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• 1 2022-08-15T17:51:23+00:00 Introduction: Narrative Methods for a Transmedia Era 43 image_header 29 published 2022-12-18T18:47:14+00:00
  

  The end of the twentieth century saw a transformation in computers from the specialized calculation and business machines of earlier decades into expressive and networked media that, by the early twenty-first century, have been adopted by billions of people around the world. The capacities of computers for simulation have yielded an environment that enables a range of media — novels, news articles, comics, films, television serials, personal photos, amateur videos, music, video games, and virtual worlds — to appear, alongside each other, on a single screen. Beyond this “multimedia” dimension, the usage of technology has given rise to a “transmedia” environment of unprecedented interactions among media forms in which people move more readily between platforms and apps — and across screens on multiple devices that they access in a single space.

  In addition to significant technological changes, the growth of digital and networked infrastructures has influenced transformations of culture and social life in the early twenty-first century. A widely circulating characterization of this shift has been captured through “participatory culture,” a term defined and popularized by media scholar Henry Jenkins (2006). In a 2007 white paper, Jenkins and his colleagues defined a participatory culture as “a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.” Moreover, such a culture is “one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created)” (Jenkins et. al.). Admittedly, the term "participatory culture" has related antecedents in educational reform and radical theories of learning, going back to varied writing by visionaries including Paolo Freire, Seymour Papert, bell hooks, Jean Lave, and Etienne Wenger. Beyond technology and education, the participatory has a much broader application to a range of creative and political practices that exceed screens and classrooms. This longer history is a reminder that participatory culture need not be entirely or even primarily about networked platforms or digital technologies but is instead fundamentally about social practices and cultures. Nevertheless, the accelerated spread of computer and internet usage in an increased number of contexts, including through the proliferation of mobile devices, has turned participatory cultures from a fringe or specialized concept to a common practice. In particular, the emergence of social media and the broader branding of Web 2.0 gave these ideas a mainstream cachet.

  The concept of participatory culture, which gained much of its initial energy in educational changes starting in the mid-twentieth century and found extensions through technological developments in the late twentieth century, found a dialectical synthesis in digital media and learning initiatives in the early twenty-first century. During these years, scholars such as Mizuko Ito and scholar-practitioners such as Nichole Pinkard deepened and popularized the field of media-enabled participatory learning (Ito et. al., Pinkard). Admittedly, numerous scholars have criticized participatory culture for the ways the term has been commercialized and coopted, as well as for its unearned optimism about participation being equally available or meaningful to anyone with Wi-Fi access (Jenkins, Ito, and Boyd). Even as it can neither be celebrated nor rejected entirely, the term names a cultural counterpart to a multimedia and transmedia environment.

  In a further development that is particularly important for this book, the transmedia environment and participatory culture of the early twenty-first century have influenced changes to the realm of storytelling, in terms of both form and habit, in profound ways. Already in 1974, media critic Raymond Williams remarks, in his writings about television, that media was becoming increasingly integrated into “the rhythms of everyday life.” He observes that dramatic storytelling, in particular, had expanded to the point that “what we now have is drama as habitual experience: more in a week, in many cases, than most human beings would previously have seen in a lifetime” (4). Alongside the quantity of storytelling, digital media has expanded the qualitative possibilities of narrative through forms that were not yet imaginable from Williams’s vantage point in the mid-1970s. At the beginning of the 2020s, narrative is conveyed through formats such as webisodes, podcasts, Twine games, Twitter plays, webcomics, multilinear interactive fictions, alternate reality games, TikTok videos, Twitch streams, and more. Stories created and distributed in these formats are commonly experienced by numerous viewers, listeners, readers, or interactors, both synchronously and asynchronously, across networked environments.

  Beyond entertainment and artistic innovation, networked and digital media have also influenced ways that storytelling can be used as a transdisciplinary method for conducting research and designing interventions in fields such as public health, medicine, and anthropology. Such methods have also received some attention in fields such as new media studies and the digital humanities, including extensions to fields such as user experience design and aesthetic interaction (Bardzell and Bardzell). Alongside this digital and networked revolution, a diversity of humanistic thinkers — postmodern critics, postcolonial and feminist theorists, and activist scholars — have heralded the rise of the participatory turn (Gubrium, Harper, and Otañez 15). This turn has seen a gradual rise in diversity of underrepresented people who can now contribute as media makers. Alongside the inclusion of new voices, digital and networked media introduce possibilities for participatory research, including increased collaboration with communities that were once treated merely as research subjects or objects.

  This book, Transmedia Stories: Narrative Methods for Public Health and Social Justice, examines ways that techniques, methods, and practices in the arts and humanities can be used to generate new knowledge and social interventions within public health, education, the social sciences, and social justice activism. These methods (described in greater detail below) include story circles and digital storytelling, narrative video games, transmedia history, speculative design, and mixed reality alternate reality games. In addition to a theoretical introduction to these methods, this book proposes to make use of developments in digital publishing in order to introduce readers to a full range of media through which these methods might be practiced. This dimension of the project enables a deep dive into a series of case studies that I oversaw and participated in, especially during the 2010s, via the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab (which I co-founded with medical doctor Melissa Gilliam) and Transmedia Story Lab (which I co-founded with Dr. Gilliam as well as social work and adolescent health researcher Alida Bouris) at the University of Chicago. All of these cases involve co-creating media with Black and brown youth on the South Side of Chicago, a context that I elaborate upon below. Along with descriptions and analyses of these cases, this book includes images, GIFs, audio files, videos, interactive timelines, and samples of curricular materials. In a variety of ways, this book explores narrative forms, cultures, and methods in a transmedia era.

  

  When I use the word “methods” in this book, I am usually not discussing traditional research methods such as archival research or close reading (in the humanities), surveys, ethnographic participant observation, or interviews (in the social sciences), or experiments or randomized controlled trials (in the biological sciences). Many of these kinds of knowledge-producing approaches do, in fact, inform the analysis in this book. However, my usage of the term “methods” seeks to capture the transdisciplinary story-based techniques used and created in order to undertake interventions within fields such as public health specifically and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education more broadly. A method, in this book's usage, may include a designed object such as a game or video or a process such as a curriculum or workshop. In all of our cases, whether they involve media objects or curricula, design that is informed by artistic and humanistic ways of thinking attempts to influence participants’ knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and ways of relating to each other while also creating new transdisciplinary knowledge in its very application. In other words, narratives we create or co-create with youth in turn have effects on their health and well-being. This approach is analogous to Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s concept of “data feminism” that calls for an expanded sense of how we understand “data science” in a way that expands from scientific and algorithmic methods to cultural contexts. In line with this approach, our work on narrative methods calls for a broader understanding of what research is and can become if we take the stories that people tell and participate within, and the contexts within which they do so, seriously. In some cases, such as the digital stories in Chapter 2 and the narrative video games in Chapter 2, researchers who contributed to projects described in this book evaluated some of our story methods and cases using social scientific methods. In other cases, such as the Transmedia History workshop in Chapter 4 and the South Side Speculations workshop in Chapter 5, we did not include a systematic evaluation with a mixed methods approach. Nevertheless, even the latter cases demonstrate ways that artists, activists, and community members can also participate in forms of research that produce new knowledge, sharpen analytical precision, and suggest alternatives to social, political, and medical norms.

  All of the methods described in this book relate, in one way or another, to storytelling. In some cases a narrative-based video game or board game serves as the intervention in which a story elicits responses or alters the learning processes of participants. In other cases, the participants themselves learn how to tell, write, and compose stories through various media, thereby learning through acts of critical making. Even as these cases exist on a spectrum, a fundamental way in which a story can serve as a method and an intervention is through what we might call experimental constructivism, a term that combines two key concepts that I would like to expand upon up front.

  First of all, I consider the methods in this book to be experimental. In my last book, Experimental Games (Jagoda 2020), I explored contemporary experiment as that method moves across science, art, economics, design, and other domains. As a scientific research method, experimental design can be contrasted with observational design. Observational approaches, from phenomenology to ethnography, involve studying subjects in their natural environments. Experimental approaches, by contrast, create an artificial intervention that seeks to compress experience, or to modulate an independent variable in order to study the effects or changes upon a dependent variable. In this way, experiments both test and produce reality. Given this reality-making quality, experiments can be both dangerous and powerful. On the one hand, the serious dangers of experiments, and the power dynamics they establish, are now well known. Extreme, if nonetheless historically exemplary cases, range from Josef Mengele’s experiments in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp to the United States Public Health Service and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Tuskegee syphilis experiment that kept penicillin from Black men in rural Alabama. In the United States, standards for the protection of human participants in research were only established in 1979 via the influential “Belmont Report” (National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research). On the other hand, countless experiments, including those reviewed and monitored by institutional review boards across the U.S., have been ethical, beneficial, and creative in demonstrating and generating knowledge that did not preexist them. In the present context, I will not repeat the claims of my earlier book by elaborating the different qualities that experiments take on when they move from the sciences to the arts and to other areas. Suffice to say, the cases explored in this book are experimental in ways that draw from both experimental research methods in the sciences and experimental forms and processes in the arts. In exploring topics as different as contraceptive usage, sexual harassment, and the likelihood of underrepresented youth pursuing STEM pathways, we often put forward a hypothesis and look at some variable human behavior. At the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and Transmedia Story Lab (more on those below), we create designed experiences, across media, which intervene in the status quo ways of thinking and doing — and we subsequently evaluate the results.

  Second, the methods and interventions in this book are constructivist. As I already explained, experiments themselves are inherently artificial rather than observational in design. In emphasizing constructivism, we also lean into an activist model of scholarship. For me and my collaborators, activism does not merely have to do with advocating on behalf of a particular perspective or ideology but rather of actively creating something new and emergent together with a group of stakeholders who are invested in the process and outcome. For us, health education (or any form of education) must exceed the colonial impulse of reproducing oneself in another person. Instead of assuming that there is absolute truth that can be discovered, we acknowledge that truth is always, at some level, constructed. This is not at all to say that anything goes, a perspective that has become widespread in the landscape of post-truth politics (McIntyre). Even as we remain open to various results and surprises within our interventions, our work contributes actively to the construction of areas such as reproductive justice, public health, and greater educational equity in STEM fields. To put this another way, the digital stories and games we create with youth help to construct a collective vision of health and wellness that often departs from dominant perspectives. The multi-level work we do can be admittedly messy in its movement among disciplinary methods and their often incompatible vocabularies and processes, though I would argue no less rigorous than standard research in its components. In our projects, we do not merely report on the world as it is, but also draw from evidence-based approaches, trial and error, and artistic innovation in order to test out alternative, and hopefully better, ways that the world could be in the present and future. Moreover, as I will emphasize throughout the book, we do not merely construct standardized interventions for young people (though we do this as well), but more often co-create stories and systems with young people. The movement from youth as research subjects to youth as collaborators is crucial to the constructivist world making to which all of our projects attempt to contribute.

  While experimental constructivism is the overarching methodological framework that this book seeks to demonstrate through its cases of multimedia and transmedia storytelling projects, each case featured in this book also has an ambivalent relationship to two other methodological terms that are already in broad circulation: design thinking and participation. To be clear, by ambivalence, I do not mean a sense of vague or not-fully-committed rejection. For me, ambivalence marks a deep and reflective engagement with a present or emergent situation that brings potential harms or simply has known limitations, but that also reveals generative affordances, applications, uses, or adaptations. Even as we often discuss the limitations of design thinking and participation, both concepts have been integral to our shared work with young people and so are worth introducing here. Indeed, as I hope to suggest, the latter term can be seen as mitigating the shortcomings of the former.

  The first term with which the contributors to this book consistently grapple is design thinking. Though grounded in an expanded exploration of design in the 1960s and 1970s, design thinking emerged as a generalized approach only in the 1980s and 1990s and then received popular attention in the 2000s and 2010s (Kimbell 2009, 2). Though the term was used in earlier writing, an important text that shifted the term’s meaning to its contemporary usage was Richard Buchanan’s “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking” (1992). This paper describes design thinking as exceeding a “trade activity” undertaken in particular product-oriented fields such as “industrial or graphic design” (5). Drawing from designer and mathematician Horst Rittel’s work in the 1960s, Buchanan argues that design can better be understood as a process for defining and solving so-called “wicked problems” that are poorly formulated, confusing, or not belonging to any particular discipline or way of thinking (15). Commonly identified wicked problems include climate change, structural inequality, racism, poverty, and the obesity epidemic. Instead of a set philosophy, design thinking has emerged as an approach to problem-solving that exceeds the traditional disciplines. Moreover, by the 2000s, creativity of the type practiced in creative writing or improvisatory performance workshops, and originating in the arts and humanities, started to play a more central role in domains such as science and business (Maciver, Malins, Kantorovich, and Liapis 2465). During this period, design thinking became institutionalized through academic programs such as Stanford University’s “d.school” (the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design), design and consulting firms such as IDEO, and publications such as the Harvard Business Review. At its core, design thinking shifts attention from the world as it is to the way designers believe it could or should be.

  Alongside the celebration of design thinking, there has been extensive critique of the approach as a “failed experiment” (Nussbaum). Those critiques are too numerous to summarize in this introduction, but I will rehearse two of the most prominent attacks. First, at the broadest level, design thinking has been accused of operating within a “managerialist framework” that is capitalist and apolitical, especially in the way it has been used by design firms (Kimbell 2011, 293). A recurring argument is that the uncritical embrace of design thinking has left us with an ideology that is insufficiently defined and more anecdotal than evidence-based. For these critics, it amounts to an overpriced product that does not add enough to commonsense problem solving (Iskander 2018). Beyond the question of efficacy, one implication of the limited managerial scope of design thinking has been its tendency to instrumentalize creativity, treating it as a problem-solving tool, instead of an open-ended or problem-making process. Amy Zidulka and Ingrid Kajzer Mitchell, both of whom have taught business-school courses predicated on design thinking, acknowledge that the approach may marginalize “less instrumental forms of creativity, such as creativity for the purpose of self-exploration and creativity that calls into question relationships of power and domination, which we also believe have a place in our classrooms” (750). In other words, this version of design risks reducing or even misapprehending creativity by making it merely productive.

  Another critique of design thinking is that it gives over too much power to designers. As Natasha Iskander argues, “Design thinking privileges the designer above the people she serves, and in doing so limits participation in the design process.” Admittedly, design thinking does often espouse a “human-centered” approach that foregrounds the perspectives of customers or so-called end users in a design process. Nevertheless, this might not be sufficient to bridge the gap between a consultant and people being consulted on their perspectives. Iskander again argues that “because the designer herself generates the tacit understandings she uses by connecting empathetically with potential users — the ‘empathize’ mode — whatever needs of product users and communities she perceives are refracted through her personal experience and priorities” (2018). In this process, the sociopolitical position or identity of the designer receives significantly more emphasis than other participants or users of a product. The risk of this focus is that treating design thinking as a generalized problem-solving process risks ignoring the context and world within which a designer operates. Some critics have gone even further to argue that the design workshop format has historically been “a privileged, White, youthful, and upper to middle-class approach to innovation that consists of activities that implore participants to rely on ideals of imagination, creativity, and novel insight.” For a variety of reasons linked to culture and access, design thinking can generate “an ethos that can be exclusionary to communities that have historically faced systemic discrimination” (Harrington, Erete, and Piper, 216, 2).

  The projects described in this book could be characterized as borrowing from design thinking, including in their relationship to experimental constructivism and the ways they approach wicked problems such as structural inequality in fields such as STEM, public health, and education. However, the way that we critically address the flaws and mitigate the limitations of design thinking is in part through a second key concept: participation. To be sure, participatory culture has received some of the same criticisms as design thinking (Jenkins, Ito, and Boyd). Nonetheless, when these two concepts are combined and adapted to specific design workshops and contexts — as I argue, later in the introduction, we have attempted to do on the South Side of Chicago in our work with Black and brown youth — a different potential emerges. Regardless of particular media or techniques, every one of our projects has focused on knowledge and practice that emerges from communities of color or historically marginalized stakeholders. In turn, we have sought to share the emergent knowledge at which we arrive with those broader communities, exceeding a model of scholarship that merely extracts information from a community en route to generalizable knowledge. In this approach, we draw directly from research methods developed through the “participatory turn” (Gubrium, Harper, and Otañez 15) and the “participatory culture” described earlier in this introduction (Jenkins 2006). Many of our projects borrow theories and processes from “Participant Action Research” that emerged through the work of thinkers such as Kurt Lewin and John Dewey, was developed by critical educators such as Paolo Freire and bell hooks, and became systematized by social scientists such as Aline Gubrium and Krista Harper (Costanza-Chock; Gubrium and Harper). Many of our frameworks adapt elements described by these scholars, and all of our cases are informed by or in conversation with their own projects and practices.

  Even as we borrow from prior participatory work, we tend to emphasize different models of collaboration rather than a flat or fully democratic participation that secretly upholds a hierarchical liberal empowerment narrative. The work that scholars and designers at the University of Chicago do with youth and community members from the South Side of Chicago are meant to be collaborative. That is, we try never to treat participants from outside of the university as mere research subjects. Even beyond this type of research frame, we do not claim to “empower” people (a unidirectional operation) or help “at-risk youth” (a stigmatizing category that deemphasizes creativity and knowledge). Instead, we work across experiences and identities of age, race, gender, sexuality, and class in order to equip participants in our projects with capacities that allow them to discover new ways of thinking and encourage them to tell their stories. For instance, instead of focusing on the “resilience” of Black and brown youth (an occasionally valuable category though one that often puts undue burden on people who are not given equal or adequate resources), we instead try to emphasize their determination and capacity. All of the cases involve collaborative research in one form or another, though this book also seeks to complicate and think through the limits of participation within already existing power structures.

  In a variety of ways, meaningful participation complicates design thinking. Along with Cynthia L. Bennett and Daniela K. Rosner, we advocate a movement from an emphasis on empathy to relationality in design. The standard design thinking process entails a designer understanding and empathizing with an end user. Though long celebrated as a paramount ethical value, empathy has limits. Bennett and Rosner offer the common example of “designers who use disability simulation techniques such as blindfolds to empathize with blind users.” One shortcoming of such a technique is that designers “may not need to consider the user with disabilities; instead, they may focus on their own experience wearing a blindfold” (1). Drawing from feminist theorist and philosopher of science Vinciane Despret, they argue that instead of aspiring to “be like” someone, designers should find better ways to “be with” them (1-2). That is, instead of replicating, simulating, or representing a position, it is more important to attune oneself, listen, communicate, and cohabitate a space with others. As Bennett and Rosner further point out, “Rather than attempt symmetry, we recognize and work with asymmetry” (9-10). Thus, to distill this principle to its fundamental form, participation should be the work not of symmetrical representation but of asymmetrical encounter. In the material space of a storytelling workshop, this might mean acknowledging the huge gap of experience and expertise in design techniques between adult designers who are part of a preexisting and well-trained team on the one hand and youth who might be editing a video or designing a game for the first time on the other. In such cases, in order for student work to communicate clearly and to reach a larger audience, professional designers can help by engaging in co-making or post-production.

  Importantly, particularly when working with youth from marginalized groups, participation cannot simply entail inviting people to step into a fully planned space of activities in which the participants take part in the organizers’ program. In other words, access is not yet equivalent to participation, even as it is a prerequisite for it. As the following chapters will demonstrate, a storytelling program can be carefully organized while still remaining open to adjustment or even significant change when a planned process does not seem to be working as expected. Instead of applying a design thinking method to every project or topic, it is important to maintain ongoing self-reflexivity about the positions and needs of all participants. This way of working has much in common with Natasha Iskander’s “interpretive engagement,” an alternative to design thinking that constitutes a process of community “problem finding, as opposed to a process of problem solving.” (Iskander 2010, 13). This collaborative process of contemplation means that even core rules of engagement that were initially established by a designer can be discussed and renegotiated by workshop participants. A key value of this process is “tolerating the confusion and indeterminacy” that comes with different perspectives and interpretations that become apparent within a design process (15). In the space of the design workshop, whenever there is a conflict between producing a polished product on the one hand and ethics and inclusivity on the other, a participatory ethos always favors the latter.

  The methods and projects introduced in this book raise questions about the affordances of digital media interventions: How can digital and transmedia storytelling methods help youth living in challenging or underserved conditions define their identities, understand their histories, and imagine their futures differently than before? How might creating a digital story — a short documentary film — affect a queer, Black high school student on the South Side of Chicago who is exploring their sexual identity? How can a narrative video game about sexual harassment and sexual violence inspire a young person to become an active bystander who intervenes in harmful situations and participates in their community? How can training in oral history and speculative design methods invite groups of young people of color to imagine alternative pasts and futures for their neighborhoods? Moreover, how can such projects most effectively introduce youth to systems thinking that helps them understand the interrelated parts — the biological, social, cultural, economic, medical, and political elements — that make up their lives? Finally, how do these interventions help youth develop and focus their digital media capacities in ways that help them beyond the particular project at hand?

  All of the methods and cases explored in this book share a fundamental commitment to social equity in general and racial justice in particular. Among the many critiques of the broad field of digital humanities and digital media studies is its limited engagement with issues of marginalized identity and sociopolitical equity, especially pertaining to race. In many cases, digital practitioners have bracketed or ignored issues related to race, class, gender, and sexuality in favor of working through computational methods or programmatic frameworks. This cordoning off or containment of social justice has not been an incidental operation of the fledgling field. As media studies scholar Tara McPherson has convincingly argued, the “difficulties we encounter in knitting together our discussions of race (or other modes of difference) with our technological productions within the digital humanities (or in our studies of code) are actually an effect of the very designs of our technological systems, designs that emerged in post-World War II computational culture” (2012, 140). In both the computational structures and racial ideologies of the 1960s, McPherson sees modularity as a logic for both organizing data and perpetuating urban segregation.

  Even as such inequality persists in the early twenty-first century and across media cultures, there have been a greater number of models and opportunities for combating and complicating earlier approaches to technology and design. Some scholars in the digital humanities (e.g., Kim Gallon, Jessica Marie Johnson, and Richard Jean So) and digital media studies (e.g., Wendy Chun, Kishonna Gray, and Lisa Nakamura) have researched and complicated the gap between technology and culture. Building on this work at a different scale, this book seeks to outline other methods and alternative ways of thinking and doing. Central to this project is the exploration of collaboration as an underlying method and ethic. Contrary to unidirectional claims to “empowerment,” which have been challenged by researchers such as Lauren S. Berliner, the projects analyzed here experiment with and strive for multidirectional processes of intergenerational making and transdisciplinary research. Though this book focuses on processes, a number of our completed digital stories and games have also achieved results that we discuss. Drawing from mixed methods research and design experience, I examine how using transmedia storytelling can create nonjudgmental spaces for underrepresented youth to explore difficult feelings and emergent identities, change their attitudes and behaviors about public health issues, learn twenty-first century literacies and media skills, pursue science and technology careers, and imagine community-based models of social justice.

  In order to show how these narrative methods operate in practice, the book zooms in on a series of cases taken from an assemblage of projects that were created primarily in the 2010s. Before introducing the specific cases, I would like to provide some additional context regarding the university labs and city of Chicago in which this work took place, as well as my own position as a writer and the collaborative processes that generated this work over the last decade. While we see the methods in this book as generalizable and extendable to numerous content areas, locations, and institutions, the specificity of our own design decisions and contexts matters for the chapters that follow.

  

  All of the projects described in this book were organized by two interdisciplinary labs at the University of Chicago: Game Changer Chicago (GCC) Design Lab and Transmedia Story Lab (TSL), which fall under the umbrella of the Center for Interdisciplinary, Inquiry, and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3). Among the centers on the University of Chicago campus, Ci3 has been one of the most diverse across lines of race, gender, sexuality, and age. The leadership of the center has been intentional in hiring and developing team members who reflect the populations with whom we regularly collaborate for our research. The collaborations undertaken within Ci3 have also crossed countless disciplinary lines. In certain cases, which I elaborate in the chapters themselves, we also collaborated with community and university partners. All of the digital projects created by the labs invite collaborations among researchers, practitioners, youth, community members, and others.

  While drawing on a variety of storytelling techniques derived from a range of disciplines, the GCC and TSL labs have focused most regularly on the content area of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and the demographic of adolescent youth of color, primarily in the United States but also occasionally in other countries such as India. Rather than treating SRH as a narrow medical area, these labs approach public health from a broader perspective. We believe that issues such as unplanned pregnancy or the spread of HIV/AIDS, for example, stem from structural inequalities in the lives of disadvantaged young people, including poverty, unsafe neighborhoods, low-quality health care, underperforming schools, transportation limits, inadequate access to healthy foods, and the lack of guarantees of personal safety. Particularly for people of color, in the United States and around the world, continuous exposure to uncertainty and insecurity as a result of these structural factors leads to chronic stressors that undermine the possibility of resilience and ultimately lead to poor health. Even in the face of such inequities, our research draws on theories such as Positive Youth Development and youth asset-based approaches that focus on building young people’s skills and capacities, instead of stigmatizing them.

  Our first lab, the GCC Design Lab focuses on designing both digital and analog games that tackle issues at the intersection of public health and social justice. This work began as a series of conversations and pilot projects in 2011 and 2012 that sought to use digital and interactive media to explore the field of sexual and reproductive health. In early 2013, the lab was officially co-founded by two University of Chicago faculty: Melissa Gilliam (a medical doctor and professor of obstetrics and gynecology and pediatrics) and myself (a game designer and professor of English at the time of the lab's formation). At the beginning, we hired a lab director and small game design staff, and began to incorporate graduate and undergraduate student fellows as well as high school youth from the South Side of Chicago. Over time, our collaborators have included researchers in fields such as medicine, reproductive and sexual health, business, economics, psychology, history, and social work, as well as practitioners coming from fields as wide-ranging as computer science, game design, film production, creative writing, digital storytelling, and activism.

  Many of the games created at the GCC Design Lab can be characterized as experimental in terms of their genre and production processes. None of these games had a commercial component and instead served the primary purposes of research and education. Some of our early projects included an interactive narrative game about teen decision-making and sexual health (Cache), an alternate reality game about economic and health disparities in America (Stork), two story-based video games about sexual harassment and violence (Lucidity and Bystander), a card game about sexually transmitted infections (InFection Four), a digital game prototype about decision-making and empathy in high school (A Day in the Life), a digital simulation game about public health (Prognosis), a mobile game about HIV testing among men who have sex with men (The Test), a storytelling card game about healthy relationships and sexually transmitted infections (Hearsay), and two citywide games about youth civic engagement and STEM pathways (The Source and S.E.E.D.). As of the writing of this book, our ongoing projects include a board game suite about Chicago-specific social issues (Hexacago Health Academy), a role-playing video game about STEM career pathways for underrepresented youth (Caduceus Quest), and a tabletop role-playing game about reproductive justice and histories of injustice (Lineage).

  Our second lab, TSL, explores ways that the narrative arts — especially emergent digital media and transmedia storytelling forms — can influence broader publics, impact policies, and improve health. Along with Melissa Gilliam and myself, this lab was co-founded with Alida Bouris, a professor of social service administration at the University of Chicago. TSL launched officially in 2016, even as the work began several years prior. Since that time, we have sought to produce a body of knowledge about digital media storytelling that explores intersections between the arts and sciences as well as critical making and practice-based research in the humanities. In addition to faculty, TSL has included a lab director, an audio-visual specialist, and associated researchers. As in the case of GCC, the focus of TSL was on youth-facing work, especially focused on high school aged Black and brown youth.

  The story-based interventions created by TSL reach back prior to the official establishment of the lab. In 2013, Ci3 began to conduct South Side Stories, a two-year project with Black youth, which serves as the core case of the first chapter of this book. Following the founding of TSL, other projects have included speculative design workshops focused on intersections of futurism and social justice (Imagining Futures), workshops oriented toward constructing both the pasts and possible futures of the South Side of Chicago (Transmedia Collage), a multimedia storytelling project in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh in India that takes up reproductive health and family planning via education and financial autonomy for girls (Kissa Kahani), a series of “bodymapping” workshops that used narratives plotted onto body-sized outlines as a way of eliciting thought about issues of race, gender, sexuality, and health (Adolescent X), and a speculative design workshop for LGBTQ youth (Queer Speculative Worldbuilding). In distinction to GCC, the projects undertaken by TSL were more focused on process and education than product or outcome. That is, instead of completed prototypes or games, these projects focused on acts of storytelling by participating youth, even as several of these processes also yielded videos, artworks, and other completed pieces.

  One overarching quality of all of the projects at GCC and TSL has been an emphasis on “transdisciplinary” work. The term transdisciplinary stands in contrast with arguably more common approaches such as “multidisciplinarity” (which juxtaposes discipline-specific methods, assumptions, and theories from multiple disciplines to work through a shared domain) and “interdisciplinarity” (which integrates frameworks from more than one discipline into a project). A transdisciplinary project is not inherently of, and by necessity exceeds, existing disciplines and divisions of knowledge (Meeth 10). The fascinating, though often difficult, transdisciplinary moments that we encounter might also be described, along with media theorist W. J. T. Mitchell, as moments of “indiscipline” in which we encounter the “turbulence or incoherence at the inner and outer boundaries of disciplines” (541). For example, creating the Lucidity video game about sexual violence or the The Source alternate reality game about STEM pathways exceeded the core techniques of any field, whether it be literary or narrative theory, health education, or video game design. The problems that we faced, in both of these projects, had to do with teaching young people about scientific topics without resorting to a quiz-like or information-focused structure of most “educational games.” Such design processes have involved careful balancing between narrative and nonnarrative mechanics; between ludic possibilities and medical facts; and between the emerging procedural rhetoric of game processes and core educational literacies (Jagoda, “Gaming the Humanities”). Many of our projects have complicated key assumptions of our core research team members who were trained in fields such as medicine, public policy, economics, design, literature, science education evaluation, and social service administration. Instead of merely suturing together these disciplines, as they already exist, GCC and TSL have attempted to begin with the clearest possible articulation of a problem that we subsequently address via a patchwork of methods and knowledge bases.

  

  All of the projects described in this book took place on the South Side of Chicago and recruited primarily youth from this part of the city. While many of the researchers and designers at Ci3 take this part of the city for granted as our home, a brief overview might be useful for readers who live in other locations. Even as the methodologies defined and elaborated in this book are meant to be generalizable or adaptable, the specificity of this area matters for understanding the context and motivations for the cases described here. As a summary, this part of Chicago includes neighborhoods such as Brighton Park and Englewood in the southwest, Hyde Park and Woodlawn in the south, Beverly and Morgan Park in the southeast, and Chatham and Pullman on the far south side. In 2016, the overall population of Chicago was almost evenly split among white (32.6%), Latinx (29.7%), and Black (29.3%) inhabitants (as opposed to the overall U.S. split, which is closer to 60.1% white, 18.5% Latinx, and 13.4% Black) (United States Census Bureau and Armentrout). Though these numbers may suggest a remarkably diverse city, which is the case in some respects, these groups remain immensely partitioned. As Chicago historian Natalie Y. Moore writes, capturing this disparity, “Chicago is one of the most segregated yet diverse cities in America. Chicagoans typically don’t live, work or play together. Unlike many other major U.S. cities, no one race dominates” (1). As she notes, early in her childhood, she “learned that the terms “South Side” and “North Side” were shorthand for “black” and “white”” (2).

  The South Side of Chicago is simultaneously home to extremely vibrant cultures and to some of the worst poverty and inequality in the United States. For example, despite extensive news coverage about murder and crime rates in the city, Chicago has not historically had even close to the highest crime rates of a major U.S. city (St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, and Memphis are among the many cities with higher rates). At the same time, other factors undermine this point. For instance, teen unemployment, especially among Black teens, has been disproportionately high and arguably linked to a great deal of the violence that does occur (Moore 176-9). Large parts of the South Side are littered with vacant lots and broad swaths of food deserts that stand in sharp contrast to large portions of the more affluent, and more white, North Side. Employment and income disparities between parts of the city are also stark. For example, the North Side neighborhood of Forest Glen (which has a population that is over 70% white) had a 2021 median household income $112,032, while the far South Side neighborhood of Riverdale (which has a population that is approximately 95% Black) had a median household income of $15,894 (Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning and Kolmar). This huge disparity holds beyond these cases, as many of the most economically disadvantaged Chicago neighborhoods are located on the South Side.

  Even with the structural inequality that has underdeveloped the South Side of Chicago, it would be a mistake to represent it only as a dystopian zone of the city. Without looking away from the segregation and related problems, Moore characterizes this area, where she lives, as making up “a magical place.” She writes:

  It’s the heart of black America, with its miles upon miles of black middle-class neighborhoods and strong political and business legacies. In summertime Chi, the aroma of barbecue wafts from backyard grills and smoky rib joints onto the Dan Ryan Expressway. Chicago is a soulful city that gave us Sam Cooke and Common, Koko Taylor and Chaka Khan. Driving east on 79th Street toward Lake Michigan is a colorful trip: men sipping out of bottles on corners, vibrant businesses, bars, funeral homes, foreboding boarded-up structures, liquor stores, churches, Harold’s Chicken Shacks and sounds of house music dancing in the air. This sense of place is special. I would never want to erase black Chicago (2).

  Historically, the South Side has been notable for many reasons — from housing the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 to giving the United States its first Black president in Barack Obama in 2008. The area has also inspired countless artists, including representations in popular television series such as Shameless (2011), The Chi (2018), and South Side (2019); powerful films such as Hoop Dreams (1994) and Chi-Raq (2015); and popular music by prominent artists such as Muddy Waters, Kanye West, and Chance the Rapper.

  Another feature of the South Side that is particularly important to the context of the methods and cases that follow in this book is the presence of the University of Chicago. The role of the University of Chicago in this area is complicated to say the least — and I come to this point with particular ambivalence as a white professor who holds a tenured position at this university. On the one hand, the university appears in many rankings as a top 10 institution of higher education in the United States, and even the world, bringing countless scholars, artists, events, and resources to the South Side. The neighborhood within which the university is located, Hyde Park, is less segregated than most South Side neighborhoods with a 2020 population that is 47.6% white, 26.8% Black, 12.1% Asian American, 8.5% Latinx, and 5.0% other races or people identifying with more than one racial background (Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning). Moreover, in the 2010s, the university has also significantly increased its admission of students of color. Additionally, the institution supports the community-oriented work of centers such as Ci3 and labs such as GCC and TSL.

  On the other hand, the University of Chicago has had a deeply problematic, even racist, relationship to its surrounding community. The university did not have the direct ties to slavery in the same way as other prominent institutions, such as Harvard University and Princeton University. Of course, this can arguably be attributed in part to the fact that that the University of Chicago was established in 1890, twenty-five years after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the U.S. At the same time, there was an older and short-lived version of the institution (sometimes called Chicago University) established in 1856 for which Illinois politician Stephen Douglas served as the first president of the board of trustees. Douglas used his Mississippi plantation (with 142 enslaved Black people owned by his wife) as “collateral” to purchase land in Bronzeville. It is worth noting that it was only in 2020 that the University removed a stone and plaque that commemorated Douglas and his contribution to the old college (Burton). Beyond links to slavery itself, the University of Chicago supported racist covenants in the 1930s and 1940s that promoted ongoing segregation (Moore 45). To the present day, members of the University of Chicago, including a growing number of faculty of color, have continued to fight the institution’s racist foundations and the ongoing legacies thereof through contributions to movements such as #shutdownSTEM (in the sciences), establishment of the More Than Diversity campaign, and eventually the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity (with faculty in the humanities and social sciences). Even as racial and ethnic diversity at the university increased significantly over time, this was a recent change and one that still remains more of a quantitative than qualitative measure of difference at the institution.

  The University of Chicago is admittedly a complicated site from which to work with Black, brown, and LGBTQ youth. Even as the university has taken steps to focus more on “community outreach” and “diversity and inclusion” in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the campus does not yet feel like a fully welcoming space to many of the students of color, especially those who do not attend the University of Chicago, with whom I have worked over the years. Even when these students attend South Side high schools that are just a few miles away, the university often feels like a space that is not for them or sometimes is actively opposed to including them. Across the programs described in this book, our teams regularly use ice breakers, open conversations, and storytelling methods in order to engage — instead of ignore — the common ambivalence of youth of color toward the university where we work and where we house our programs. The point is never to convince participating youth that the University of Chicago is really a good institution that is open to them. Instead, we want the tensions and inequalities that structure their relationship to the place, and therefore their relationship to the artists and researchers who run these programs, to be part of the very fabric and process of engagement. Rarely do students come out of our programs feeling reconciled with or even fully safe at the university, nor is this ever our goal. We do hope to contribute to changing the University of Chicago for the better, a goal that we share with many of our colleagues. At the end of the day, our objective is to promote open conversation, knowledge sharing, a small redistribution of the resources of a private university, and the possibility of social change.

  

  In addition to the context of the University of Chicago labs and the location of the South Side of Chicago, I would like to say something about the situated perspective of this book and of the projects that it takes up. My own particular identity, perspective, and motivation as the lead writer of this book, and a co-founder of the two labs in which this work was conducted largely in the 2010s, brings with it both advantages and limitations. I hesitate to veer into an autobiographical mode that might distract from the core people, projects, and concepts that are the focus of this book, but the deeply personal nature of this work requires some acknowledgment and reflection. Across my career, I have worked as a literary and cultural critic, a media theorist, a game designer, a storyteller, a digital media artist, a health activist, and a researcher who uses social scientific methods. These roles may at first appear discrete or unrelated but are in fact thoroughly integrated across my life and work. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I was influenced most by two overarching forces. The first was the example of my mother who participated in the Solidarity movement and fled Poland as a political refugee, subsequently raising me to think about a range of social and transnational issues (as we moved from Austria to Australia and finally to the United States). During my childhood, I grew up in exile from most of my family, speaking Polish in mostly English-speaking contexts and steeped in the politics of the late twentieth century. The second was the rise of computational and networked technologies during this period that captured my attention from an early age. The fusion of these two influences led me to a series of projects that concern the sociopolitical impacts and experimental possibilities of media technologies. While I have been steeped in the humanistic fields of literary and media studies since my graduate training, it was the collaboration with and mentorship of Melissa Gilliam that motivated me to focus increasingly on the fields of sexual and reproductive health, public health, and STEM education. Along with my core appointments in Cinema & Media Studies and English, I also took on a secondary appointment in Obstetrics and Gynecology and an affiliation with the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

  It would be reasonable to ask why a Polish immigrant decided to devote a decade (and counting) of their career to using digital media to improve the health of Black and brown youth in Chicago, and why I am specifically qualified to write this book. After immigrating to the United States, I lived briefly on the West Side of Chicago, an extended area that contains the largest Polish community outside of Poland itself, before spending a decade of my life in California and North Carolina. Currently, back in Chicago, I live in Woodlawn, just south of the University of Chicago and the Hyde Park neighborhood in which it is located (according to 2000 census data, Woodlawn has a 94.2% Black majority and as of 2020 a $25,807 median income) (Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning). During my time in Chicago, I have witnessed structural inequality, including racism and segregation, impact so many people around me, which motivated me to learn more and try to make modest contributions to counter these tragic sociopolitical systems and cultural developments.

  While this description of my background might account for my motivation in working on the media interventions described in this book, in terms of qualifications, the honest answer is that I am not qualified to write this book. As an immigrant who was not a native English speaker, I lived the earliest years of my life in a government housing project in Sydney, Australia and eventually settled in the United States where my family eventually moved into the middle class by the time I reached high school. For these reasons, and because of my neurodivergence, I faced some discrimination in my youth. Given this national and class background, as well as my subsequent adoption of a life that I would characterize as queer, I was arguably more attuned than some to intersectional experiences and opportunities. That being said, I am visibly a white man with the significant privileges that this visual and legal identity affords, so I never suffered the forms of severe racism or the cumulative microaggressions that people of color have lived with for centuries. In the United States, in particular, the legacies of this racism go back to processes such as the indigenous genocide that occurred amidst settler colonialism and the chattel slavery that served as a key foundation of the U.S. economic system, while also stretching forward to ongoing processes of segregation, rejection of undocumented immigrants, and a prison-industrial complex that discriminates against people of color. Despite my commitment to justice, equality, and intersectionality, it is important to emphasize that I have not been the direct target of these systems and therefore could only have an external perspective on them.

  This limitation of my own point of view is precisely why this book is the result of both direct and indirect collaboration. Directly, I have collaborated on this particular book with two incredible colleagues who have served as the visual and multimedia designers of this book, but have also worked with me on the projects that serve as our core cases and as readers of chapter drafts. Both of them are Black designers who live in Chicago. My first core collaborator, Ireashia Bennett, served as the audio-visual production manager at the Transmedia Story Lab from 2017 to 2021 where they designed multimedia works, videos, and youth-facing workshops. Bennett is a Black, queer, and disabled filmmaker and designer who seeks to bring a compassionate perspective to communicating social issues in accessible formats through multimedia storytelling. My second collaborator, Ashlyn Sparrow, worked as the director and lead game designer of Game Changer Chicago Design Lab from 2013 to 2018 and has served as a director of the Weston Game Lab from 2018. Sparrow is a Black game designer who creates socially impactful digital, transmedia, and analog games, as well as youth-facing workshops.

  I have served as the sole writer of most chapters of this book in order to maintain a consistency of voice and a continuity of perspective, as one of two principal investigators who has been present to all of the projects described here (the only major exceptions being Chapter 2, in which I co-wrote the core chapter with Alida Bouris, and supplementary sections and media such as the short documentary segments such as the videos in Chapter 6, directed by and co-created with Philip Ehrenberg, that are credited locally). At the same time, Bennett and Sparrow have taken the lead on the visual, audio, and interactive components that are aligned with the types of work and vision that they contributed to each of the labs to which they have contributed. More profoundly than this simple description of the division of labor, I want to emphasize that the thought and interventions in this book would not be possible without the intelligence, creativity, and perspectives of these collaborators. With the exception of very early projects, one or both of them were on the ground with me in all of the projects undertaken by GCC and TSL.

  Beyond the three core writers and designers of this book itself, the work described and analyzed in these pages belongs indirectly to a much larger community. We have done our best, in each chapter, to credit the faculty, staff, students, community members, and youth who contributed either to elements of the chapter or to the project described in that chapter. Our approach to collaboration — in planning, executing, and in post-production or writeups of projects — resonates with Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s call to “show your work” and “make labor visible” in collaborative projects in fields such as data science and the digital humanities (173). A similar principle is at play in collaborative projects that occur in the areas of digital media and activism. While our credits will not perfectly account for the life worlds and communities that brought forth these projects, we have sought to name at least key contributors.

  Along the way, the status of different projects precludes us from sharing full names in all contexts. For instance, the South Side Stories case covered in Chapter 1 was an IRB-supported study that involved certain digital stories about sensitive sexual topics. While we are able to attribute authorship to sample stories that we share because of participant consent, we retain anonymity in sharing focus group data. In other cases, as with the Transmedia Collage program described in Chapter 3, this workshop was run as a critical pedagogy intervention rather than a full-fledged study. Moreover, students created collaborative historical projects, instead of individual pieces, and consented to their circulation through exhibitions and online contexts, thereby making attribution more straightforward. In each chapter, we seek to describe the specific nature of the intervention and our logic of attribution.

  Beyond credits in particular chapters, I would like to single out Melissa Gilliam, who founded and directed Ci3 and co-founded the labs that fall within that center and that oversaw the projects described in this book. In conjunction with her work as a medical clinician and a professor, Gilliam also served as the dean of diversity and inclusion for the Biological Sciences Division at University of Chicago Medicine and vice provost at the University of Chicago. In 2021, she transitioned to the role of provost and executive vice president at The Ohio State University, becoming the first woman of color to ever hold this role. Since the time I arrived at the University of Chicago, Gilliam generously invited me into a decade of collaborations that are still ongoing and, despite our drastically different trainings, trusted my judgment and contributions to our collaborations. Given the stark hierarchy between the sciences and medicine (in the upper echelon of most universities) and the humanities and arts (at the bottom tier and often on the chopping block), it feels especially remarkable to me that she would include me as a partner in this work. This book or the projects analyzed within it would not be possible without Gilliam’s leadership and vision.

  I would like to end this section on two notes about collaboration. First, collaborative authorship and intervention design have long been a norm in the sciences but remain an anomaly in many humanities and arts fields. Though ideas are regularly generated in groups — in workshops, at symposia and conferences, and through editorial processes — the production model of the humanities favors single-author monographs or edited collections of single-author essays on a shared topic. Similarly, in the arts, many media such as painting, sculpture, or novel writing are organized around an individual artist. Even collaborative art forms, such as film, sometimes overvalue or disproportionately reward a director or even co-directors over a huge group of collaborators, including cinematographers and editors who often have an equal or even greater impact on a resulting film. Admittedly, in the early twenty-first century, we also see that fields such as new media studies and digital humanities have explored alternative models of collaborative making and scholarship through research infrastructures such as the humanities lab. In our work together at GCC and TSL, we have sought to expand this emergent humanistic direction, while also delving into collaborations with the biological sciences, social sciences, and arts.

  Second, we credit youth for projects whenever that is possible. As I noted, in some cases IRB protocols require privacy and anonymity that limit the inclusion of full names. However, some of the projects included in this book were run as collaborative workshops, rather than full-fledged studies that included quantitative or qualitative evaluation. In those latter cases, we are able to provide the full names of the young creators, sometimes alongside the collages or digital stories that they created. As such collaborations between the humanities, arts, and sciences continue, and hopefully proliferate, ethical negotiations about inclusion and credit will continue to be a major issue. We do not claim a one-size-fits-all solution to these tensions, but do discuss various ways that we approached this issue at different moments in the book.

  

  The six chapters in this book introduce and complicate a range of methods that use multi-level collaboration and transmedia storytelling tools in order to intervene in areas related to public health and STEM education. Following this introduction, each chapter takes a slightly different emphasis. For example, Chapter 2 takes up digital storytelling and the South Side Stories project in order to focus on ethical issues in program design and qualitative data drawn from youth participating in this project. By distinction, Chapter 3 about narrative games and the Lucidity and Bystander projects extends more emphasis to workshop and game design decisions. While the approach to each method and case is different, the book is meant to be modular in its construction. In other words, even as elements of the chapters inform each other, I have organized this book in such a way that readers can easily move from the introduction to whichever chapter or chapters interest them most.

  Additionally, in order to show how these methods operate in practice, the book works through a series of cases selected from a larger assemblage of projects. Along with traditional textual chapters, this book takes advantage of the multimedia publication format for reasons that are both theoretical and practical. Theoretically, digital concepts call for contemporary tools to enable ways of thinking and navigating information that are proper to digital and networked environments. As Anne Friedberg already pointed out back in 2009, with the digitization and online access to content across media formats as well as the emergence of new platforms and cultural practices, “we are now able to write with the very images and sounds that we have been analyzing” (Friedberg 150). Of course, there is not a universal need to write with images and sounds, in all cases, but opportunities for multimedia scholarship introduce new forms of knowledge making, analysis, and pedagogy. This project thinks not merely about but also with these historically new media and modalities. Practically, continued innovation, meaningful experimentation, and widespread adoption of these new methods is only possible with greater engagement by scholars with digital materials, in addition to secondary accounts of such projects. For example, though many scholars may understand the form of an alternate reality game in theory, seeing footage, timelines, and accompanying materials that make up such a project makes it more possible to reproduce or adapt such a technique. The multimedia form of this book intends to provide greater transparency and information sharing, so that such work can continue and develop in new directions. Without overwhelming readers with an excess of design materials, we nonetheless seek to offer greater access into what Dan Cohen has called the “hidden archive” of transient documents such as sketches, notes, and documents that may not be part of a final work, but still have value to researchers and makers.

  Beyond using digital media to communicate more clearly with readers, this book also foregrounds cases of digital media that we have ourselves created as a way of asking and testing research questions. In this way, the book is in resonance with projects by hybrid scholar-practitioners such as micha cárdenas. She helpfully describes “practice-based research" as "a form of research driven by creating art, media, performance, networks, or community engagement instead of relying only on close study of archives of text or media” (19). Though this book includes some close readings, more often it uses precisely art making and community engagement as a way of thinking.

  

  Chapter 2 (“Story Circles and Digital Storytelling”) offers an overview of story circles and digital storytelling methodologies. Story circles are a facilitated process for soliciting self-reflective participation through a series of oral and written prompts related to an overarching theme. The democratic impulse of the circle, which consists of check-ins, group agreements, deep listening, and witnessing, seeks to foster a safe environment for learning across a broad range of capacity and experience. Digital storytelling, which can follow from story circles, involves a production-driven workshop, in which participants craft a script and use video editing tools to integrate images and audio. This process results in a short digital video akin to an in-depth interview or short autobiographical essay film that blends moving images and audio.

  This chapter focuses on the case study of South Side Stories (2012-2014). South Side Stories used story circles and digital stories to explore how identity, space, and context shape young people’s sense of self, relationships, sexuality, and health. The stories that youth created with adult facilitators conveyed the lived experiences and determination of young people growing up on the South Side of Chicago. The stories showed how experiences with stigma and segregation, as well as violence and victimization, influenced youth perceptions of themselves, their futures, and the resources available to them. The conclusion of this chapter gestures briefly toward a second TSL project, Kissa Kahani (2016-2019), which used story circles and digital storytelling to identify social and structural factors that contribute to widespread gender inequalities in Lucknow, a city located in Uttar Pradesh in India. Working with young people and local community partners, TSL ran workshops and began the process of co-creating media with youth. This chapter features both images and actual digital story videos that emerged from these workshops.

  

  Chapter 3 (“Narrative Video Games”) expands the scope of multimedia and transmedia storytelling by considering the category of narrative video games. Games can be studied as simulations with mechanics, rules, and objectives. However, they can also be approached as interactive narratives that enter into conversations with both print and electronic media. With a diversity of intersections between games and narrative, it is important to think with greater care about ways that digital games expand and complicate how we think about storytelling. Increasingly, digital games blur with categories such as interactive narratives or fictions. Many twenty-first century video games such as Gone Home (2013), Life Is Strange (2015), Disco Elysium (2019), and The Artful Escape (2021) are concerned, first and foremost, with world creation, decision-making, and storytelling. The field of so-called “serious games” has also expanded the range of interactive stories that can be told in service of social, educational, and political objectives. Moreover, in the field of adolescent sexual and reproductive health, researchers have become increasingly interested in interventions that rely on gamification, game mechanics, and game-based narratives.

  Following a short overview of narrative in video games, this chapter turns to the more focused topic of how narrative games can be used in participatory contexts and as research interventions. The case studies in this chapter are Lucidity (2013) and Bystander (2016-2018): two video game prototypes created by the GCC Design Lab to tackle issues of sexual violence and sexual harassment. The multimedia video game Lucidity (2013), co-created with a group of youth, follows the life of one character, a young Black woman named Zaria who remembers and grapples with a sexual assault from her past. The player discovers parts of the story by reading comics, watching videos, navigating interactive websites, and playing short video games. This earlier game represented a collaborative process of discovery that informed our move towards intervention to shift outcomes. The second game, Bystander, offers a different model of participation than its predecessor. Instead of focusing on youth-created work, this game was designed and developed by the university-based GCC team but in consultation with youth who represented the likely eventual players. This mode of player-oriented experience design (or human centered design) influenced the narrative, the dialogue, and the style of the game. This chapter explores this process of participation as well as the potential learning benefits of narrative video games. In addition to this textual argument, we will also include screenshots and GIFs that feature game mechanics and key details of levels from both games. The chapter also incorporates a video essay that features footage from the Lucidity workshop.

  

  Chapter 4 (“Transmedia History”) explores a technique of media making as a way of understanding and reimagining history. Though this process drew from the elements described in earlier chapters, it is not a concept with as precise a set of historical coordinates. This chapter introduces the concepts of critical pedagogy and critical making. It focuses on how a wide range of media literacies and creative techniques can be used to teach, study, and remake history. Beyond the autobiographical narratives elicited through story circles and digital storytelling, media making can also serve the collaborative production of community-engaged public history that combines archival research, oral history interviews, and imaginative synthesis through historically-informed fictional production.

  This chapter uses the case study of the first year of the Transmedia Collage: Histories of Violence and Futures of Health on Chicago’s South Side workshop (2017-2018). This project explored how a climate of structural violence has impacted the health and well-being of youth of color and the communities they live in on Chicago’s South Side. TSL and the University of Illinois at Chicago’s “History Moves” initiative, led by History and Gender and Women's Studies professor Jennifer Brier, worked together to create new narratives about the city of Chicago. The multi-institutional team recruited students of color from a group of South Side neighborhoods. Youth learned to conduct and record interviews that helped them learn about histories of the South Side. Using this research, they created text, image, and audio collages that reimagined the pasts of their neighborhoods. Each collage exemplified how both participatory maker culture and digital media can alter how we understand key concepts including urban space, publics, and the relationships between violence and health. This chapter includes reproductions of the youth collages, images and audio files from the workshops, and original collages created by the TSL team.

  

  Chapter 5 (“Speculative Design”) follows closely on the preceding chapter. It takes up the practice of future-oriented speculative design. Commonly, “design” refers to the use of creative and artistic techniques to solve problems and enable innovations. Instead of proposing concrete solutions or even predicting the future, speculative design is more exploratory and constructive. Specifically, this approach uses techniques of critical making in order to imagine alternative social and political futures. In the past, however, speculative design has often privileged the technological imagination over structural inequality and racial injustice. As I emphasize in this chapter, artists and designers have also increasingly challenged this approach by putting this method in conversation with ideas taken from critical race theory, gender and sexuality studies, and activist practice.

  The case in this chapter is South Side Speculations (2018-2019), the second year of the Transmedia Collage program. This project sought to disrupt dominant narratives about “the future” as a monolithic concept that often comes from technologists and policymakers. In order to garner a more heterogeneous vision of alternative futures (plural), we asked youth participants to use historical and media work to lay the foundations for speculative narratives about possible futures of their neighborhoods. In workshops, we asked: What will the future of Chicago look like in thirty years? And more importantly: How do we want the future of the South Side of Chicago to look? Inspired by sources ranging from Afrofuturism to speculative design, we created short films about the future of the South Side of Chicago. The process yielded a bottom-up futurism: an imagination that unfolded not at the more abstract “global” scale or the isolated “individual” scale, but rather at the “neighborhood” scale that is both communal and concrete. Instead of claiming to solve problems, the group sought to find, stage, and make problems of the future in order to inhabit the many complexities of the present. This chapter includes elements of the workshop curriculum, production images, and final speculative short films.

  

  Chapter 6 (“Alternate Reality Games”) brings together several threads of the book to examine a live-action mixed reality game genre that depended on a transmedia narrative. Alternate reality games (ARGs) are large-scale, participatory narratives designed for multiple players. ARG narratives use transmedia storytelling, whereby elements of the story are distributed and conveyed across different media. These media may include (but are not limited to) TikTok videos, radio broadcasts, blog posts, social media, and invisible theater performances that unfold in public or unconventional spaces. As players move through the narrative, they encounter an assemblage of short games, puzzles, and playful experiences that use both physical and online spaces as their platforms. Explicit gameplay challenges may require players to crack codes using cryptography, engage in social engineering experiments with non-player characters and actors, and play traditional digital or analog games. Moreover, ARGs prompt collaboration and crowdsourcing among players to enable progress through a media-based scavenger hunt and narrative. Investigation drives gameplay, leading some players to solve a puzzle or uncover a new detail of the story before others. Consequently, any single player is unlikely to ever have a full grasp of the entire narrative. Since ARGs take place across extant real world and online spaces, they break down many of the boundaries associated with other forms of storytelling.

  This chapter explores the educational and social potential of ARGs by describing and analyzing the design, curriculum, and objectives of an ARG entitled S.E.E.D. (2014) that was created by the GCC Design Lab. The overview of the game and argument uses some of the transmedia assets that made the game itself possible, as well as video documentation of the game, in order to give a fuller account of this genre and its affordances. S.E.E.D. unfolded on site at the University of Chicago and, for select portions, online across three weeks in July 2014. The purpose of the game was threefold. First, S.E.E.D. sought to transmit STEM knowledge and career interest. Second, the game developed new media literacies through hands-on and game-based learning. Third and finally, this ARG included exercises to promote political participation and civic engagement. Across these objectives, the program relied on the framework “connected learning”: an approach that advocates for expanded access to learning that is socially embedded, interest driven, and oriented towards educational, economic, and political opportunities. S.E.E.D. invited its participants into a science fiction narrative. Following these three weeks of gameplay and collective storytelling, the design and research team broke the fourth wall and debriefed students about the experience. Participants then continued for two more weeks through a camp in which they learned how to design board games and ARGs about self-selected serious social topics, such as gang violence, water scarcity, teenage pregnancy, and gender discrimination in the workplace. These final weeks invited players to become game designers. As I argue, this five-week program was at once an out-of-school educational program, a practice-based digital humanities experiment, a designed game, a research study about alternative learning forms, and a scalable social intervention. The conclusion takes up questions of infrastructure and what it might mean to build or scale large ARGs. This chapter includes three distinct pathways for understanding alternate reality games as a method: the traditional chapter, a short documentary film (split up into five parts) that features game designers and players describing the S.E.E.D. ARG, and an interactive timeline that includes over 100 major events that made up the development and execution of the program. Given the complexity of this particular method and case, we hope these distinct pathways will engage different kinds of readers of this book.

  

  A short final section, (“Coda: ‘Fourcasting’ the Future”), follows closely on the sixth chapter. Here, I explore how transmedia storytelling and the growth of live-streaming platforms such as Twitch could open up new possibilities for narrative methods that include improvisation with larger audiences. This coda gestures toward the next step of ARG design taken up by another group with which I work at the University of Chicago, the Fourcast Lab, which has organized this form around live-streaming platforms in order to tackle issues such as climate change, diversity and inclusion, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

  

  Transmedia Stories is in conversation with fields that include media studies, digital humanities, public health, public anthropology, Black studies, education, sociology, and game studies. The text includes both theoretical overviews of core concepts and methods — and extended cases, augmented by media assets, with which we hope to bring those cases to life. The purpose of this book is not merely to archive a set of experiments that I contributed to in the 2010s. Much more than this, I hope that these cases serve as inspirations for future projects undertaken with different participants in varied places. As I have tried to emphasize in this introduction, there is a specificity to the execution of our projects that has to do with adolescent youth of color on the South Side of Chicago and researchers, artists, and staff at the University of Chicago. At the same time, with adjustments to scale, budget, or content, many of these methods can be adapted and extended by projects in very different cities such as Oakland, Detroit, or Boston (or internationally, as our labs have done in workshops in Lucknow or Hong Kong). Similar interventions and research could be undertaken at public universities, community colleges, or middle and high schools. Instead of a more technical presentation of results, which our labs have veered toward in some of our publications that appear in public health or STEM contexts, this book seeks to make transdisciplinary and transmedia interventions accessible to readers, designers, and researchers.

  As a final note, given the piecemeal nature of academic funding, scientific norms, and other factors, many university labs produce article-length rather than book-length publications. With this book, we hope to move beyond the presentation of results about individual projects. Instead, this book presents a decade’s worth of thought and work, showing myriad ways that narrative methods can be used to target different aspects of sexual and reproductive health among youth of color.

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• 1 2022-08-15T17:51:31+00:00 Narrative Video Games 24 image_header 99 published 2022-12-18T19:15:32+00:00

  The ways that we work and communicate, research and learn, socialize and romance, conduct our finances and communicate with our governments, are all intimately intertwined with complex systems of information — in a way that could not have existed a few decades ago. For such a systemic society, games make a natural fit. While every poem or every song is certainly a system, games are dynamic systems in a much more literal sense. From Poker to Pac-Man to Warcraft, games are machines of inputs and outputs that are inhabited, manipulated, and explored.

  —Eric Zimmerman (“Manifesto for a Ludic Century”)

  If the key to compelling storytelling in a participatory medium lies in scripting the interactor, the challenge for the future is to invent scripts that are formulaic enough to be easily grasped and responded to but flexible enough to capture a wider range of human behavior than treasure hunting and troll slaughter.

  — Janet Murray (Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace)

  To many people, video games remain at best a lightweight entertainment form and at worst a medium responsible for ills such as escapism, addiction, violence, procrastination, and asocial behavior. Given these types of common criticisms, to create a prosocial video game might already seem a contradiction in terms. Additionally, the content element of a game that is specifically about sexual violence, as the cases in this chapter in fact are, might strike a dissonant note. How could one play with a topic that is as serious, terrifying, and difficult to talk about as sexual violence? How could one use the leisure activity or trivial pastime of gameplay to intervene within a topic that is the source of so much suffering and trauma? And then how could a game combine storytelling and interactive elements to address such a serious topic?

  This chapter tells the story of a multi-year process during which Ci3’s Game Changer Chicago (GCC) Design Lab took on the task of designing a video game about sexual violence with and for young people. This is not a perfectly teleological narrative: one focused on a final product that explains and justifies the process that led up to it. Instead, our lab was interested in learning from experimental glitches and failures, a process we have followed in many of our programs, including the ongoing multi-year Hexacago Health Academy initiative in which we co-create board games about health topics (such as unplanned pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, childhood obesity, food insecurity, drug and alcohol use, and structural violence) with youth, integrate these games into educational curricula, and evaluate their efficacy.

  Looking back on several years of game design, we followed a process that itself might have value in demonstrating the usefulness and meaningfulness of video games to a field such as public health. Building on the more linear narratives in Chapter 2, this chapter expands the scope of transmedia storytelling by considering the multilinear and participatory category of narrative video games and what this form, as a method of social intervention, might bring to the field of public health and social scientific thought, as well as education, more broadly. While the games we discuss can be understood as digital narratives, they also introduce medium-specific elements of games, such as rules, mechanics, and objectives.

  Following a short overview of the expanded role of narrative in games and the rise of the category of serious games in the twenty-first century, this chapter turns to the more focused topic of how narrative games can be used as a participatory and research intervention. Unlike the other chapters, which focus on one core case each, the analysis in this chapter is organized around two case studies that include Lucidity (2013) and Bystander (2014-2016): video game prototypes created by the GCC Design Lab to tackle issues of sexual violence and sexual harassment. This sequence of cases is meant to demonstrate adjustments in process and methods that we have developed, across programs that shared a similar goal. First, Lucidity was the outcome of a collaborative process of discovery in which adult designers co-created a DIY video game based on narratives crafted by high-school-aged youth. The workshop that yielded this game subsequently informed our move toward an intervention designed not merely to raise consciousness but to shift behavioral outcomes. Second, Bystander offers a different model of “participation.” Instead of focusing on youth-created work, this game was designed and developed, first and foremost, by the university-based GCC team but in consultation with youth who represented members of the imagined ideal player base. This mode of user-facing experience design did not begin with youth-created raw material, but instead asked youth to respond to and influence the construction of the narrative, the dialogue, and the style of a game designed by adult designers. In addition to this textual argument made in this chapter, we also include a short documentary video of the Lucidity workshop and both photos and GIFs that feature game mechanics and key features of levels from the Lucidity and Bystander games.

  Though the cases in this chapter are digital games, in the conclusion, we turn briefly to how this process informed the flexible analog game design process in our Hexacago Health Academy initiative, which focused on first-order system design through a series of board and card games. We hope this short example demonstrates how narrative game design can be used as a method even without expertise in digital development. Finally, this chapter makes a case for narrative games, in general, as a promising method in areas such as sexual and reproductive health research and public health.

  

  Game designers and educators Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman produce a composite definition of a game based on a survey of definitions from game designers and experts, including David Parlett, Johann Huizinga, Roger Caillois, and Bernard Suits. They ultimately describe a game as “a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (80). This definition of games might direct us most readily toward strategy board games such as Go or chess, parlor games such as charades or “twenty questions,” or simulation video games such as Grand Prix Simulator or SimCity. Each of these games, whether analog or digital, is a system that engages players who use mechanics and act within rules in pursuit of objectives or victory. Yet beyond basic roleplaying or temporal sequencing, none of these games focus heavily on storytelling. Indeed, even if we look toward a broader set of video games, we see that games ranging from Tetris (1984) to Candy Crush Saga (2012) to Baba is You (2019) include anywhere from no narrative to a small degree of decorative storytelling. The fictional scenarios in these games are not the centerpiece of each experience, and they do not put forward elements such as well-drawn characters or navigable storyworlds. Such games are primarily procedural, rule-based, and objective-oriented. So, then, why would we be interested in games in a book about narrative methods?

  Notably, the humanistic field of game studies has itself resisted the role of narrative in video games, at least in its early years. One of the originating conflicts within the field, occurring around the late 1990s and early 2000s, had to do with the approach of ludology versus narratology. The ludologists — including scholars such as Espen Aarseth, Markku Eskelinen, Gonzalo Frasca, and Jesper Juul — contended that game studies needed to differentiate itself from other fields such as literary studies or film studies. Ludology insisted on the medium specificity of games that made them distinct from print or screen oriented narrative. To these scholars, the study of games had to be a formalist discipline that could focus on game mechanics and rules as its core elements of study. These turf wars were a response to early new media studies research, especially from literary and performance scholars such as Janet Murray and Brenda Laurel, who treated digital games as an extension of narrative and theatrical drama.

  The point of this chapter is not to revivify this scene of disciplinary disagreement — one that looms larger in the imaginary of contemporary scholars than it did at the moment of its genesis (Jagoda and Malkowski). Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the dismissal of narrative as a core element of game studies might fuel resistance to thinking of game design as also serving as an instrument that might be part of the toolbox of someone who wishes to use narrative methods for research interventions. In fact, if we look back at the history of video games, we see extensive evidence of narrative as one of their core elements. More than that, we see video games as a zone of creative experimentation with narrative as it enters a digital, networked, and transmedia ecology.

  Even some of the earliest video games, such as Spacewar! (1962) included light narrative premises or frameworks that drew on established genres and invited players to imagine their own stories. Some of the earliest digital games with extensive narratives included text adventure games such as Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), Zork (1977), and Trinity (1986). Beyond single-player experiences, multiplayer text adventure games, called MUDs, or multi-user dungeons, such as MUD1 (1978) and AberMUD (1987), also introduced multiplayer narratives to the space of video games. Without offering a systematic account of narrative in games (which would require its own book and already appears in other scholarship), it is also easy to see that many popular video games have narrative dimensions (Jagoda 2018). To take a well-known example, The Legend of Zelda (1986) tells the story of Link, who traverses Hyrule in search of the Triforce and searches for Princess Zelda who has been kidnapped by the evil Ganon.

  Many earlier video games offer little more of a narrative premise or backdrop to gameplay. In the 1980s and 1990s, complex narratives were arguably more common in Japanese roleplaying video games such as Dragon Quest (1986, also published in North America as Dragon Warrior) and Final Fantasy (1987) than in their U.S. counterparts. By distinction to early computer or console games, many popular or acclaimed video games from the twenty-first century, even coming from the U.S., rely heavily on narrative. Some of the most commonly discussed examples include Neverwinter Nights (1991), Baldur’s Gate (1998), Bioshock (2007), Mass Effect (2007), Heavy Rain (2010), Red Dead Redemption (2010), The Walking Dead (2012), The Last of Us (2013), Life is Strange (2015), and Disco Elysium (2019). This short list of high profile games is by no means anomalous and certainly nowhere near comprehensive. Complex storytelling has become more intricately integrated into video games in general. Games across genres convey their stories through character and avatar development, world exploration and spatial storytelling, and decision-making and strategy that determines key narrative branching and outcomes. In other words, there is now good reason to be interested not merely in the role of narrative in video games, but in video games as a medium for telling stories in fundamentally new ways that depend in choice, interface interaction, and participation. Storytelling has been an equally important aspect of the other category that I would like to introduce here: serious games.

  

  Along with the development of narrative video games, the twenty-first century has also seen the expansion of another approach to games that is crucial to understanding why it would be possible to develop a video game about sexual violence: that is, the serious game. In 1970, Clark C. Abt coined the term “serious game” and contended that a game need not be merely a leisure activity but can also be a way of thinking, experimenting, and solving problems. In the 1960s and 1970s, game-based interventions were largely pen and paper, card, and board games or live-action simulations that might be applied to areas such as education, government, and occupational training. There is also a longer specific history of military uses of games for scenario planning and pedagogy that goes back to Prussian war games such as Kriegsspiel that were developed in the nineteenth century (Peterson). By the twenty-first century, this approach to games had blossomed into a broader constellation of digital game-based social, educational, and political interventions.

  A common question raised about serious games is whether they can be both topically serious and  “fun” at the same time. Elsewhere, I have argued that fun often privileges consumer categories such as satisfaction or gratification (Jagoda 2020). Fun is also analytically imprecise insofar as one person's idea of fun might be tedious or uncomfortable to another. Moreover, Amanda Phillips has argued that fun was used amidst the #GamerGate culture wars to mark a purity that “'real' gamers” might engage in as opposed to organizations that duped people into “playing terribly crafted but ideologically innovative games” (9). Without rehearsing the details of this debate, it is worth noting that serious games, at their best, can be both intellectually and mechanically engaging, both informative and fun. Of course there are educational and serious games that amount to little more than interactive quizzes, but that arguably has more to do with flawed design than any inherent shortcoming of the category of games.

  To highlight one of the best known earlier serious video games, we might consider The Oregon Trail. Originally developed in 1971 and released in its fully graphical form in 1985, this game invites the player to control a party of settlers that sets off on a journey that exceeds 2,000 miles, leading from Independence, Missouri in 1848 to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. You bring equipment, supplies, and money with you and begin an emergent narrative. At every turn, the player faces challenges such as thieves who steal your supplies, wagon damage that prevents progress, or cholera that kills party members. As a roleplaying game, The Oregon Trail allows the player to select their primary identity (e.g., a banker from Boston or a farmer from Illinois) and the names of all five members of their party. Each in-game day, the simulation gives you information about the state of the world (e.g., the weather, your party's health, your pace, and your rations) and gives you a series of actions from which to choose (e.g., continue on the trail, check supplies, change food rations, or attempt to trade). Throughout the experience, you navigate a series of text menus and engage in occasional mini-games. This serious game offered an interactive history lesson that used historical research to inflect the probabilities of different events occurring. Several versions of the game moved from the original 1971 build created by Don Rawitsch — a history teacher who eventually collaborated with the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) — to the most commonly played 1985 graphical version for the Apple II computer that was developed by designer R. Philip Bouchard’s team. Already, with this case, we see the complex trajectories and collaborations necessary to combine content knowledge (e.g., history lessons) with an engaging design (e.g., a simulation game with an emergent narrative). Though Oregon Trail is an early example of a broadly circulated serious game, this field has expanded in the twenty-first century with companies like Filament Games, which has completed over 160 games about topics such as the Bill of Rights, English language literacy, plant growth, and basic mathematics.

  Beyond video games focused on specific educational curricula in disciplines such as history or science, other serious games have focused on areas of cultural, social, or political advocacy. One game that received considerable critical acclaim was the puzzle-platformer Never Alone or Kisima Inŋitchuŋa (2014), which explores indigenous culture through an interactive version of an traditional Iñupiaq story. At the level of development, the game was a collaboration between the Cook Inlet Tribal Council and the educational game company E-Line Media. In other words, the game relied on the expertise of people who were intimately familiar with Iñupiaq narratives and traditions, but also paired them with game designers and artists who had experience in the medium. This story sought to share indigenous stories in an interactive format and popular game genre that would be accessible to younger players.

  When the GCC Design Lab began exploring games about sexual and reproductive health, we found several serious games in the space of public health that were aimed at a variety of audiences. A few examples of these games include a decision-making narrative game about adult communication concerning underage drinking (Start the Talk, Kognito), a mobile roleplaying game that seeks to increase adherence to prescribed medication and promotes behavior awareness among HIV-positive men and trans women between the ages of 16 and 24 who have sex with men (Epic Allies, BATLab), and a roleplaying game that raises awareness about sexually transmitted infections and sexual health for an audience of youth in Swaziland (Swazi Yolo, Formula D Interactive).

  A smaller number of existing games also included associated research about the effectiveness of the game in changing attitudes and behaviors of players. One example of a game that was created along with a Randomized Controlled Trial is HopeLab’s action game Re-Mission. This third-person shooter video game has the player guide a nanobot that moves through a human patient in order to help them fight cancer. The game is designed to help young cancer patients learn about the disease and its treatments, and to take an active part in combating their cancer. In a study of 375 cancer patients from the ages of 13 to 29, a two-year trial discovered 70% quicker acquisition of cancer-related knowledge, a three-fold increase in cancer-related self-efficacy, and greater adherence to prescribed medication among patients who played Re-Mission as compared to a control group (Kato et al.).

  Serious games, which raise consciousness or seek to change behaviors, are also connected to the prominent category of gamification. This term names the use of game mechanics in traditionally nongame activities, which attempt to impact areas such as education, consumption, military training, fitness, and productivity management. Gamification often relies on extrinsic motivation achieved through data tracking, points, badges, and rewards (Reeves and Read; Hunter; Zichermann and Linder; Zichermann and Cunningham). Though this approach has become a highly visible and widespread dimension of serious games, GCC has been interested in challenging certain precepts of gamification by creating games that rely more on intrinsic than extrinsic motivation, and carefully integrate learning objectives into games that are mechanically engaging (Jagoda 2020). Even so, it is worth acknowledging that elements of gamification still find their ways into our designs. To show how we have attempted to combine narrative and serious games in addressing sexual harassment and violence, I now turn to two cases of development workshops and final narrative game designs.

  
  
  

  Given the longer history of serious games I just reviewed, the idea of a video game about sexual harassment and sexual violence might no longer appear as absurd to readers not previously familiar with the field. Even so, attempts to make interactive experiences about this topic have been limited. Perhaps the most common approach appears in online sexual harassment modules that are now common in institutions of higher learning and workplaces. Such training often asks participants to read narrative excerpts or to watch short videos and subsequently to answer questions about appropriate behavior, usually from a legalistic perspective. While such training modules are not games per se, they incorporate interactive tools in the service of learning and compliance. Some studies of sexual harassment prevention training, for instance, have found that such an approach is ineffective or even has a negative effect on the attitudes of users, especially cis men, who may be inclined to harass women (Robb and Doverspike; Frank and Kalev). Beyond this more common training, there have also been examples of serious games that approach sexual harassment and violence. One example of this kind of game is Decisions That Matter (2015), an interactive narrative game that seeks to teach incoming undergraduate university students about sexual assault on campus.

  The emphasis on sexual harassment and violence training usually starts at the university level and extends out into workplaces. While these are important sites, our work at GCC began with the recognition that sexual violence was not merely a problem that began in college, but that impacted youth at earlier moments, especially in high school and even as early as middle school. Of all sexual assaults, the majority happen among younger people with 54% occurring between the ages of 18-34 and 15% between the ages of 12-17 (Department of Justice; Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network). One survey on sexual violence in seventh through twelfth grade found that 56% of women and 40% of men reported experiences with unwanted sexual comments or touch (Hill). Other surveys found a prevalence of violence within romantic relationships. Among 68.6% of students in grades 9 to 12 in the U.S. who dated in the 12 months prior to one survey, 9.6% had been purposefully physically hurt and 10.6% had been forced to do sexual things they did not desire by their dating partner (Kann et al.). This problem had not abated by the end of the 2010s. The U.S. Education Department discovered that reports of sexual violence at K-12 public schools increased from about 9,600 in the 2015-2016 school year to nearly 15,000 in the 2017-2018 school year (Civil Rights Data Collection). While there is research on successful curricular components that can combat sexual violence and harassment, minimal data exists regarding the content and prevalence of sexuality education in middle and high school contexts (Schewe; Wolfe et al.; Eisenberg et al.). Factoring in varied state requirements across the U.S. suggests that such education is limited at best.

  Given this uncertain and unsatisfying state of sexual education across the U.S., in 2012, we set out to co-create a game about sexual violence with a group of youth through a workshop hosted by GCC at the University of Chicago. Most serious games are created in a top-down manner by game companies or university design labs for end users to experience. Some of these games benefit from focus groups in which potential end users inform design and development, as well as playtesting later in the process. For example, the frame of “gamification,” which I discussed in the previous section, usually assumes a top-down approach, informed by behavioral economics, which nudges participants toward behaviors that have been identified as favorable by designers (Thaler and Sunstein).

  Given the charged and difficult nature of the topic of sexual violence and harassment, our design team did not want to presume to know precisely what high-school-aged youth should be learning or more importantly how they might best learn about this topic. In working through this set of issues, the GCC team developed the Lucidity workshop. This program was as focused on the feasibility and acceptability of the process of using gameplay and storytelling to approach sexual violence as it was on the game that would be the outcome of the shared work. Designers in the GCC Lab aimed to collaborate early and substantially with youth in the creation process of this game by drawing from conceptual models such as “participatory design,” “design thinking,” and “human centered design” that recommend incorporating people affected by the core design issue into the development of responses or solutions (Asaro; Brown; IDEO). As I discuss in the introduction of this book, we also complicated these models in a variety of ways. By co-designing games with young people, we sought also to operationalize asset-based frameworks, such as Positive Youth Development, in order to engage youth as valued and meaningful partners in research that concerns their lives and well-being (Bernat and Resnick; Catalano et al.). The intervention focused on skills such as storytelling and media making, as well specific content about sexual and reproductive health. We worked under the conviction that storytelling can elicit understanding, involvement, and a sense of agency; media creation can sharpen twenty-first century literacies; and discussing sexual and reproductive health topics can increase content knowledge and self-efficacy (Pellegrino and Hilton).

  For this project, which came to be known as the Lucidity game, we recruited eleven African-American and one Latino participants (seven female and five male) from high schools and youth-serving programs in Chicago for a three-week workshop that took place in July 2012. Participants worked with GCC Lab staff who included a creative writer to develop the multimedia narrative, a game designer to prototype games, and a filmmaker to create videos and voiceovers. Our method involved a series of sessions that sought to make the topic of sexual violence salient to our audience and collectively to develop the game itself. Before beginning work on the digital game itself, we focused on four primary session types:

  • First, we ran brainstorming sessions in which young people were given the word “sex” and asked to write about whatever came to mind, verbally share, and discuss their associations. In addition to creating a word cloud, youth engaged in short writing exercises in which we asked them to write personal narratives related to the generated constellation of words. These narratives could be about themselves, their close friends, or people from their neighborhood. At this stage, we also encouraged them to write in any format that felt comfortable to them, including prose or poetry. This step drew from the story circle method described in Chapter 1.
  • Second, moving from personal response, we organized group storytelling exercises, in which youth responded to a prompt and added their personal experiences to a composite narrative. This uses of modified story circles moved youth from the type of individual nonfiction that informs conventional digital storytelling techniques to a different mode of collective fiction organized in a shared game project. At this stage, the group pulled details, including characters and experiences, from many of the individual stories, and transformed them gradually into a single fictional story.
  • Third, we organized “Ask the Doctor” sessions, in which we brought in a medical doctor to answer questions about reproductive health and sexual violence. Some of the details that youth learned during these sessions would eventually find their way into the finished game.
  • Fourth and finally, we organized youth-directed research and discussion sessions about sexual and reproductive health topics, which would further inform the shared game and its focus on sexual violence.

  Even prior to explicit game design, these informal narrative-oriented sessions yielded several elements that we included in the final game. For example, in a storytelling session, one workshop student revealed that he split his family time between his father in the suburbs and his mother in the city. Young people wanted to include this type of family arrangement in the story, so it became a part of the protagonist's life narrative and a theme within a mini-game. In addition, we tasked a small group with researching reproductive health differences between youth in cities versus in the suburbs, after which the full group discussed disparities in sexually transmitted infection rates by neighborhoods. By drawing from stories and reflections shared by young people of color — an under-represented group in video games and other media, even more at the time of the workshop than at the time of this book's publication — the characters and situations in the game reflected concerns that would be significant to the workshop participants’ peers. Moreover, concrete details from personal stories further motivated research, which might otherwise have seemed abstract or irrelevant to the lives of participating youth.

  Discussions and prototypes from the workshop informed a core narrative and four mini-games that became modules of Lucidity: a web-based, multimedia game with a multilinear narrative and two possible endings. The finished game took a player approximately 45 minutes to complete, including the story elements and all four mini-games, which are necessary to make progress to the ending. The overall experience is composed of four mini-games within different gameplay genres, including a room-escape puzzle, a point-and-click adventure, an educational fill-in-the-blank challenge, and a three-dimensional maze.

  The Lucidity transmedia game approaches sexual and emotional health through a single narrative made up of video, photography, comics, websites, digital games and other media. The GCC Design Lab team co-authored and post-produced the game based on stories and assets created by youth participants. This video of the Lucidity workshop and game was originally published by "Audiovisual Thinking: The Journal of Academic Videos." As of the time of this book's publication, the journal is no longer online and the video is not accessible in its original location.

  Narratively, Lucidity tells the story of a young Black woman, Zaria, who loses her capacity to dream for many years, following a traumatic event. To her surprise, after an intense conversation with a fortune teller that initiates the game, she unexpectedly begins to dream again. These dreams return Zaria to several periods in her life: adolescence, young adulthood, and the present day. The narrative is communicated entirely from Zaria’s perspective, and moves back and forth among different time periods to reflect the constructive process of memory and procedures of working through trauma. The player must make sense of the fragmented story by traversing a series of media — reading text and comics, watching videos, listening to audio clips, playing short mini-games, and navigating websites. This transmedia experience makes up a single narrative about Zaria’s past. The voice of the adult Zaria serves as a mechanism for embedding information about sexual assault and guiding the player through her past experiences while also modelling healthy communication and decision-making skills. By the end of the game, the player learns about a traumatic event in Zaria’s early life: as a teenager, Zaria was sexually assaulted by her boyfriend, Rico, who was later killed, complicating her ability to process and gain closure. Zaria suppresses this memory until, later, she is diagnosed with an unrelated sexually transmitted infection. This event leads her to think back, associatively, upon her past and its connection to her present, and to face the future consequences of her trauma. Each mini-game advances the narrative. One mini-game takes place in her teenage bedroom; a second, in her neighborhood on the night she was sexually assaulted; a third, during her visit to the doctor’s office; and a final dreamlike and surreal maze, in which the player helps Zaria choose her future path by deciding between two major life choices.

  While the youth workshop directly shaped the key themes and elements of Lucidity, much of the design and development — including asset creation, assembly, and refinement — took place among professional GCC faculty and staff following the workshop. In those months, the lab designers finalized the narrative, designed and programmed puzzles, created graphic novel pages, recorded additional voiceovers, and embedded links to external websites. Design team professionals with expertise in sexual and reproductive health and rights and young people’s development selected links to well-established local and national resources on relevant topics (e.g., the U.S. Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network website). The game encouraged players to access these websites for aid in completing game challenges, as well as additional independent learning about sexual health and assault. Following production, a medical doctor and social worker reviewed content for medical accuracy and created content warnings about language, images, and audio that might be difficult for some players. After this process, the final Lucidity game and launched online in late 2012.

  Though this section of the chapter has focused on the game production workshop, we have written elsewhere about research results regarding the efficacy of the Lucidity game (Gilliam, Jagoda, et al). To briefly summarize the procedure and results, we administered a pre-game questionnaire, the gameplay intervention itself, and a researcher-facilitated focus group for twenty-four young people between the ages of 14 and 18. We then asked participants to play Lucidity again at home. Seven to fourteen days after the initial session, researchers contacted each participant for an approximately ten-minute follow-up telephone interview. Twenty-three of these participants responded (nineteen participants were African-American and 16 were female). This follow-up communication gave us an opportunity to find out whether players had reflected upon the game experience since the initial session.

  Overall, the research participants endorsed the game and reported interest in increased public awareness and communication about sexual violence and health. In the initial focus groups, youth communicated overall approval of the game, the acquisition of new knowledge about sexual violence and health, minimal past exposure to education about sexual violence, and an interest in learning more about additional sexual violence topics. One critique that emerged concerned the multilinearity and fragmentation of the narrative, which produced some confusion about the plot and gameplay elements. Admittedly, some of this confusion had to do with the nature of trauma itself, but also extended to specific youth-made decisions about the narrative form. The most consistent theme that the follow-up telephone interviews raised had to do with how Lucidity helped youth communicate about sexual violence. Almost every interview participant reported initiating discussions about the game or sexual violence with parents, teachers, siblings, friends, or romantic partners. A central finding from this game evaluation had to do with Lucidity's effectiveness in facilitating communication between players and their extended communities. This case study suggested that video games and digital narratives might help minimize discomfort or embarrassment regarding a charged topic, augment self-efficacy, and alter social norms through mediated communication.

  Given that Lucidity (similarly to many serious games) is a single-player game, we also realized that such a game might be more effective if paired with an opportunity for group discussion and shared reflection following gameplay. In light of this finding, we began more actively to develop curricula alongside our subsequent game projects. The successes, limitations, and possibilities raised by this pilot project also led directly to another game project about sexual harassment and violence, Bystander, to which I now turn.

  

  As an educational intervention, the Lucidity workshop was effective in giving youth participants a chance to think through and contribute to a finished digital game. At the same time, we found limitations in relying too heavily on youth contributions in creating a final game that would be played by others. For example, the narrative was too complex and convoluted for many players who were not part of the workshop and did not have extended experience with the narrative. As a follow-up game-based intervention about sexual violence and sexual harassment, we next turned to the Bystander project. At a high level, unlike Lucidity, Bystander was created primarily by professional designers working at a university lab, but included ongoing consultations with high school students about elements where their contributions were valuable and in ways that did not rely on a design expertise that they had not yet acquired. Youth also participated as actors who embodied the primary characters within the game.

  Before describing the form and narrative of the final game, it is worth discussing the new process that we instituted during the design of Bystander. Instead of an intensive three-week workshop, we convened a youth fellows group made up of ten participants, eight of whom had previously participated in one of our GCC Lab’s game-based summer programs. For this reason, the youth already had an easy rapport with one another, were comfortable with the facilitators, and understood the core mission of GCC. This core of high school students met on the University of Chicago campus for six hours total each week, usually across two separate three-hour sessions. Instead of co-creating the game with youth, the designers of the Bystander game constructed assets that they then shared with the participants. For example, during one session, we focused on the game script and requested feedback about the dialogue. During this meeting, students shared suggestions regarding how they saw the realism and aesthetics of any given scene. For instance, with youth, we discussed a level of the game that takes place at a party and brainstormed clickable objects that might plausibly appear in this scenario such as red Solo cups, a pizza, speakers with a music playlist, and so forth. During a second session, we asked youth to playtest portions of the game in development, including the user interface and game mechanics. Even before putting youth in front of computer screens, we gave them printouts of key materials, highlighters, and red markers to enable a range of responses. After these sessions, designers discussed the feedback among themselves and incorporated some of it into the build.

  While Bystander is a game about sexual violence and sexual harassment, the youth fellows in this case did not receive sessions dedicated to this content, unlike the Lucidity workshop which included content-specific conversations with experts. Instead, these issues were incorporated directly into discussions about the game, especially since some of the gameplay required topical knowledge. Certain game levels included right and wrong answers. Occasionally, when a participant learned that they had answered a question in the game incorrectly, they would want to discuss or even debate the answer. When a correct answer was surprising to any of the fellows, our initial goal was not to judge but just to listen, observe, and attempt to understand their underlying logic. Subsequently, we sought to facilitate the discussion in a way that remained generous and enabled everyone to contribute. In response to discussions, we sometimes introduced content-specific resources, such as the “Tea Consent” video, which was circulating broadly online at the time and introduced an accessible shared analogy to our discussion about sexual consent (May 2015).

  In these conversations, gender dynamics were frequently evident. In game scenarios that focused on sexual harassment and rape myths, for example, fellows who were cis men much more commonly submitted incorrect answers during playtesting. After noting they were incorrect, these participants would regularly ask follow-up questions about the specific scenario, such as “Is rating girls on their hotness really sexual harassment?” or “A girl isn’t asking for sex by wearing a short skirt?” Essentially, we saw the frequent repetition of the very rape myths that the game was being designed to critique and undermine. In these conversations, even before facilitators could intervene, the young women would often respond with reasons as to why the behavior in question was problematic and hurtful. In these instances, male fellows would sometimes turn to adult facilitators for adjudication. The facilitator would often respond with parallel absurd scenarios that relied on similar logic. For instance, game designer Ashlyn Sparrow frequently asked questions such as, “Are you asking to be thrown in jail for wearing baggy pants?” “Is a person automatically a gang member because they have dreadlocks?” or “Is your sister, cousin, or auntie asking for sex when she wears a shorter skirt?” More than rhetorical questions, these concrete scenarios were successful in complicating underlying assumptions. As the youth fellows program progressed, even participants who initially gave consistently incorrect answers would correct fellows who had missed the previous session. These sessions also inspired us to strive for greater concreteness in the Bystander game itself, knowing that we would not be available to speak with players in all cases when they played the finished game.

  The integration of young people in this development process contributed to the final Bystander game. The completed game takes the form of an interactive narrative with mini-games that unfolds across four episodes. These episodes address topics that include sexual harassment, supporting sexual assault survivors, consent, intimate partner violence, laws regarding sexual violence, and pathways for accessing relevant resources. Unlike Lucidity, which focused on the perspective of a survivor, Bystander focused on bystander behaviors as a way of making gameplay less confusing and more accessible to a larger number of players. The player takes the perspective of a high school junior who confronts a series of episodes linked to sexual violence and harassment. Bystander is a theoretically based intervention that aims to increase the skills, attitudes, and awareness that high school youth can use to combat sexual violence. The experience frames sexual violence prevention as a community-based responsibility. Bystander also challenges common rape myths and explores a continuum of opportunities for individuals to intervene before, during, or after a sexual assault.

  Even as Bystander involved young people less in the role of primary designers (as was the case with Lucidity) than as focus group members and playtesters, the game was designed to be played by Chicago South Side youth specifically and Black and brown youth more generally. As such, the game departs from the kinds of norms that were common in the mainstream video game industry at the time, and even at the time of this book’s publication. For example, many of our characters are Black youth who inhabit the types of schools and neighborhoods that the youth fellows themselves inhabited at the time. The frame narrative takes the form of a graphic novel that leads to four episodes with unique mini-games. Even as these mini-games include information that one might find in a standard sexual harassment module, that information is integrated into a narrative context that adds realism and depth to the interactions. Moreover, each episode of the game features unique game mechanics that invite a unique interaction with the scenario.

  In the first episode, the player navigates a high school environment and identifies instances of sexual harassment. At the level of action, the player must then choose among a number of behaviors that might most effectively disrupt harassment, deciding among options such as expressing empathy, checking in with a friend, and giving a harasser a silent stare.

  In the second episode, the player has a conversation with a friend who reveals that she was sexually assaulted by her boyfriend. As the conversation unfolds, the player must listen attentively, reassure her friend, identify any cultural myth about sexual violence, and demonstrate supportive behaviors toward this survivor. This mini-game involves branching decision trees that move the conversation in a variety of directions.

  In the third episode, the player arrives at a friend’s party and witnesses an acquaintance coerce a friend using alcohol. The player encounters several sexual assault myths related to alcohol. The mini-game involves adopting the part of an active bystander, identifying opportunities for intervention across the navigable space, and acting upon those possibilities.

  In the fourth episode, a male friend relates a sexual assault by older teenagers and is unsure of what how to respond. The player must support his friend by researching facts and resources regarding sexual violence on his phone. The mini-game involves closely reading versions of fictional resource sites and summarizing findings.

  In pilot research that we summarize elsewhere, our lab attempted to assess the game’s feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy. To briefly share the procedure and results, trained facilitators implemented the game across four sessions in two twelfth-grade classrooms in November 2016. After the program ended, 46 students — the majority were Black/African American (66.6%) and female (55.5%) with a mean age of 17 — filled out a post-intervention survey about their experience, acceptability of the program, and attitudes toward bystander behaviors. Overall, we found that the Bystander game and curriculum were feasible and acceptable to twelfth-grade students. The young people who played Bystander reported themselves as being significantly more likely to support a survivor and engage in sexual assault prevention. Among students who completed the game, 97.6% expressed a belief that the program was “valuable,” 83.3% reported that it taught them new information, and 60% found it relevant to their personal lives. Only two students (4.7%) reported feeling uncomfortable with the program content (Rowley et al.).

  In terms of process, beyond the role of youth, it is worth noting that Bystander marked GCC’s first close integration of designers and researchers throughout the design process. Previously, as in the case of Lucidity, GCC staff would design or develop a game with youth before handing it off to researchers who would subject the game to research via surveys and qualitative methods. For this project, at least one researcher was present at most design meetings. Even early in the design process, the difference between perspectives and approaches was notable. Consistently, researchers began with tested frameworks and methods for attitude and behavior change. By contrast, game designers began by playing and dissecting the existing catalog of content or genre adjacent games to imagine a novel and emotionally resonant route into the topic. While our ongoing discussions led to greater agreement over time, there was an initial split in which the researchers approached games as problem solving vehicles (e.g., media for embedding critiques of rape myths), while the game designers approached games as conversation starters that animated problems (e.g., ways into dialogue about concepts such as consent that do not define but open up different possibilities). A consistent debate within the group had to do with how didactic a game should be to be most effective with its players.

  Overall, the GCC Design Lab learned a great deal from the design process and final version of the Bystander game. While most universities offer Title IX and sexual harassment training modules, these remain uncommon at the high school level. Moreover, existing training is frequently top-down in its approach or limited in the interactivity (or the meaningfulness of the interactivity) that it affords. We believe that games about sexual harassment and violence, especially with embedded narratives that mirror the experiences of young players, might make these crucial conversations more accessible to young people and give them chances to experiment with and reflect upon their feelings and beliefs.

  Despite everything we learned, the Bystander project also had a number of limitations. We determined that in order to move from gameplay to rich discussion about topics such as consent, as well as distribution through schools, we would need to pair the game with a vibrant curriculum. Unlike Lucidity, Bystander already incorporated curricular elements directly into the gameplay itself, but this did not substitute for valuable corresponding discussion about the game, following the experience. Additionally, while we conducted some initial research on the game’s feasibility and acceptability, this game would benefit from a longitudinal study that explores how a video game might effect youth in the longer term, including how it impacts the types of discussions they are likely to have with peers and adults. Even so, given our existing resources, we were able to incorporate youth as playtesters, while still allowing professional designers to develop the bulk of the game. Compared to the Lucidity project, this process produced a more polished and engaging game.

  

  The discussions between GCC designers and researchers, which started haphazardly during the Lucidity project and took a more systematic form during the Bystander game, raised questions about how serious narrative games might promote learning and behavior change. During these years, the members of GCC began to think more about earlier educational video games such as Reader Rabbit (1983), The Oregon Trail (1985), and Number Munchers (1986), which adopted a design strategy predicated on overt transmission of information. Similarly, in the early years of the GCC Lab's formation, we actively played and discussed serious social and political games such as 3rd World Farmer (2005), Darfur is Dying (2006), and PeaceMaker (2007), which sought to inform players about a topic or induce empathy. We saw our games, including on topics such as sexual harassment and violence, falling at the intersection of education and sociopolitical advocacy. Yet both the approaches of information delivery and consciousness raising seemed insufficient (if necessary) as components that could achieve integrated learning and thoughtful behavior change. Though Lucidity and Bystander both integrated more complex questions of sexual trauma and identity into a game that conveyed concrete information, the balance did not yet seem ideal to us.

  Around this time, the GCC Design Lab grew inspired by Geoff Kaufman and Mary Flanagan’s writing, which proposed a concrete method for achieving behavioral change through games. They describe an “embedded design” technique “through which potentially sensitive, controversial, or challenging ideas or themes in games are crafted in a less overt and less obviously didactic or ‘message-driven’ way” (Kaufman and Flanagan). By filtering prosocial content or even an entire curriculum through a layer of mechanical abstraction, narrative allegory, or mixing of on and off topic content, this method suggests a powerful approach to difficult and sensitive issues. One challenge of embedded design, within the field of public health generally or sexual and reproductive health specifically, is that this approach targets attitudes and actions that are not always proximate to a particular behavior. In cases such as contraceptive usage or sexually transmitted infections, specific knowledge is important to shaping behaviors. At the same time, embedded design could be useful as a way of addressing social determinants of health: that is, the larger life contexts within which people make decisions about health, wellness, and sexuality. Instead of the more focused approach taken by traditional educational or serious game design, embedded design takes a more holistic or ecological design approach that opens up to feelings, emotions, affects, social relations, and connections to broader communities and identity groups. This technique is particularly well aligned with an issue like sexual harassment and violence, which links to a variety of topics such as gendered entitlement and peer beliefs that exceed mere information.

  Beyond the cases of Lucidity and Bystander discussed in this chapter, the processes we explored during the years of these projects changed our design philosophy going forward. First, in several projects over the subsequent years, we started to experiment actively with embedded design, including in The Test, a mobile game prototype used to promote HIV testing by providing information and influencing motivations among young men who have sex with men (Gilliam et al.). The modest successes and lessons of the Lucidity workshop and the Bystander youth fellows program also made us aware that participatory narrative game design might be even more powerful than gameplay in educating and eliciting conversations about difficult topics such as sexual violence. This approach could be effective either by encouraging youth to create finished games that are less polished and likely not ready for peer players (as in the case of Lucidity) or incorporating youth into a process led by professional adult designers that could yield a more accessible game (as in the case of Bystander).

  Combining lessons from both projects, GCC began a multi-year program (ongoing at the time of this book's publication) that we called Hexacago Health Academy. This program built on the lesson that it is not merely gameplay but the conversations that make up collaborative game design that constitute an ideal context for working through the complexities and difficulties of a topic such as sexual violence. In this program, which launched in 2015 and unfolded through an initial series of multi-week summer workshops in 2016 and 2017, we taught high school students about health issues through a combination of gameplay, embedded game design principles, health research, and interactions with STEM and health professionals and adult mentors. The core of the curriculum focused on Hexacago: a game board that GCC first prototyped in 2013. This board represents a map of the city of Chicago with an overlay of hexagons. It encourages the development of games that grapple with health promotion at individual, interpersonal, community, and policy levels.

  In collaboration with adolescents on Chicago’s South and West Sides, these gameplay and game design interventions use human centered design to develop games that can be used as educational tools to improve adolescent health and wellbeing. The resulting game prototypes of Hexacago Health Academy focused on health topics that included unplanned pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, childhood obesity, achievement of educational goals, urban planning, and alcohol and drugs. Moreover, in 2022 we expanded to approach topics that include food insecurity and structural violence. Moving forward, we also plan to develop curricula that can help integrate these games into high school classrooms focused on science and health. In 2018, GCC collaborated with the Center for College Access and Success (CCAS) to recruit educators to form the Hexacago Advisory Group. Building on the youth fellows program from Bystander, we asked GEAR UP educators to participate in a group discussion to provide feedback and brainstorm ways games might be used in their classrooms. In the summer of 2019, we worked with South Side Chicago teachers to run and study a week-long curriculum organized around five of the board games created in previous workshops and optimized by professional designers. The early years of this ongoing program yielded a number of games, most of which have a roleplaying and narrative dimension, for which I offer brief descriptions here:

  Baby Town: This resource management board game invites players to traverse different elements of high school life, including balancing their GPA, finances, and social life with the possibility of becoming parents and attending to a baby’s health and happiness. This game explores the challenges of unplanned pregnancy without stigmatizing this route. Through embedded design, Baby Town incorporates pregnancy into a teenager's broader set of possible life experiences.

  Clinic Quest: This competitive trivia game invites players to adopt the role of health researchers who collect data about six common sexually transmitted infections. Players answer topical questions as they move across the board.

  Hearsay: This cooperative narrative card game asks players to team up to tell a complex, even playfully convoluted, story about human relationships, emotions, and social networks. Special contraception cards, which are embedded into the deck instead of being the focus of play, integrate sexual and reproductive health education into each story.

  Infection City: This cooperative board game invites players to roleplay as a team of epidemiologists who try to contain a meningitis outbreak. Players build clinics and vaccinate populations while meningitis spreads around a city. While focusing on sexually transmitted infections in both the game and associated curriculum, Infection City became even more salient as an interactive approach to epidemiology in the COVID-19 era.

  Pipeline: This board game explores structures that contribute to violence across an urban space, especially as related to drug networks. Players take on the role of the police commissioner, the mayor, or a drug dealer who all seek to balance their own self-interest with the interests of the city.

  Smoke Stacks: This competitive anti-smoking board game invites players to take the role of tobacco executives whose profit motive is to get as many prospective customers as possible addicted to tobacco products. As customers die, executives have to craft advertising campaigns, select media through which to share those campaigns, and invest in particular products. This inversion uses embedded design tools to produce a more compelling gameplay experience.

  Though the early Hexacago Health Academy games were not digital or transmedia based, like the other projects featured in this book, they represent the collation of years of lessons across numerous programs and game design cycles. Our process of making new board games, integrating them into high school curricula, and evaluating their efficacy continues even at the time of this book’s publication with projects such as Lineage (2021), an analog game about the history of reproductive justice. We are also conducting research on Caduceus Quest (2022), a digital roleplaying game in which players build up teams of doctors, policymakers, researchers, youth advocates, and educators to solve a medical mystery en route to STEM learning.

  While the lessons explored in this chapter were initially learned through GCC projects, they also inspired the formation of a second lab in 2015: the Transmedia Story Lab. This lab took the lessons of participatory and embedded design beyond narrative games toward other storytelling methods to which we turn in the next two chapters of this book.

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