Audience Level: Beginner
This session is perfect for newcomers who are just starting out and want to learn the basics. No prior knowledge of game design is necessary.
Session Information
What might a museum of languages look like? Although important complex cultural and social artefacts, languages are hard to preserve because they are hard to experience: we can only appreciate the intricacies and inner logic of a language by learning it and learning a language is a difficult, a huge commitment. We can interpret art without learning to paint and music without learning to play, but it is hard to understand and appreciate a language without the two thousand hours it takes to learn to speak it. Language apps like Duolingo have used gamification to support language learning. Meanwhile, games themselves have offered ways to examine fictional languages, as in Heaven's Vault (Inkle, 2019). The aim of this concept game jam is to think through how else games might help us experience languages, or even record and preserve them. For instance, can we design games that speakers of endangered languages could use to record the language used by elder folk and teach it to young people?
Join us for a conceptual game jam run by the Bristol Digital Game Lab. In our game jams, we use game design and the language of games to explore complex problems. We've shone light on algorithmic bias and post-conflict societies, to themes such as protected site strategies. The aim is to think about how games, as complex systems themselves, can help us to examine other processes. For this conceptual game jam, we'll be exploring how games can help us imagine a museum of languages. For more about the Lab's game jams, see our website. All welcome!
There will be a networking pizza lunch 12:00-13:00. The Game Jam will begin at 13:00.
Optional to bring your own laptop. Paper materials will be provided.
Intended Learning Outcomes
- The aim of this conceptual game jam is to use the principles games design.
- To think through what a museums of languages might look like.
- To rapidly prototype ideas for games that might achieve this.
