ARTS K JULY: Writing for Social Justice and Video Games

Artists and cultural workers have always played a central role in supporting, galvanizing, documenting, and making interventions to support social movements for justice. Recent events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, movements for #LandBack and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, movements against Anti-Asian racism (amongst many other organizing initiatives), have brought forward the ever pressing need to address inequality in our communities.

This course examines how art and culture can be a vehicle for social change: whether it be producing artwork that addresses systemic racism, to grassroots community building initiatives, to film festivals that celebrate marginalized identities. This course will look at how themes of social justice are explored through creative-critical writing, research and public engagement to support social justice agendas. It will provide students opportunities to examine, analyze and undertake critical engagement with creative processes of marginalized peoples and the intersection of creative writing, social justice, and anti-racist feminism, with strong emphasis on how socio-historical contexts are crucial to acts of creative writing, teaching, research, and engagement with multiple publics.

In the past 40 years, video games have evolved in scope, depth and sophistication. Modern games feature motion capture by Hollywood actors, thousands of lines of recorded dialogue, and complex storylines that often branch and have multiple outcomes. In this course, students will discover what it means to be a narrative designer in this highly collaborative, constantly changing field. Through a combination of lectures, video presentations from leading game writers, reading assignments, in-class writing exercises, and assigned projects, students will learn how to create a compelling video game story through cutscenes, voiceover dialogue, in-game text, found narrative, and other techniques. No previous experience with games or game-writing is necessary.