Games Outside of ‘Game Studies’: Game Design as Pedagogy and Politics
Dr Alison Croasdale is a lecturer on the MA Digital Media: Education and a former secondary school teacher. This post summarises collaborative work growing from her education-focused PhD thesis, and the subsequent dissemination of this work in non-education centric academic settings.

Completing education-focused work on a thesis, ‘What is Missing and Found: Immersion and Engagement as Concepts and Pedagogy,’ which used videogame design and making as a way of assisting students in accessing literary texts, and Game Studies theory to frame the data, situated this project as somewhere between very different academic disciplines. The thinking following it, then, would always have to deal with its interdisciplinary positioning, most notably in the work’s location as overlapping Education, and Game Studies.
In early October 2024, at the Central and Eastern European Game Studies (CEEGS) conference in Nafplio, Greece, a solo paper, ‘Games and the Performance of Multi-Layered Identities’, and a paper co-written with Dr Bruno De Paula (UCL) – ‘Expressive Design: Exploring Creative Process and Critical Thought in Non-Professional Game Making‘ were delivered, bringing work specifically pedagogical in focus to an explicitly Game Studies environment. The paper on performance reconsidered some of the original thesis data mentioned above through the performative aspects of game design, game sharing, and game play. The co-paper, meanwhile, explored game design in an HE context, where the makers were engaged in a reflexive process of ‘creativity’ and how it might be applicable to classroom practice, should the students involved return to work in some form of teaching. The difficult balance to be found with both papers was speaking the language of the conference environment, whilst remaining true to the teacherly aspects of the research. This proved a productive challenge as both papers represented a departure from the way in which games in education are often discussed.

In January of 2025, at another Game Studies conference in Santiago, Chile (II Congress of Ludo-critical studies: “The political component of games”), a workshop co-presented with former MA Digital Media: Education student Pilar De La Maza – ‘The Politics of Classroom Play’ – built on the ideas of CEEGS, but also on both presenters’ direct experience of classroom, rather than HE, teaching. Working through the juxtaposition of pedagogy and Game Studies, this workshop invited the conference participants to become students themselves, and to complete (and reflect on) game design activities that might be used in a classroom. The development of this work from that presented at CEEGS was the focus on the potential for games to unpack sensitive political issues, such as immigration, as well as providing an opportunity for academics in the field of Game Studies to explore their specialism from a more unusual perspective. It is hoped that ‘The Politics of Classroom Play’ will be successfully developed into wider collaborative research in classrooms in Santiago and in London.