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A better way to talk about videogames and media literacy

Indspire > Events > National Gathering > Presentations > A better way to talk about videogames and media literacy

Presented by Jeremy Nelson and Joshua Nilson

Drawing upon experience making the Indigenous-led survival videogame Akiiwan, as well as teaching youth at ImagineNATIVE game workshops, Jeremy will share a simple and highly engaging way to enhance media literacy on games, and use popular games as a way to explore Indigenous values.

Videogames are the most popular form of youth entertainment, and we sometimes tend to focus on the dangers of gaming instead of giving students the tools to interrogate their own gameplay. If students can understand why games are fun, and their own personal tastes in gaming, they can learn something about themselves. They can then take this a step forward and reimagine how a game they already love would be different if a core indigenous value was integrated.

By understanding game mechanics, and then reimagining them through an Indigenous lens, students look at videogames different and also gain confidence to make better games in the range of user-generated platforms available today.

This presentation will briefly run through a simple series of exercises that can allow students to look at their favourite games through a new lens. It will draw upon examples (and rich video content) from Akiiwan Survival to show how understanding core mechanics of a genre (in this case survival) opens the possibility to reimagine them, without sacrificing fun, and perhaps even enhancing it. In this case we went from a common “4X” framework (eXplore, eXpand, eXpand, eXterminate) to a framework rooted in the 4R’s

This is a variation of a talk I did at Brock University for their Indigenous games day, when six-nation students from southern Ontario are brought to the lab to learn game design. It also condenses some key ideas and lessons from my time as a mentor with the ImagineNATIVE Youth Collective.

I can record a short version of this if you like since unfortunately these were not recorded, please let me know (I’m very busy travelling right now and I knew if I didn’t get this in when I had a spare moment I might forget so I wanted to get it started).

Here is an early article on the game:

I am attaching the slides that I used to lead the ImagineNative Workshop — I can format these better and talk through how to use them in a simple but fun in-classroom exercise!

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