Science and Games

Undergraduate / Graduate

City planning simulators. Environmental advocacy projects. Citizen-science research platforms. Whether to engage and communicate with wider publics, as tools for modelling scientific concepts and processes, or as objects of study in their own right, games have been employed by innumerable research communities across the 20th and 21st centuries. This course will explore how a variety of scientific disciplines and research cultures have thought with, about, and through games. Examining and evaluating these connections can teach us about research and communication practices in these fields and about the multifaceted nature of game-based media. Each week we will address a different subfield in the physical, biological, or social sciences, each positioned to draw out a unique aspect of games' connections to scientific research, communication, and knowledge production. Readings will be inter-disciplinary, drawing from game studies, social studies of science, and the various research fields themselves. Many examples considered through our weekly case studies will be video games, but not exclusively, and students will also develop skills to address the material- and medium-specific affordances of different forms of games in both class discussions and through a tabletop game design project.