Game-Making Workshops
Gaming theory: A board games making workshop for finding agency in structure – With designer Max Haven
Date: 22 January 2025
Time: 4:00 - 6:00 pm
Location: Goldsmiths, Room TBC
FREE – Sign up HERE
Games are fun artificial structures within which players encounter and express unusual agency. This makes them excellent vehicles for exploring the nuances of our social world. In this workshop, we’ll learn to make simple board games to reflect on the limits and potentials of social and cultural theory.
In the first part, facilitator Max Haiven will provide a framework for using board game design as a method of theoretical exploration with reference to several popular games as well as some of his own inventions including ClueAnon (a game about why conspiracy theories are fun… and dangerous), Billionaires and Guillotines (a satirical plutocrat simulator, to be published in 2025 by Pluto Press).
In the second part, participants will be invited to use simple elements to create their own board game based on a social or cultural theory that is important to them. No experience or preparation is necessary, although participants are encouraged (but not required) to come with a question about society or theory in mind that they want to explore.
Contact: Aleena Chia [email protected]
Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination.
His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018).
He is currently working on a book for MIT Press tentatively titled The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism and a board game, Billionaires and Guillotines. He led a team that recently published The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers (2024).
Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches atLakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). As part of Sense & Solidarity, he offers strategy and communications workshops for social movements.
Date: 22 January 2025
Time: 4:00 - 6:00 pm
Location: Goldsmiths, Room TBC
FREE – Sign up HERE
Games are fun artificial structures within which players encounter and express unusual agency. This makes them excellent vehicles for exploring the nuances of our social world. In this workshop, we’ll learn to make simple board games to reflect on the limits and potentials of social and cultural theory.
In the first part, facilitator Max Haiven will provide a framework for using board game design as a method of theoretical exploration with reference to several popular games as well as some of his own inventions including ClueAnon (a game about why conspiracy theories are fun… and dangerous), Billionaires and Guillotines (a satirical plutocrat simulator, to be published in 2025 by Pluto Press).
In the second part, participants will be invited to use simple elements to create their own board game based on a social or cultural theory that is important to them. No experience or preparation is necessary, although participants are encouraged (but not required) to come with a question about society or theory in mind that they want to explore.
Contact: Aleena Chia [email protected]
Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination.
His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018).
He is currently working on a book for MIT Press tentatively titled The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism and a board game, Billionaires and Guillotines. He led a team that recently published The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers (2024).
Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches atLakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). As part of Sense & Solidarity, he offers strategy and communications workshops for social movements.
Date: 10 October 2024
Time: 5:00 - 6:30 pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building RHB 2.104 Chesterman Room
Have a mobile phone? Want to make a game? Join us for a workshop on DIY game makingwith the app Downpour – createdby v buckenham, who will be leading the workshop. Crafting supplies provided, but bring your own too!
Contact Dr Aleena Chia for more info
Sign up for future events here
Find out more about v buckenham and Downpour
