Curious Games: Game Making, Hacking and Jamming as Critical Practice

In this article we establish the affordances of game making and hacking as a critical practice in teaching and research. We explain the origins of our approach in two completed research projects and consider its impact on our ongoing scholarly practice. In the first project, students at the Manchester School of Architecture were tasked with exploring questions relating to Britain’s post-war power infrastructures through the creation of games (in place of traditional essays). These games were subsequently used to share research with the public. In the second project, we moved from game making to hacking through participatory research with young people, investigating how board game play could support their climate literacy and action. There, game hacking was an anarchic process that enabled young people to interrogate the world and develop critical frameworks for speaking out about their experiences. In our own research practice, we have used game hacking to creatively investigate designing for sustainability and as a practice for imagining alternative climate futures. Translating the methods of making and hacking into the UKHE classroom, we have developed creative game-based learning and teaching practice to support students to develop and investigate their own research agendas.