Boal on a Boat: Teaching Critical Game Making

Prax's paper, presented at DiGRA 2020, argues for a critical approach to game design education that cultivates conscientious and reflexive designers rather than purely vocational ones. Its central proposal is a two-week teaching module built around an intentionally impossible assignment: students must design a game intervention for mixed crews aboard a shipping company, where Filipino deckhands and Nordic officers face unstated ethical tensions. The module draws on values-in-design theory, Nordic participatory design traditions, and the pedagogies of Freire and Boal, including Boal's Theater of the Oppressed and Frasca's Videogames of the Oppressed.

The module was piloted with eleven master's students at Uppsala University in fall 2019, with group feedback analysis supporting the author's conclusions. Results indicate that the lectures largely worked as intended. Students debated the ethics of the shipping-company task, questioned whether the framing risked reproducing colonialism, and surfaced tensions between ethical refusal and the economic pressures facing working designers. One group's FIFA-based proposal smuggled in democratic, self-organized committee governance as a stepping stone toward workplace organizing, while most other proposals sidestepped the core injustice.

The debriefing made the assignment's design explicit and revealed considerable ethical and emotional stress, including financial pressures and the unequal risks borne by international students. The author concludes that the exercise succeeded in prompting students to examine critically the tasks they are given. The evidence base is small and drawn from a single cohort, so the findings are best read as a qualitative case study of one pedagogical intervention rather than a generalizable measure of outcomes in game design education.