This winter, UBC’s Pop Culture Cluster hosted the Games and Social Justice Public Lecture Series, a series of weekly talks and workshops that brought together scholars, game designers, artists, and community organizers to explore how games—from digital video games to analog tabletop systems and tarot—can both reinforce and challenge systems of power. Spanning ten sessions between January and March 2025, the series offered a vibrant, critical, and often deeply personal look at how play intersects with identity, activism, and cultural expression. With hybrid events held in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and online, the series drew strong attendance from students, scholars, and members of the public alike.
Throughout the series, Sarah Heng Hartse’s live graphic recordings captured the intellectual and emotional resonance of each session. These illustrations, which were projected in real time, will be compiled and shared on our website as a visual archive of the series.
The series launched with a dynamic Roundtable on Games and Social Justice featuring Carina Kom and Claris Cyarron, who shared insights from their work across AAA and indie games. They discussed how queerness, design ethics, and player-community relationships can become driving forces for equity within the gaming industry. Their talk emphasized how representation in both production teams and narratives leads to more meaningful player experiences.
The following week, anna anthropy challenged the very structure of games with “Forward Isn’t Progress: The Body in Play,” interrogating the linearity of progress mechanics and proposing models that reflect the non-linear realities of trauma, queerness, and disability. Anthropy’s evocative, sometimes poetic critique was paired with free access to her interactive works, giving attendees a direct window into her praxis.
John Ayliff’s hands-on Twine workshop in late January provided participants with tools to create interactive fiction. His engaging introduction to non-linear storytelling prompted conversations about how accessible platforms can democratize game-making, especially for underrepresented voices.
In mid-February, Candie Tanaka and Laura Fukumoto brought forward the intimacy and relational power of card-based community practices, using Hanafuda and tarot to highlight how games can cultivate intergenerational memory and cultural continuity. The session was as heartfelt as it was informative, encouraging new ways of thinking about cards as vessels for healing and resistance.
Jess Wind’s lecture on Dungeons & Dragons homebrew (March 6) unpacked the politics of fan labour, intellectual property, and resistance within player-created content. Their talk spotlighted the tension between mainstream game systems and grassroots worldbuilding, showing how players can challenge dominant narratives through the act of play itself.
Luke Parnell (Haida) and James Darin Corbiere (Aa-nishin-aabe)
One of the series highlights was the Roundtable on Indigenous Voices in Tabletop (March 14), held at the Terminal City Tabletop Convention. Panelists James Corbiere, David Plamondon, and Luke Parnell offered powerful reflections on Indigenous storytelling, sovereignty, and game development. They emphasized culturally grounded mechanics, the importance of consultation, and how games can be a vehicle for education and healing. The event marked a critical expansion of the series into both community-based and convention spaces.
UBC also welcomed Bo Ruberg (March 18) for “How to Queer the World,” an inspiring lecture that reframed worldbuilding not just as narrative work but as an act of resistance embedded in the design systems of video games. Ruberg’s talk built on their newest book and gave attendees a rich framework for analyzing game mechanics through a queer theoretical lens.
Later that week, Christopher Marmolejo offered a radically spiritual and intellectual provocation in their lecture, “Divination for Decolonization”. Framing tarot as a decolonial technology, Marmolejo invited the audience to consider how divinatory practice can disrupt colonial epistemologies and reconnect communities with ancestral knowledges.
The series concluded on March 27 with Greg Loring-Albright’s talk on critical board game modification, a fascinating exploration of how small changes to familiar games can produce radical shifts in meaning and player experience. Drawing from his research and game design portfolio, Loring-Albright proposed frameworks for making tabletop games more equitable and reflective of marginalized experiences.
We extend our heartfelt thanks to all speakers, participants, and co-sponsors.
After this inspiring semester of stimulating programming, the Pop Culture Cluster is excited to continue its support of academic, public-facing, and community-engaged scholarship in critical game studies. Stay tuned for our launch of the UBC Critical Play Lab this fall!
To stay updated on this new initiative and future programming, including recordings and artist graphics from this series, please subscribe to our mailing list by emailing pop.culture@ubc.ca and follow us on Instagram.
In the meantime, let’s keep playing—critically, joyfully, and justly.