The Critical Play Lab is excited to announce the Games for Decolonization Project’s award of an Insight Development Grant!
The Games for Decolonization Project seeks to cultivate a deeper understanding of the role of table-top gaming in decolonial education, arts-based research creation, and co-creative research mobilization. At the heart of this initiative, the project team seeks to support Indigenous game designers in the development of table-top games to facilitate reflection on settler colonialism, traditional knowledges and land-based education.
The “Games for Decolonization Project” turns to tabletop gaming as a new avenue for sharing stories of historical and contemporary Indigenous experience to advance the work of truth and reconciliation and honour Indigenous knowledges and storytelling traditions. The goal of this project is to develop a pilot game in consultation with Indigenous knowledge keepers, game designers, and David Plamondon, a Cree tabletop game consultant and founder of Pe Metawe Games, an Indigenous-run board game consulting group and publishing house. Collaborating and publishing with Pe Metawe Games will ensure the board game’s availability to a broad audience and support an important Indigenous-led company in the gaming industry. Any profits will go to Indigenous partners, with a portion donated to the Indian Residential School Survivors Society.
As part of the project’s initial development phase, PopCC Director Dr. Biz Nijdam will perform interviews and record conversations with Indigenous knowledge keepers about Indigenous gaming traditions. The partnerships required to pursue this work were established during the Games for Decolonization Workshop (Spring 2024) and further developed during the Games & Social Justice Lecture Series (Winter 2025). This interview series will culminate at the Arctic Winter Games (AWG) in Whitehorse in 2026, where Nijdam and the PopCC team will interview participants. The interviews will be archived on the project website and contribute to a short documentary film.
For more information or to join the Games for Decolonization team, email biz.nijdam@ubc.ca.