Making Sense of Lived Experiences with Opioid Addiction through Autobiographical Game Design and Game Jamming Practices

This study proposes an interdisciplinary research project examining how young adults living with opioid addiction in Brantford, Ontario, can use autobiographical digital game design and game jamming as tools for making sense of their lived experiences. The authors frame game design as a sense-making practice, drawing on arts-based, participatory, and phenomenological approaches alongside life storytelling and illness narrative frameworks. The project is motivated by the worsening opioid crisis in Ontario, where drug-related deaths rose by 25 percent between March and May 2020 compared with the same period in 2019, and where Brantford reportedly has the second highest rate of opioid poisoning in Canada.

The planned methodology centres on two weekend-long inclusive game jams involving 20 participants aged 18 to 30. Participants will be trained in Twine, Makey Makey, and GameMaker Studio 2, and data will include drawings, sketches, and other visualizations generated during ideation and prototyping, as well as in-depth phenomenological interviews. Analysis will seek rich descriptions of experience across participant narratives. The study received ethics board approval for summer 2022 and is being conducted in collaboration with a local community health centre to support participant wellbeing.

The authors argue that existing research has examined autobiographical games largely from the designer's perspective and has studied storytelling and drawing as modalities for addiction narratives, but has not explored how game design and game jams can serve as expressive tools of self-reinvention for people living with addiction. The project aims to contribute to research on serious games by shifting from designing games for a "vulnerable population" toward giving marginalized creators control over the design process, with an emphasis on psychosocial benefits and agency.

The research questions address how participants make sense of addiction through game design and how autobiographical games might build community health. Anticipated contributions include advancing knowledge in serious games, addiction research, and the health humanities, disrupting stigma around substance use, raising public awareness of the opioid crisis, and proposing new approaches to community health in a post-pandemic context. The project was funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant and Wilfrid Laurier University.