the discipline, echo in game design and game studies as well. Many
researchers find themselves at the intersection of “studying” and
“making” games. Many did or do so at their own precarity. El
fields and departments in which they find themselves working have

17 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer,

“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass Deception,” in Philosophers on Film
from Bergson to Badiou, ed. Christopher
Want (Nueva York: Columbia University
Prensa, 2020), 80–96.

18 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Specula-
tive Everything: Diseño, Fiction, y
Social Dreaming (Cambridge, MAMÁ: CON
Prensa, 2013).

19 Matt Malpass, Critical Design in Context:
Historia, Teoría, and Practice (Londres:
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).

20 Cameron Tonkinwise, “How We Intend to
Future: Review of Anthony Dunne and
Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything:
Diseño, Fiction, and Social Dreaming,"
Design Philosophy Papers 12, No. 2
(2014): 169–87.

21 Malpass, Critical Design in Context, 11.

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 39, Número 1 Invierno 2023

very specific metrics that often fit more squarely in the “studying”
aspects of their work. Only as they are able to establish themselves
are they able to justify the “making” components of their work. En
some respects, this is also the cause of the division between the
“social scientists”/“humanists” and those working more in the
realm of human-computer interaction or HCI. This is why, to a
great degree, much critical design work is motivated by critical
work in the humanities and social sciences. They form a somewhat
symbiotic kind of relationship. All of this is to say, yet again, eso
this is precisely why it is important to establish a field of critical
game design.

Academics and artist-designers Lindsay Grace and Mary
Flanagan have experimented with “critical play” and “critical game
diseño,” respectively, as a way of using forms of play and game
mechanics to engage players in critical dialectics.22 Flanagan’s
work interrogates play at large as reality-making, in that our social
and material worlds are shaped by the forms of play we practice in
a ellos. In addition to producing her own works that challenge as-
sumptions of what it means to play—such as a giant Atari-style joy-
stick that requires several collaborating players to use—Flanagan
documents public critical arts practices as examples of playing with
the social. While these pieces often take the form of performance
arts or “culture jamming,” such as the media hoaxes developed by
the Yes Men, Flanagan also traces digital games-based cultural
intervenciones, such as Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal’s Night of Bush Cap-
turing: Virtual Jihadi,23 a mod—of an Al-Qaeda mod—of an inde-
pendent game celebrating the Iraq War. Aquí, the “critical-ness” of
play emerges through what Alex Galloway calls “art gaming,” the
use of gaming technologies to create critical or subversive inter-
active experiences.24 A unifying factor in these kinds of critical
intervenciones, Galloway notes, is that games and gaming technolo-
gies serve as the medium for political intervention, rather than as
the mechanism. The primary qualities of intervention are aesthetic,
with the remixing of gaming technologies serving to achieve those
aesthetic purposes.

Grace’s critical design work centers gaming-specific inter-
actions and mechanics as the site of critical intervention and ex-
plicitly draws on Dunne and Raby’s version of critical design. Grace
begins by deconstructing game mechanics, revealing how the
procedural rhetorics operating in games spaces are shot through
with political power. Al hacerlo, Grace’s design work inverts
these mechanics to call attention to their underlying social and
political ramifications. His game Bang! replicates first-person
shooter tower defense gameplay, where a player must locate and

22 Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical
Game Design (Cambridge, MAMÁ: CON
Prensa, 2009); and Lindsay Grace, “Critical
Gameplay: Design Techniques and Case
Estudios,” in Designing Games for Ethics:
Modelos, Techniques and Frameworks, ed.
Karen Shrier and David Gibson (Hershey,
Pensilvania: IGI Global, 2011), 128–41.

23 Wafaa Bilal, Shoot an Iraqi: Arte, Life
and Resistance Under the Gun (san
Francisco: City Lights Books, 2013).
24 Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays
on Algorithmic Culture (Mineápolis:
University of Minnesota Press,
2006), 107.

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 39, Número 1 Invierno 2023

25 Grace, “Critical Gameplay," 138.
26 Lindsay D. Grace, “An Introduction to

Black Games, Blackness in Games,
and Otherness,” Black Game Studies
(Morrisville, CAROLINA DEL NORTE: Lulu, 2021), 2.
27 Petri Lankoski and Jussi Holopainen,

Game Design Research (pittsburgh, Pensilvania:
ETC Press, 2017).

28 Ver, Por ejemplo, Rebecca Goodine

and Rilla Khaled, “Ctrl+ R: Reflections
on Prompting Reflective Game Design,"
in Proceedings of the Digital Games
Research Association International Con-
ference (2019); Rilla Khaled, “Questions
Over Answers: Reflective Game Design,"
in Playful Disruption of Digital Media, ed.
Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath (Singapur:
Saltador, 2018), 3–27; Paolo Pedercini,
“Videogames and the Spirit of Capital-
ismo,” La Molleindustria, Febrero 14,
2014, https://www.molleindustria.org/
blog/videogames-and-the-spirit-of-capi-
talism/; Miguel Sicart, Beyond C: El
Design of Ethical Gameplay (Cambridge,
MAMÁ: CON prensa, 2013); Bo Ruberg, "No
Fun: The Queer Potential of Video Games
that Annoy, Anger, Disappoint, Sadden,
and Hurt,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ
Worldmaking, No. 2 (2015): 108–24; y
Bo Ruberg, “Kissing for Absolutely No
Reason: Realistic Kissing Simulator,
Consentacle, and Queer Game Design,"
in Video Games Have Always Been
Queer (Nueva York: New York University
Prensa, 2019), 110–32.

29 Laureline Chiapello, “Epistemological
Underpinnings in Game Design
Investigación,” in Game Design Research:
An Introduction to Theory & Practice, ed.
Petri Lankoski and Jussi Holopainen
(pittsburgh, Pensilvania: ETC Press, 2017), 15–33.

30 t. l. taylor, “Beyond Management:

Considering Participatory Design and
Governance in Player Culture,” First
Monday (2006), https://doi.org/10.5210/
fm.v0i0.1611.
Ingrid Burkett, Una introducción a
Co-design (Sídney: Knode, 2012).
32 Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders and Pieter Jan
Stappers, “Co-creation and the New
Landscapes of Design,” CoDesign 4,
No. 1 (2008): 5–18.

33 Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice:
Community-led Practices to Build the
Worlds We Need (Cambridge, MAMÁ: CON
Prensa, 2020).

34 Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders and Pieter
Jan Stappers, “Probes, Toolkits and

eliminate enemy soldiers sneaking through brush. Sin embargo, upon
successfully defeating an enemy, the game pauses and plays a
slideshow of that soldier’s life, from growing up, to falling in love,
to accepting their ultimately fatal mission. The goal of the game,
Grace argues, is to use mechanics to reveal games’ “duplicity of val-
ues”;25 en este caso, the ludic need for the player to take the enemy
soldier’s narrative and history seriously to view him as a threat—
but only up to the point of death, when that narrative must be for-
gotten for the player to not feel guilt or remorse. Grace’s practice has
also worked to highlight Blackness in design, in terms of the iden-
tity of game designers and in incorporating Black experiences and
an orientation toward community building in the narratives and
mechanics of gameplay.26

The object-centered approach to criticality in game design,
where the designed game operates as a provocative or otherwise
normative text that aims to reorient its players, serves as a common
approach across Flanagan’s, Grace’s, and Bilal’s work. Arguably, el
centering of the game artifact or of the game maker as auteur fig-
ure has been the dominant paradigm of critical game production
since about 2000. Petri Lankoski and Jussi Holopainen have de-
scribed as “conceptual” or “autobiographical”27 the object-centered
design processes of artists like Paolo Pedercini, creator of the anti-
imperialist Phone Game; the moral and ethical design strategies
developed by Miguel Sicart; the emotive and affective game de-
signs traced by Katherine Isbister; and queer game designs explored
by designers and scholars Rebeca Goodine, Rilla Khaled, and Bo
Ruberg.28 As Laureline Chiapello traces, the design epistemologies
that influence game design practices, even critical ones, ha sido
those that have tended to frame the gamic artifact as a mode of com-
municating the intentions, emotion, or messaging of a design prac-
titioner to their intended players/users.29

Drawing on calls by other researchers,30 games also saw a
shift in the 2000s toward codesign,31 participatory design,32 y
community-led design33 practices in established design disciplines,
critical game design practitioners have begun questioning the
boundaries of designer and player as well as the notion that play-
ers/users engage with a designed artifact only at the completion of
its design. Codesign methods invite users and other stakeholders
into the design process earlier—ideally, during the moment of prob-
lem definition that shapes the goals and directions of the project or
artifact. By initially and consistently involving user groups in the
design process—in ways that afford users agency in the process,
not just opportunities for consultation—codesign practices reframe
the designer-user relationship from “design for” to “design with.”34

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 39, Número 1 Invierno 2023

Codesign practices also challenge assumptions about the nature of
expertise and power in the design process, shifting the role of de-
signer away from sole visionary maker toward that of a facilitator,
whose experience and knowledge of common design patterns help
bring community-driven ideas into workable existence.35

Although community-led design and critical design are con-
sidered different modes of practice in product design, the relative
under-definition and under-theorization of design methods in
games opens up a productive space for them to be thought together.
So does the close relationship between the professional game devel-
opment and independent game modding—user-generated content—
where the same tools of production are used to modify or make new
versions of previously developed games. The separation of design
practice from professionalization in games allows for broader ques-
tions of identity and positionality to enter critical game design
methodology, including questions of race, género, orientación, y
sovereignty. Yolanda Rankin and India Irish have developed game
codesign practices that center Black feminist thought, así como
workshops that bring Black women into design practices from
which they have been systematically excluded.36 These workshops
worked to include Black women in the concepting and early stage
designing of a mobile game and allowed participants to self-deter-
mine the kinds of gameplay and narratives that were important to
represent in their games. Rankin and Irish highlight that these ele-
ments centered values and experiences typically sidelined or con-
sidered marginal when developing games, including the ability to
represent a diverse array of Black women’s bodies and redefining
forms of customizability for in-game assets. Institutional and orga-
nizational changes in the game development process create ripple
effects throughout the entirety of the game.

Elizabeth LaPensée, Outi Laiti, and Maize Longboat uplift
sovereignty as the center of their codesign practice, arguing that
representing the lives and stories of Indigenous people is only a
first step for game developers. The capacity for Indigenous self-de-
termination is fundamental to the creation of “sovereign games,”37
or games led by Indigenous persons, practicas, and world orienta-
ciones. Reflecting on the development of three of their own games,
LaPensée, Laiti, and Longboat trace how sovereign leadership and
self-determination not only means having Indigenous members on
a design team, but also centering Indigenous relationships with kin,
comunidad, and land. LaPensée’s When Rivers Were Trails involved
extensive collaboration and communication with elders and knowl-
edge-keepers, and through grant and agency support was able to
hire Indigenous artists and developers, as well as to hold sovereign

Prototypes: Three Approaches to Making
in Codesigning,” CoDesign 10, No. 1
(2014): 5–14.

35 Christopher Alexander, A Pattern

Idioma: Towns, Edificios, Construction
(Oxford: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 1977).

36 Yolanda A. Rankin and India Irish, “A

Seat at the Table: Black Feminist Thought
as a Critical Framework for Inclusive
Game Design,” in Proceedings of the
ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4,
No. CSCW2 (2020): 1–26.

37 Elizabeth A. LaPensée, Outi Laiti, y
Maize Longboat, “Towards Sovereign
Games,” Games and Culture 17, No. 3
(2021): 15554120211029195.

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 39, Número 1 Invierno 2023

game jams. Más importante, these interactions with Indigenous
communities were not extractive; artists, escritores, and knowledge
keepers were compensated to game industry standards, and care
was taken to ensure that community involvement focused on ca-
pacity-building, or the infusion of both skills and sustainable fund-
ing into a community, over the “one-and-done” nature of many
game jams. Tal como, sovereign design highlights the networks of
relation that make up game production and Indigenous community
and critically examines how those networks overlap with, are en-
tangled with, and disrupt networks of coloniality and capital. Crit-
ical game design, entonces, is not just a synthesis of critical corrective
and design practice, or only developing a more representative
narrative and more ethical gameplay; it is an interrogation of the
power of the operational logics in games and in games spaces
e instituciones.

Queer game scholars and game makers further push the
boundaries and intersections between critical game studies and
game design. One early example of this kind of connective tissue
can be found in the critical work by Adrienne Shaw on the spaces
that queer gamers find or make for themselves.38 This work becomes
mobilized in later work archiving LGBTQ games to inform not just
critical work but also future design work. Another early straddler
of the scholar/maker divide was Anna Anthropy, whose work high-
lighted that many queer makers tended to work in forms and for-
mats that were not always recognizable to more traditional game
players and game makers.39 Anthropy further presents much of this
trabajar, such as critiques of “empathy games,” through their critical
making practices in games such as The Road to Empathy and the
installation game Empathy Game, which was featured in 2015 en
Babycastles, an independent game developer and art gallery space.
A more recent example can be found in Bo Ruberg’s critical work on
games and queerness40 being mobilized in subsequent work and col-
laborations with Josef Nguyen.41 In all cases, many queer scholars
tend to find themselves by default straddling the same lines that
other scholars have in different fields.

Although the literature presented here is largely founded
on work done by scholars in North America and Western Europe,
this falls in line with much of the work published in the field of
game studies on the topic of design research and design studies.
While the subfield of production studies42 in game studies has
begun grappling with the importance of more area-focused
investigación, the field remains relatively small. De este modo, much of the re-
search examined in this introduction falls into this same pattern.
This is one aspect of what we hope to prompt in the future. Where

38 Adrienne Shaw, Gaming at the Edge:
Sexuality and Gender at the Margins
of Gamer Culture (Minnesota: Universidad de
Minnesota Press, 2015).

39 Anna Anthropy, Rise of the Videogame
Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals,
Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs,
Queers, Housewives, and People Like You
Are Taking Back an Art Form (Nueva York,
Nueva York: Seven Stories Press, 2012).

40 Bo Ruberg, Video Games Have Always
Been Queer (Nueva York: Nueva York
Prensa universitaria, 2019).
Josef Nguyen and Bo Ruberg,
“Challenges of Designing Consent:
Consent Mechanics in Video Games as
Models for Interactive User Agency,” in
Actas de la 2020 CHI Conference
on Human Factors in Computing Systems
(2020), 1–13.

42 Casey O’Donnell, “Game Production
Estudios: Studio Studies Theory,
Method and Practice,” in Independent
Videogames: Cultures, Networks,
Techniques and Politics, ed. Paolo Ruffino
(Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2020), 148–60.

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 39, Número 1 Invierno 2023

are the gaps and margins in the field even as it begins to establish
sí mismo? The articles in this special issue all engage with the political
and epistemological dimensions of design research, including how
systems of power legitimize certain ways of knowing over others;
the challenges of integrating critique and material practice; ques-
tions of the boundaries of methodology, discipline, and institution;
and the potential for games and design to highlight feminist, Indig-
enous, and raced knowledges that have been marginalized in
game studies and design research. The first set of articles plays with
development processes and form to highlight how marginalized
perspectives, methods, and worldviews can be centered at the
heart of game design. Kara Stone furthers a process of reparative
game creation, one that underscores possibilities for game design
to be used for healing, repair, and sharing vulnerability. Miguel
Anthony DeAnda and Gracie Lu Straznickas counter what they
identify as a merit-based ideological structure to game-level design
practices—a structure, they argue, that can be undermined or sub-
verted through incorporating lenses of queerness and disability—
particularly that of “passing”—into level design heuristics. Joshua
Wood produces a series of game design exercises used to think
through a Chicano theory of game design—ones that play off Jesse
Schell’s design “lenses” and Brenda Brathwaite’s design “chal-
lenges” to represent Indigenous and Mexican identities and ways
of knowing.

The second set of articles approaches critical game design
institutionally, examining how the epistemic and structural con-
ditions of the industry and academy can be reconfigured to allow
for new kinds of design practices. Rilla Khaled and Pippin Barr
highlight the pragmatic and epistemological gaps between the
formal design disciplines and game design. A potential solution,
they argue, can be found in their development of a method for
design materialization, a game-specific design research that
blends critical interpretation with evidence-based forms of design
research and knowledge. The interdisciplinary team of Colin
Milburn, Katherine Buse, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Melissa Wills,
Raida Aldosari, Patrick Camarador, Josh Aaron Miller, and Justin
Siegel trace their modification of the protein-folding simulation
game Foldit, titled Foldit: First Contact. The science-fiction-themed
game seeks to build better narrative and community connections
with the Foldit game, but in ways that allowed for reflection on the
intersection of scientific practice with the needs and values of
local and national communities. Finalmente, Rebecca Rouse and James
Malazita trace the structural and political tensions at play during
the development of the critical game design master’s and PhD pro-
grams at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. For Rouse and Malazita,

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 39, Número 1 Invierno 2023

building new formations of games programs in the academy is
itself a kind of game design, one that plays with the epistemic foun-
dations of humanities and technical fields.

Each article helps form a foundation for critical game design
and draws from intellectual traditions and debates not only from
both game studies and game design but also from the classical de-
sign disciplines. Hay, por supuesto, limits and gaps and missing
pieces, but this issue does not seek to be a field summary or a de-
fining moment of critical game design. Bastante, this issue speaks to
our hope for the future–that this collection opens space for a plu-
rality of approaches, methods, and models for the future of games
scholarship and scholars working in academic and professional
spaces. We also hope that our presence in Design Issues will begin
to build more connections and collaboration between game design
and the broader design disciplines, allowing space for research,
scholarship, and creative work that drives the underlying epistemo-
logical core of the many spaces in which all designers find them-
selves educated and employed.

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 39, Número 1 Invierno 2023
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