This talk explores ways that gameplay and game design help us think about some of the most pressing issues of our time — from climate change to the spread of emerging infectious diseases. Following an overview of the concepts of “serious games” and “critical making,” guest speaker, Patrick Jagoda, will offer a series of cases of digital, analog, and mixed reality games that he co-directed and created at the University of Chicago across several labs, including the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, the Fourcast Lab, and the Weston Game Lab.
Jagoda will present four projects that suggest ways that humanistic and artistic approaches to games can help us understand and intervene in today’s most urgent wicked problems, especially in the domains of education, public health, and social justice. First, Caduceus Quest (2025) is a video game designed to increase underrepresented high school students’ science knowledge, professional pathways to science fields, and civic engagement. Second, Hexacago Health Academy (2015-2025) is a multi-year public health program in the form of a game design curriculum in which we co-designed board games about topics such as the spread of infectious diseases, food insecurity, and structural violence with high school students. Third, Haven (2024-present) is a text-based roleplaying video game that uses both asynchronous and synchronous elements to enable first-year students at the University of Chicago to practice capacities linked to open discourse, free expression, and negotiation of difference. Fourth and finally, Cene (2022) is an alternate reality game developed as a three-week climate change curriculum for middle school environmental science classes and was piloted in three schools in Chicago for over 350 students. Across these cases, Jagoda will discuss how worldbuilding, storytelling, and gameplay can invite players, from middle school students to adults, to address both the personal and social dimensions of wicked problems.
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Patrick Jagoda is William Rainey Harper Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, English, and Obstetrics & Gynecology at the University of Chicago. He is Chair of Cinema & Media Studies, Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry, and director of the Weston Game Lab. Jagoda specializes in media theory, game studies and design, and twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture. He is co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab that work with BIPOC students on projects linked to game design and STEM fields. Jagoda is co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry, faculty director of the Weston Game Lab, co-founder of the Fourcast Lab, and director of the Media Arts and Design program at the University of Chicago.
Jagoda's books include Network Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016, with Michael Maizels), Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020), and Transmedia Stories: Narrative Methods for Public Health and Social Justice (2022, with Ireashia Bennett Ashlyn Sparrow). He is also a recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Jagoda completed his PhD in the Department of English at Duke University in 2010, along with a graduate certificate in Information Science and Information Studies.