Research Unplugged Episode 3 –Game Jams are her jam: Using digital game design to support mental health addiction recovery

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• Interviewers: Andrew Welsh, Tracy Woodford
• Guest: Dr. Sandra Danilovic
• Length of Interview: 31:11
• Listen to the Episode

00:00:00 [Intro music]

00:00:11 Andrew Welsh

Hello, and welcome back to Research Unplugged, the official and the only research-based podcast for the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences. This is our third episode.

So, if you're just joining us for the first time, we're hoping to interview different faculty members across the programs in our Faculty of Human and Social Sciences here at the Brantford campus of Wilfrid Laurier University to learn more about their research programs, more from a perspective of kind of like the general audience member, so to make it more accessible. I'm one of the hosts of Research Unplugged, Andrew Walsh, and I'm joined by my co-host, Tracy Woodford.

00:00:52 Tracy Woodford

Hello.

00:00:52 Andrew Welsh

And our guest today for episode 3 is from our game design program, Dr. Sandra Danilovic. Thank you for joining us.

00:01:00 Sandra Danilovic

It's lovely to be here with you, Andrew and Tracy.

00:01:04 Andrew Welsh

And Sandra is joining us remotely. She is at home. We are at work, which isn't a bad thing that we're at work. We're all working. Sandra, we're just going to we're just going to dive into it again. Really, all we want is, what we want is to get people interested in your research. So, you're this is like for students, it's for like the average person. So, unlike some of our other episodes where, you know, in our first two episodes, we had people from psychology, for example, and psychology is a program that exists, on probably every college university campus people know it. But I don't know if our audience will be as familiar with game design as an academic program. So, I thought it might be nice to kind of start things off, if you could tell us a little bit about game design.

00:01:50 Sandra Danilovic

Of course, my pleasure, Andrew. So, game design and development at Laurier, our program at Laurier is focused on critical game design and values-based game design practices. So, what that means is that, yes, we are training students to enter the game industry as game developers and designers and animators and artists, but our program is emphasizing skills that are looking at ways to make games more reflectively, critically, mindfully, ethically. So, our program, I think, is unique in that sense, in that a lot of game design programs at other universities might be more general, and they might train people to enter the industry with all the skill sets. And our program is very much focused on the idea of ethical game design and critical game design and values-based game design, infusing game-making practices with human values, human purpose and goals, and making games that are critical and ethical and reflective and that bring something to the world that's positive and meaningful and knowledgeable. And in that sense, my research aligns very closely with that framework. of ethical game design and making games with care and mindfulness and care for other people, care for the world, empathy and so forth. So, my research fits perfectly in that’s in that framework.

00:03:46 Andrew Welsh

Does game design have, I always thought Scott Nicholson, who's also a faculty member in the program, like you had a saying or like a model, games for, or am I thinking of something else? Games for a better world?

00:03:59 Sandra Danilovic

Absolutely, games for social change, games to make the world a better place.

00:04:03 Andrew Welsh

That's it.

00:04:05 Sandra Danilovic

Making the world a better place through games, through game design, absolutely, and along those lines, I think our faculty, myself, Scott Nicholson, Steve Wilcox, and Charlie Wells, we're all focused on... I mean, I think we're also looking at things like gamification and game-based learning and games for health, games for education. So, I think our program is a bit more kind of oriented towards games that are not just mere entertainment, although of course they're fun to play and they're entertaining and beautiful and pleasurable, but they're more than just entertainment.

00:04:58 Andrew Welsh

Yeah, I always love hearing about stuff coming out of the program. It's to me one of the few really truly innovative programs that have developed over the last decade or so. What drew you to game design? When did you know you wanted to be a university professor in general, and how did you make your way into the game design program? Tell us a little about your background.

00:05:22 Sandra Danilovic

I would be happy to. So, I was a documentary filmmaker and a multimedia artist for a decade or more, actually, before I transitioned into academia. So, I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts in film and video production, and I actually started out with a visual arts and painting and photography, and then I transitioned into filmmaking. And after my degree from York University, I became a documentary filmmaker. I started my own production company, and I became a producer, writer, director. And I made three one-hour long documentaries, two of which were broadcast on television. One documentary went on to festivals, film festivals, and my work was, I was really keen on sort of working with communities and social issues, and so my first two documentaries, for example, are focused on the immigrant experience and immigrant narratives, and which is also kind of semi-autobiographical because I grew up as an immigrant in Toronto. And so, and then my third documentary was, this was around the time when I started to transition into digital media, animation, and web development and games. So, my third documentary, “Second Bodies,” was on avatar identity and mental health and digital worlds and virtual worlds like Second Life. And so, right after that third film, which is called “Second Bodies,” which went on to festivals and it won a couple of awards, I decided that I wanted to do my PhD. And then I applied for my PhD. This was after my master's, of course, which was also in digital media and games. And so, then I went on to U of T and finished and graduated from the Faculty of Information at University of Toronto. with a focus on game design, autobiographical game design practices.

So, my focus became, when I was doing my PhD, my focus became art games, experimental games, and games about illness and disability, games specifically focused on mental health, which then, of course, during my time at Laurier, during my tenure track, the first five years that I was at Laurier, I've been organizing game jams, which are game design workshops for people with mental health challenges and addictions, and teaching people how to make autobiographical games about mental health and addiction, and doing this kind of community-engaged work, which I've been doing since 2014, which is the subject of my next book [chuckles]. Essentially, since the last 10, 12 years of my research on game jams and games for mental health and addiction, that's the subject of the book that I'm revising right now called: “Game Design, TheraPoetics: Making Games with Care.”  That's the tentative title.

00:08:56 Andrew Welsh

Right. And that leads us nicely into the next question we wanted to ask you is tell us a little bit about your research program. So, how did you get immersed in this area of research? What have you been working on the last, if you can sum up a decade's worth of work in a few soundbites?

00:09:19 Sandra Danilovic

So, I organize game jams and I invite, and I organize these game jams where I invite people with mental health challenges and addictions to make games over the course of a couple of days, a weekend. And I teach them with my team, with my research team and assistants, I teach them how to make games using oftentimes open-source software, software that's free and easy to use and learner friendly, like Twine, Bitsy and Scratch. If people in the kind of computer science and game design know these programs, these software tools for making games. And then over the course of two days, I motivate game jammers to make their games and then I essentially observe what happens during the game jam, and I document what happens during the game jam, much like an ethnographer does. And I interview participants, game jammers, about how they experience the process of making an autobiographical game informed by their lived experiences with mental health and addiction.

And so, I interviewed them during the game jam, and I interviewed them after the game jam. So, I conduct so-called qualitative interviews with game jammers about their creative process. And then all that data, all that material, including their doodles and sketches and ideation materials, their flow charts, their kind of decision-making trees and so forth, all the work that goes into making a game, which involves things like conceptualization, ideation, animation, drawing, painting, digital work, programming, design, and implementing your idea into a functional software application, because I study computer games and digital games, that whole process I document, and then that becomes the subject of my publications.

So, it's that creative process, the trajectory of that creative process and of what it's like to make a game about lived experiences with mental health and addiction. And so that's the subject of, that was the subject of my dissertation, my PhD dissertation. And that is also, to some extent, the subject of my first book, “Arts for Health Games,” which is a bit more broad, a broader, it's a broader, it's more broadly focused, I should say. And then the subject of my next book, which I'm revising.

So, it's really what I'm doing is, in this book that I'm revising currently for University of California Health Humanities Press, I am articulating essentially a creative, a theory of creative cognition rooted in autobiographical game design practices. And that theory is called game design Therapoetics. It consists of four parts of game making, which I call the tetrad of Therapoiesis. Four poesis: Autopoiesis, self-making, which is the autobiographical component; Fabulopoesis, metaphor making, which is taking your lived experience and translating it into a game metaphor, like a puzzle or a maze; Logopoiesis, which is computation making, that's the programming, the digital design, the technical practice of game development; and Sociopoiesis, which is collective making, which is the community aspect of the social connection and the bonding and the relationship building that happens during a game jam, which is a social event.

00:13:40 Tracy Woodford

Sandra, I have a question for you. The name Game Jam, is that an industry name or is that a Laurier specific?

00:13:49 Sandra Danilovic

Tracy, it's an industry name. So, game jams originate back to the early 2000s. And essentially, game jams are very similar to hackathons and, you know, workshops. I mean, they're rooted in the tech industry's idea of like make and break things, make sort of, you know, sort of this Mark Zuckerberg's motto, the founder of Facebook, this idea of just rapid prototyping and making things and breaking things and doing things really fast to generate innovative ideas. And so, game jams have been around since the early 2000s, but they've become a phenomenon in the game development, on the game development scene. And academics also use game jams to work with marginalized communities. For example, that's me. But also, game jams are an industry phenomenon. So, there are game jams out there that invite people to sort of socialize and connect and network and make games together over a short period of time and have something that they could use as a prototype that then they can later refine and polish and or market and sell to.  And so, game jams can serve multiple purposes.

But oftentimes, the phenomenon of the game jam, I've, my influences in terms of organizing game jams are they usually originate from more independent spaces. For example, my first game jam was in 2012. I participated in my first game jam in 2012 with an organization in Toronto called “Dames Making Games,” which is this feminist organization that was teaching women, LGBTQ designers and trans people how to make games from scratch, because that was kind of a gap in the industry at the time. There were not a lot of women making games and people who are, you know, so that was trying to fill that gap, a community gap. And I thought there are principles for how to organize a game jam in this sort of very inclusive, nourishing way, I really love that. So, that those principles, some of those principles and values that they were working with, such as care and nourishment and inclusivity and diversity, I adopted those principles as values in my own game jam organization practice. So, they originate from “Dames Making Games” and this booklet that was also authored by called the “Gamerella Game Jam Guide,” which is also kind of a feminist rooted practice.

And so, I've adopted a lot of those values into my own game jam organizing because I work with people who are oftentimes struggling day-to-day with mental health issues and possibly in treatment from addiction and an active treatment and recovery from addiction. And so you have to create a space that is welcoming and nurturing and supportive to people who have, who are, who have very specific needs and make that space a joyful, a joyful, nourishing, motivating space so that people can actually enjoy themselves and feel connected and supported in their game making practice and create something that they're proud of and create something that will bring them meaning and purpose in their lives.

00:18:11 Tracy Woodford

Well, that's a great explanation because you hear game jam and it sounds like this is fun and we're going to have a party but dealing with marginalized…

00: 18:18 Andrew Welsh

Well, it could be fun.

00: 18:19 Tracy Woodford

It could be fun. But the particular participants that you are engaging with, that sounds to me like there might be more intense subject matter. So, it sounds like maybe you try to make it more welcoming, like you said, and engaging and fun, even though you're dealing with heavy topics sometimes.

00:18:41 Sandra Danilovic

Oh absolutely. It's, I mean, in some ways, my game jams differ from industry game jams, because a lot of industry game jams, for example, they are all-nighter events. So, sometimes people will start making games and they will go into the night and take two full days to make a game and have all-nighters, so to speak, which can be very taxing on the body, right? It's not for everybody.

00:19:13 Tracy Woodford

Not me [laughs]

00:19:14 Andrew Welsh

It's not me anymore [laughs]

00:19:16 Sandra Danilovic

It's not for me! You know, I like to sort of create much more nourishing and relaxed and more certainly much more sustainable games [laughs] that don't tax people's energy and that support people and especially people who are already dealing with various health issues. And so, my game jams are very different in that regard because a lot of industry game jams can be kind of go, go, go, very focused on productivity and output and delivering a finished product. And a lot of industry game jams are also highly competitive. And in my case, I'm not, I don't set up my game jams as competitive spaces. I set them up as these care spaces where people can connect and bond and build relationships but not compete with each other in that way.

00:20:21 Andrew Welsh

Would it be accurate to say as well, like industry game jams sound more like outcome oriented? Like you said, Mark Zuckerberg wants innovation, whereas the game jams that your program would focus on some more like where the process itself is kind of the goal. Is that right?

00:20:37 Sandra Danilovic

Absolutely. My game jams are process driven. That's a key part of my framework. Everything is process driven, not product driven.

00:20:47 Andrew Welsh

Well, what we wanted to do, we had a question and aside for the audience, we have a pre-draft of questions, but you've kind of largely addressed it unless you feel like you haven't addressed everything. But we were going to ask you to take a deeper dive into your research, especially your book called “Game Design Therapoetics, Making Games with Care,” and we were going to ask, you know, tell us what Therapoetics is, but you've pretty much done that. So, one thing actually I was curious about though, because in trying to explain to friends and family that have no idea about what professors do when we're not teaching and about the writing process in a book, they just assume, you know, I'm explaining to, like I've been going through the process of a book and they had a hard time understanding that you submitted the book at the start of September and you're just getting reviews now [6 months later] and will you have a copy in hand by the end of the month and I have to explain that no, this is months more. Maybe, what is the process of writing an academic book?

00:21:52 Sandra Danilovic

Oh, it's such a great question, Andrew. So, in my case, my book, “Game Design Therapoetics,” is based, again, as I mentioned, it's based on more than 10 years of research. And it really is based on my dissertation work, my PhD, but it integrates the latest data from my 2022 game jams. So, it integrates data, empirical data from my 2014 game jam, which I conducted at University of Toronto, which was my PhD work. And then it also integrates data from my SSHRC-funded study on game jams and addiction from 2022-23-game jams in Brantford and Hamilton that I conducted with my research team. So, it integrates all those game jams into my theoretical framework, which I developed over the course of my PhD.

And what happened was essentially in terms of writing this book, I revised my dissertation into a book at around 2020, and then I started offering some sample chapters and a proposal to university presses and publishers. And that process took for me to get an actual book contract. That process took three years.

00:23:14 Oh, wow. That’s a long time.

00:23:17 Sandra Danilovic

I had a lot of rejection [laughs] because my book is very interdisciplinary and it blends game design with mental health and from kind of a, from a, and I draw on a wide body of literature. I draw on literary theory, game studies, psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, you know, art and aesthetics, computer science. It draws on a, my work draws on a wide, wide swath of literature. And so, it was very difficult, it was a very difficult sell. But it is a contribution to the health, medical humanities, as I found out through my process over the last five, six years of trying to place myself in a particular field. And so, once I started to present at conferences, medical health humanities conferences, I realized that that's my audience and that's where people were asking me to present. And hence how I got my book contract with the University of California Health Humanities Press out of UCSF, which is a medical school, University of California, San Francisco. And my book, my manuscript was sent out for review, for peer review. So, I got peer reviewer comments. This was in 2023. And I've basically been taking those peer reviewer comments and integrating all that feedback into my revised manuscript. And that's been taking me a couple of years to revise the whole book, which is 6 chapters and a conclusion, but quite conceptually dense and difficult. And where I'm building theory, I'm not just applying theory, I'm building new theory. That's why it's so difficult [laughter]. And my manuscript is due at the end of the summer.

00:25:27 Tracy Woodford

Yay!

00:25:28 Sandra Danilovic

It's a do or die. I'm almost done. I’m on my 5th chapter right now, revising my 5th chapter. I just have one more chapter to revise and my conclusion, write my conclusion?

00:25:39 Tracy Woodford

It's a long process and your persistence is admirable!

00:25:45 Andrew Welsh

It is. The process sounds very familiar.  Yeah, I was getting the sweats just listening [laughter]. It's the same. Like I floated my manuscript, it got rejected. Like the proposal, you know, the process is long. For people who don't work in academia, we're not doing nothing. It just takes a long time to get some of the stuff done. The next thing we wanted to ask you is, you know, what are the next steps for your research? What do you want to do next in game design?

00:26:11 Sandra Danilovic

That's a great question, Andrew. And there's three words I'm going to say; Care-based artificial intelligence.

00:26:20 Tracy Woodford

Ah, yes.

00:26:21 Sandra Danilovic

That's my next project. So, my next project is at the intersection of game design practices and care-based, value-based artificial intelligence. So, AI-powered game design practices. And strengths and weaknesses for people, again, people living with chronic illnesses and disabilities and how care-based AI can step in to preserve energy and reduce burnout and assist people in essentially being creative and motivate them to make something that they're proud of.

00:27:12 Andrew Welsh

That's excellent.

00:27:13 Tracy Woodford

Yeah, AI is such a big area for discovery. So, that's great.

00:27:23 Sandra Danilovic

Ethically responsible AI, that's what I'm interested in essentially, is ethically care-based, ethically responsible artificial intelligence and how it can be used towards creativity.

00:27:35 Andrew Welsh

That's good to hear because I'm old enough, I grew up with the Terminator film, so it's not Skynet [laughter]. That's good. So, Sandra, we try to have like a signature part of our podcast. So, what we decided on, because in the Dean's office, which is where my office is located, we have a group chat. So, every morning I share a dad joke of the day. So, we've been asking guests on our podcast if there's a dad joke that they tell their class or a joke that they tell their class, usually at some point in the semester. Do you have a dad joke or a joke that you like to tell your class?

00:28:10 Sandra Danilovic

Oh, my goodness. I'm just trying to think what kind of jokes I tell during class. I usually tend to, I know I ham it up for students because of course they have to, I have to keep their interest. And so, it's really important to me to keep their interest and keep them excited during class and not bored through my lectures [laughs] So, I always tend to, I usually sort of, I might impersonate, do some impersonation.

00:28:47 Tracy Woodford

Oh, such as? Not to put you on the spot or anything [laughs]

00:28:54 Sandra Danilovic

I mean, I, mean, teaching games is so much fun, right? Because you can sort of go into that world of fantasy and entertainment and characters and adopt characters and sort of ham it up during class and get people to listen to you. And I don't have anything specific that I can just think of at the top of my head [laughs]

00:29:17 Andrew Welsh

That's okay, because probably the funniest moments are when we're spontaneous in class, because I'm not usually intentionally funny it's usually very unintentional, so [laughter].

00:29:28 Sandra Danilovic

Exactly!

00:29:29 Andrew Welsh

Well, thank you very much for joining us, Sandra. We really appreciate it. And I said it before the game design program, I've been trying to, my son will be doing university open houses in the fall upcoming. And I've been trying to twist his arm a little bit to check out the game design program. But we really appreciate your time.

00:29:47 Tracy Woodford

Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much, Sandra. We appreciate it. And we wish you best of luck with your book.

00:29:55 Sandra Danilovic

Thank you so much to both of you, Andrew and Tracy. It's a great pleasure.

00:30:01 Andrew Welsh

Oh, the pleasure was all ours. Good luck on your book, as Tracy said, and I'm sure we'll see you again very soon, if not in person on campus, as one of the little boxes on a Zoom screen during a meeting. Thanks again also to the audience for joining us, and everybody take care.

00:30:20 Sandra Danilovic

Bye, everybody.

00:30:20 [Outro music]

00:30:24 Andrew Welsh

Thank you so much for listening to the Research Unplugged Podcast. This episode was made possible by the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences at Wilfrid Laurier University and produced by Andrew Welsh and Tracy Woodford. Original music provided by Kevin Byrne, Megan Shubrook, and Tracy Woodford. You can find out more about today's guest and the research in the show notes for this episode. Until next time, remember to unplug and stay connected.