The Games and Social Justice Lecture Series (2025)
Please join us for this ongoing series of speaker events that examine the intersections between digital and analog gaming cultures and the work of social justice. Speakers will explore various approaches to video games, tabletop games, and tarot including game design, game play, and fan cultures to examine how gaming cultures, on the one hand, perpetuate bias, prejudice, and problematic power dynamics and, on the other, are capable of intervening in discourses of oppression, heteronormativity, and settler colonialism.
Events happen mostly on Thursdays in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and online. In person seating is limited. Events are free but registration is required. Please register for each event in the schedule below.
We have also commissioned local artist, Sarah Heng Hartse, to live draw the events and provide a graphic recording of our time together. Her drawings will be projected in real time! We’ll compile the graphics at the end of the series and host them on our website as another form of documentation.
If you’d like to stay informed of upcoming events and opportunities like this, please signup for our mailing list HERE.
This programming is generously cosponsored by the UBC Popular Media for Social Change Research Excellence Cluster, CENES, the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, German Studies Canada, UBC Comics Studies Cluster, the UBC Centre for European Studies, and the Narratives Group in the UBC Centre for Migration Studies. This work has also been partially supported by ISoTL Seed support.
Notice of Recording/Photography
Unless otherwise stated, these events will be recorded. Virtual participants can submit questions anonymously and will not be visible to other participants. In person participants may notify the photographer/videographer onsite if they do not want their image taken. The Q&A portion of the events will not be recorded.
Schedule
Please note that this schedule is subject to change. Information will be adjusted as more details become available.
January 16 @ 3:30 PM | Roundtable on Games and Social Justice
Dodson Room (302), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre & Online
Registration required | RSVP HERE
Speaker Bios
Claris Cyarron is an architecturally-trained storyteller, multidisciplinary designer, and the co-founder of queer studio Silverstring Media. Serving as the studio’s creative director, she works closely with each of her team members to hone the meaning in their work and to increase the positive resonance between the game’s individual parts. She believes stories are powerful places: structures where personal growth and magic are possible. As a writer and narrative designer she has worked on Timespinner, Celeste, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, as well as Silverstring Media’s own Glitchhikers: The Spaces Between, and more.
Carina Kom (she/hers) is a dynamic force behind some of the most vibrant and exciting game projects in Vancouver, Toronto, Seattle, and Los Angeles! She is now the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Simply Sweet Games, and continues to leave her mark as a video game director, producer, and passionate advocate for the games industry. With 17+ years of working experience, Carina has worked on indie games as well as massive AAA titles, collaborating with teams such as EA, Microsoft, and Unity to successfully launch games on multiple Gen4 and Gen5 platforms. She also volunteers and serves in two non-profit organizations because her passion extends beyond work, and she believes that innovation can occur at any level. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, she takes pride in representing an underrepresented group and derives great joy from connecting with individuals from diverse backgrounds. When she's not bringing joy to the workplace (which is a mandatory part of her job), she enjoys drinking tea, sipping rum, and visiting her grandma on the weekends.
January 23 @ 4 PM | Forward Isn't Progress: The Body in Play
Dodson Room (302), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre & Online
Registration required | RSVP HERE
Our games, digital and tabletop alike, are structured around a linear model of progress: As time passes, we get stronger, gain power and control over the game world. Not only is this model of history rooted in colonialism, but it fails to reflect the non-linear ways the body experiences trauma, queerness and disability. How can we deconstruct the progress narrative and find ways of representing more complicated, fractured histories in play?
Speaker Bio
Anna Anthropy is a game designer, writer, educator and cyborg. She works in both the digital and tabletop spaces. She currently lives in Chicago with a little black cat named Encyclopedia Frown.
Several games referenced in the talk are free to download or play online:
- dys4ia (15-20 minute game about trans health care)
- Queers in Love at the End of the World (10-second game about queer temporality)
- Sonata in Zero G (30-60 minute tabletop game about scars and disability)
January 30 @ 4PM | Introduction to Interactive Fiction and Twine
Peña Room (301), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre & Online
Registration required | RSVP HERE
Independent game developer John Ayliff creates text-based games using Twine, an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. His games include the viral hit Seedship and its successor, Beyond the Chiron Gate. He will lead a workshop on Twine as a form of interactive fiction.
Speaker Bio
John Ayliff is an independent game developer who creates text-based games using Twine. Before going independent he worked in the games industry as a MMORPG content developer.
February 13 @ 4PM | Card-based Community Practices
Dodson Room (302), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre & Online
Registration required | RSVP HERE
Card-based Community Practices with Candie Tanaka and Laura Fukumoto on the social justice possibilities of communal card-based games like Hanafuda 花札 (Flower Cards) and tarot.
Candie Tanaka is the artist/author of Hanafuda 花札 (Flower Cards) in RML3: Undercurrents and Folds (series). They are also the author of Baby Drag Queen which is a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. Candie Tanaka is a multiracial trans writer, artist and librarian challenging the binaries continually reconstructed between self and other while exploring archive and memory in a socio-political context. They are a creative writing graduate of The Writer’s Studio program at Simon Fraser University and have a BFA in Intermedia from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. Their first YA book, Baby Drag Queen was published with Orca Books in April 2023. They’ve also published work in Resonance: Essays on the Craft of Life and Writing with Anvil Press and This Will Only Take A Minute: Canadian Flash Fiction with Guernica Editions.
Laura Fukumoto settled in so-called Vancouver more than fifteen years ago, and is committed to loving and living in this place. Theatre artist and poet, she gets paid to talk sometimes. Laura has published poetry and articles with Subterrain, Wordworks Magazine, Vancouver Pride Mag, and a forthcoming anthology, "The Gate of Memory", with Haymarket Books April 2025. BFA Theatre (UBC 2014) and The Writer’s Studio, SFU (2021). Ask her about Virago Nation, TWS, Vancouver Mycological Society, or choir. Laura has been the Governance Coordinator for 221A Artist Run Centre since the beginning of 2023, and is grateful to support the relationship-building and mission of 221A.
March 6 @ 5 PM | Expanding Worlds with D&D Homebrew
Dodson Room (302), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre & Online
Registration required | RSVP HERE
Jess Wind is a queer depressed human who writes about games, media, and gender. Their doctoral research explores experiences of labouring in precarious creative industries, and discourses of racism and unnamed whiteness in player communities such as Dungeons and Dragons. Jess is an amateur baker, jock, and parent to cats and plants. They really like birds.
Their talk discusses homebrew content creation, labour, and discourse in Dungeons and Dragons player communities. Through making, selling, and sharing content, homebrew participates as a powerful mechanism for cultural production in D&D’s economy. It is a contested space, where ownership, power, and control are negotiated and professionalized. Creators participate in collaborative meaning making which can critically resist discourses of white cis-heteropatriarchal colonial control. In homebrew, creators experiment with stretching, breaking, and remaking the game to envision ever expanding worlds.
March 14 @ 6 PM | Roundtable on Indigenous Voices in Tabletop Games
Terminal City Tabletop Convention, Vancouver Convention Centre
Registration required:
- Terminal City Tabletop Convention admission fee required for in person attendance: Register HERE
- Virtual participation: this event will be recorded and posted online at a later date.
How can Indigenous voices shape the future of tabletop gaming? What role does game design play in storytelling, cultural preservation, and advocacy? Join us for a conversation with Indigenous game designers and industry professionals as they share their experiences navigating the gaming industry, advocating for Indigenous consultation, and creating games that centre Indigenous knowledge, histories, and storytelling traditions. This panel, co-sponsored by Terminal City Tabletop Convention, brings together game designers working across the tabletop gaming industry to discuss the intersections of play, representation, and community engagement. The discussion will explore the challenges and opportunities of Indigenous-led game design, the importance of culturally responsive game development, and the ways in which games can serve as powerful tools for education, reconciliation, and social change.
James Darin Corbiere is Aa-nishin-aabe, originally from Wiikwe-amik-oong in the Great Lakes region, now living on Vancouver Island. James is a former police officer and Indigenous language teacher turned artist. More recently, to help his students study, James used his knowledge and experience within colonial systems to create the "Truth in Truth and Reconciliation Board Game" which is now published and available for sale. James began his unique style of artworking in November 2015. Using ink, markers and hi-liters on planks of White Ash wood, he translates and records the stories contained in the wood grain, following "Spirit Lines' embedded in the Wood, to create beautiful, flowing, organic art in the Eastern Woodlands style made famous by Norval Morrisseau. James' early artwork becomes the basis of the artwork featured in the Truth Game, but his passion is to return to writing and illustrating his soon to be "epic saga" titled The Book of Balance. The Book of Balance is a four part series over 1,000 pages of Indigenous storytelling in a graphic novel featuring the mighty Nanaboozhoo.
David Plamondon is Cree with strong community ties to Treaty 8 and Treaty 6 Territory. David serves as the Team Guide for Pe Metawe Together LTD which incorporates both Pe Metawe Consulting and Pe Metawe Games, both community focused organizations committed to reducing barriers and providing better access for marginalized communities in areas that have been historically excluded. A lifelong gamer, David is always working to help introduce more people into the gaming community, advocate for better representation and diversity, and pushing for more safe and inclusive spaces for gamers who have been excluded for too long. David's favorite game(s) change frequently but as of the writing of this bio, he's currently very much enjoying Innovation by Carl Chudyk and Dale of Merchants by Sami Laasko.
Luke Parnell's name is Guxw Gahlgan (always carving) and is Laxgiik (eagle) from Wilps Kwa’kaans. His mother is Nisga’a from Gingolx and his father was Haida from Massett. Parnell has been a carver for over 20 years and though his primary medium is wood, his materiality is determined on a project by project basis. His practice explores the relationship between Northwest Coast Indigenous oral histories and Northwest Coast Indigenous art, centering on narrative. He creates his artworks in order to understand these histories and concepts and their relationship to contemporary events. Parnell explores the relationship between Northwest Coast Indigenous oral histories and Northwest Coast Indigenous art, an example is the Haida “Bear Mother” story, it is a traditional part of his oral history. It has been interpreted in different mediums such as argillite, wood and metal, by a multitude Haida artists from pre-contact to the present. The artworks serve as a visual language; this visual language is material expression related to experience. Rather than a written language compiled of signifiers related to sound. The experience of the work is important because there is so much room for interpretation. Bill Reid explains this theory somewhat, in the 1957 CBC radio special, Carvers of totempoles. “A totem pole cannot be read like a book as some people think, with the knowledge of the legend, the characters can be identified and the family of the man whose honor it was carved can be determined.” Following this trajectory of the art as visual language related to experience, Parnell’s game designs whether they are intended to be cultural objects or well tested mechanics, their meaning is tied to the materials, methods and context.
Cosponsored by Arts Multilingual Week and the Terminal City Tabletop Convention.
March 18 @ 12 PM | How to Queer the World: Radical Worldbuilding through Video Games
Dodson Room (302), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre & Online (livestream begins at 12:30 PM)
Light lunch will be served to in-person attendees before the event starts. Lunch will be provided by Friendship Catering, an Indigenous-owned and operated social enterprise serving the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre Society and East Vancouver's Urban Indigenous community.
Registration required | RSVP HERE
Today more than ever, we need the power to build new worlds. Video games are exceptional tools for worldbuilding because every video game itself is a world. Yet, in video games and other media forms, worldbuilding is still commonly understood as an expression of storytelling. A queer reading of video games shows us that worldbuilding means something much deeper and more radical than narrative elements that sit on the surface of the world. In video games, worlds are built on the foundation of interaction design, software simulations, graphical dimensions, and other elements often overlooked as too technical to hold cultural meaning. By analyzing these elements of game development as acts of worldbuilding, we can reimagine worldbuilding itself: as a process of challenging firmly held beliefs about the fundamental structures, conventions, and irreducible truths that give shape to the world around us. Video games also powerfully model the concept of queer worldbuilding–a practice of building worlds that destabilizes the fundamental logics of our universe and builds new worlds founded on alternate expressions of gender, sexuality, embodiment, intimacy, and desire.
Bo Ruberg, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, as well as the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Their research explores gender and sexuality in digital media with a focus on LGBTQ topics in video games. They are the author of four books: Video Games Have Always Been Queer (NYU Press, 2019), The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games (Duke University Press, 2020), Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies (MIT Press, 2022), and How to Queer the World: Radical Worldbuilding through Video Games (NYU Press, 2025). They have also co-edited two volumes, Queer Game Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and Real Life in Real Time: Live Streaming Culture (MIT Press, 2023). In 2021, they received the Stonewall Book Award for Non-Fiction from the American Library Association. In 2022, they received the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. They are also the recipient of a 2023-2025 Dangers & Opportunities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice; Centre for Cinema Studies; Department of Theatre and Film; and the Popular Media for Social Change Research Excellence Cluster.
March 20 @ 4:30 PM | "Divination for Decolonization" with Christopher Marmolejo
Dodson Room (302), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre & Online
Registration required | RSVP HERE
This talk with engage the Tarot as cypher for decolonizing consciousness. Within divination one can find a dignity that is denied in dominator culture. The cards are neurological pivots, subverting the logical dominance of society and self. They will be discussed as tools to reengage alternative epistemologies assaulted by colonial imperialism. The tarot is an affective archive that, when supplanted with a liberatory language and framework, may challenge and delegitimize colonial structures within and without. Every reading then pushes forward the long-multi-pronged project of decolonization.
Christopher Marmolejo, MA, is a Brown, queer, and trans writer, diviner, and educator. They use divination to promote a literacy of liberation. They are the author of Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy, published by North Atlantic Books, Mar 05, 2024. They were born and raised in San Bernardino, California, in community with the Serrano people of the pines, the Yuhaaviatam Clan of the Maara’yam. With nine-plus years of experience as a trained educator focused on cultivating classrooms of emancipatory possibility, they work with students around the world to plant and nurture the seed of a divinatory practice, finely weaving tarot, astrology, and curanderismo with decolonial, queer epistemologies and critical, feminist pedagogies.
March 27 @ 5 PM | "Critical Board Game Modification: Changing Board Games to Change the World" with Greg Loring-Albright
Dodson Room (302), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre & Online
Registration required (webinar only) | RSVP HERE
Working board game designer and scholar Greg Loring-Albright, PhD will present a talk about changing board games to incite social change. Hobby board gaming, as theorized by scholars like Paul Booth (2018) and Stewart Woods (2012) has been and continues to be a growing subculture, fandom, and market. Games like Catan (Teuber, 1995), Ticket to Ride (Moon, 2004), and Wingspan (Hargrave, 2019) are the result of design interventions by inspired designers. However, board games lag behind other entertainment media like film, TV, and video games when it comes to depicting social change and representing marginalized groups. Greg works to change this, both by designing and publishing new games (e.g. Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, 2022, co-designed with T.L. Simons; Keep the Faith, 2024) and by creating frameworks for modifying existing games (e.g. First Nations of Catan, 2015). This talk will address a general audience, briefly describing the world of hobby board gaming, showcasing some of its problematic dynamics (drawing upon Flanagan and Jakobsson, 2023, among others), and offering paths for other designers and interested amateurs to create their own interventions in the space by modifying the board games that they already play. In addition, Greg will propose a theory of how board games incite social change, developed from close observation of hundreds of board gaming sessions, both in a research context and while playtesting games for publication. Many approaches to games optimistically presuppose a level of impact on the player that may not be justified. Yet board games can change their players, primarily via the discursive opportunities that they afford around the table.
Greg Loring-Albright is Assistant Professor of Games, Media, and Culture at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology. His dissertation analyzed analog games and their digital adaptations, and his research areas include analog games, fandom, and game design for social change. In addition to teaching and researching, he designs board games including Ahoy (2022), Bloc by Bloc: Uprising (with T.L. Simons, 2022), Keep the Faith (2024), and the official board game adaptation of The Peoples History of the United States (with Jason Perez, forthcoming). Find him at gloringalbright.com.
April TBD
More information coming soon.
April TBD
More information coming soon.