This week at The Games Institute we are highlighting the work of PhD candidate Steve Wilcox. From the English Language and Literature department at the University of Waterloo, his research examines various forms of art such as literature, comics, and videogames and their capacity to expand the number and range of experiences humans undergo. Steve’s research at The Games Institute revolves around the idea that games excel at teaching players how to situate knowledge.
Steve has begun preliminary research at The Games Institute on treating games themselves as heuristics for knowledge translations. Games afford players a degree of agency that enhances their capacity to represent experiences in a persuasive, personal, and practical manner, which fosters the retention and deployment of those experiences in everyday interactions. He explores this notion not only in terms of its artistic implications, but in its potential application to scholarly publishing, or what can be referred to as playable publishing. This concept represents a kind of interactive form of conveying scholarship that enhances the reader/player’s understanding of the material by affording a degree of play into the process. Allergies & Allegories, a web-based game of Steve’s design, is an example of transforming the insights of an academic paper to the need for increased awareness of food allergies into a game that attempts to realize that increased awareness. This has the potential of making scholarship accessible to wider audiences, while also making the material more persuasive and meaningful.
Allergies & Allegories, which follows from his collaboration with GET-FACTS (Genetics, Environment and Therapies: Food Allergy Clinical Tolerance Studies) is a portion of Steve’s dissertation. This game has players working with Mia, a child who has a peanut allergy and has recently moved to a new school. The objective of the game is to improve the Mia’s well-being, which is a composite of various factors identified in the research conducted by GET-FACTS on children with food allergies in Ontario schools. The objective in creating the game is to work towards lowering the social and cultural difficulty these individuals face by engaging children, adults, students, and teachers with various representations of day-to-day life with food allergies.
Steve will be presenting this idea at the upcoming Sustaining Partnership in Scholarly Publishing conference. He will also be presenting on First Person Scholar, an online periodical that publishes accessible scholarship on games and culture, for which he is co-founder and editor-in-chief.