2023 E. James Holland Symposium on American Values: Patrick Jagoda and Ashlyn Sparrow - GAMES AND AMERICAN VALUES: Symposium Schedule and Publicly Available Topical Information

A transmedia game about COVID-19. (2020)

A transmedia game in response to COVID-19. (2020)

A transmedia game about climate change. (2018-2019)

A video game about sexual harassment and sexual violence. (2016-2018)

In our increasingly networked world, digital games, board games, role playing games, escape rooms, and other types of games command an ever-expanding audience. At the same time, “gamification” has imposed unprecedented levels of competition, repetition, and quantification on daily life.

Patrick Jagoda, professor of English and cinema and media studies, and Ashlyn Sparrow, assistant director of the Weston Game Lab at the University of Chicago, discuss how games can be leveraged for learning and social impact.

The language of competition, leaderboards, and points have taken over mundane aspects of our lives. But, can we use games and game design thinking to shift our relationship to the world and design a more just society?

Professor Patrick Jagoda introduces and discuss his new book Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and to reflect upon his role as co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab.

How can games create deep and meaningful encounters with important human questions and the future? Patrick Jagoda, Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago, joins Weston Game Lab director Ashlyn Sparrow to discuss a series of the lab’s innovative — and effective — digital and analog game projects.

The third day of Ada Lovelace Week 2020 features an art panel with Ashlyn Sparrow and Snow Xu, focusing on how computing allows new art forms to emerge

Ashlyn Sparrow talks games, society, and cultural impact, and invites us all to think critically about how our society has been designed, who it’s been designed for, and who it’s been designed by.

Ashlyn Sparrow is the Assistant Director of the Weston Game Design Lab at the University of Chicago. Her session explores the creation of educational games, drawing from a range of behavioral theories and game design practices that can help increase knowledge or produce attitudinal shift in players. Ashlyn introduces the audience to game design principles that can be applied to science visualization projects.

Ashlyn Sparrow, Game Designer and Director of Ci3’s Game Changer Chicago Design Lab (GCC), gives a demo of Bystander and discusses the importance of integrating a youth-friendly storyline and visual design in each player scenario that touches upon critical sexual assault topics. A seasoned game designer, Ashlyn also shares why GCC is exploring health and social issues through video and analog games.

In this talk, Professor Patrick Jagoda argued that games in the early twenty-first century should be conceived not merely as objects, forms, or activities, but as nothing less than a unique mode of experimental thought and learning.

The eleventh volume of Elective Studies Supper Club for Illinois artists, featuring a lecture by alternate reality media expert Dr. Patrick Jagoda (U of Chicago), who gave a talk entitled "Alternate Reality Games: Experiments in Serious Play."