The department of Game Design at Uppsala University, campus Gotland
Category: Blog
This is the highly informal blog of the GAME-department. We use it mostly to document the things we do outside of running one of the worlds strongest game educations. For information about our education, programs and courses, check the official site at Uppsala University.
Posted on - Comments Off on Meet us in Stockholm on the 4th of April! CategoriesBlog, Publicity Tagsoutreach
The Department of Game Design at Uppsala University is attending The Swedish Game Industry Career Fair, at Nalen in Stockholm. The event is free to attend, and is an excellent opportunity to meet a ton of game studios and whole lot of game educations, to see if game development might be for you.
The 4th of April is ~10 days before the national application deadline, so we highly recommend you swing past and check the options out before applying to higher education. We will make sure to bring a couple of our students so you get to speak with them directly, and maybe try their games while you’re at it!
Gratuitous photo of students setting up our booth at Gamex, in 2013. Because why not. 🙂
The jury represents the most hard-working participants at the Gotland Game Conference (save for our students, natch). Jurors travel from around the globe to hear our students’ presentations a day before the conference even starts, and to spend the better part of a week playing all of the student productions on the show floor.
Johannes Wadin (Might & Delight), leading the 2nd Year Jury at the 2011 Gotland Game Conference
Each member brings their own set of experience and expertise, and share that insight directly with the students at the GGC. We have academia and graphics solidly represented now, so the next bunch of seats are reserved primarily for programmers, HR and the nebulous “production“-people. There’s is of course always room, too, for people with investment or recruitment needs!
Lina Sors Emilsson at the Gotland Game Conference 2017.
The interview is unfortunately entirely in Swedish, but she’s talking about how we use this course to have game design students work with external “real-world” concerns, such as; crisis management, Gotland’s water shortage, job market access for the differently abled, and so on. For the first iteration we worked closely with Region Gotland and local industry to come up with realistic concerns and evaluate the student output.
The Gotland Game Conference is looking over its award categories this year. There will be many changes, but one of higher priority than most is the addition of a… “diversity award”, for lack of a better term.
We work hard in the education and with the conference to engage thoughtfully with issues like representation, gender, intersectionality and the perspectives and lived experiences of the non-[white hetero cis male]. We need an award to highlight and celebrate student projects that exhibit an especially conscientious or nuanced understanding of these issues.
But we need help:
What should we call this award?
What are reasonable evaluation criterias for such an award?
Who (plural) should we look to invite for play testing and evaluation of the games? (the local RFSL and Pride chapters, for sure. But who’s an expert on, say, race in Sweden?)
Specifically: the department faculty, being very much mostly white and edumacated types, do not feel at all like a reasonable authority. I mean that both in terms of appropriation and in terms of perceived validity of the award. While the fight is ours to take, it is not on us to declare any sort of victory. And in terms of validity of the award – it risks being seen as self congratulatory.
So. I am currently looking for any sort of input, really. If you don’t want to discuss publicly, feel free to grab me over e-mail!
If you would like to be part of the Gotland Game Conference jury, read these instructions and submit an application. Leave a comment in the last field if you are particularly interested or suited for the diversity-perspective.
