Humanities discourse in games classroom: research through design with Games4Impact

Game development education is commonly considered to focus on game production with branching areas of game design, game programming or game art; nonetheless, developing games include more than what these three disciplines—design, software development, art— bring to the table. Acknowledging the transdisciplinary nature of games, we present a classroom approach that explores the social, cultural and humanistic identity of games via research through design while also encouraging students to leverage the expressive power of games. The merit of this approach is using game making as a space to ignite inquiry on socio-cultural contexts and facilitate an exploration for complex topics in a playful manner. This paper presents a reflective practice, methods of inquiry, and case examples to effectively apply design research in a project-based classroom environment. Case examples demonstrate strengths of the application for student learning and for the actualisation of design research in the classroom.