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

In this article we establish the affordances of game making, hacking, and jamming as critical practices in teaching and research. We explain the origins of our approach in specific teaching and research projects and consider their impact on our scholarly practice. First, we interrogate the value of game making through a project in which 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. Second, we develop the concept of game hacking in relation to our own research practice, where we have used it to creatively investigate designing for sustainability and as a practice for imagining alternative climate futures. Finally, we move from game hacking to a consideration of jamming through reflections on a participatory research project with young people, which sought to understand how board game play could support their climate action. There, game hacking became an anarchic process that enabled young people to interrogate the world and develop critical frameworks for speaking out about their experiences. Using game making in the HE classroom led us to employ hacking as a research method, which in turn prepared us to recognise and value the anarchic jamming that emerged in our participatory project with young people. That jamming experience has subsequently transformed how we approach both teaching and research, making us more attentive to moments when we might be willing to dwell in apparent unproductivity.