Creative Work

Grassroots: Unite, Reclaim, Maintain Mobile Game Concept (2022-2025)

How can we guide the production of a video game that helps advance the goal of decolonization? Games have historically embraced colonial tropes in their mechanics. This can be seen in mainstream location-based mobile games (LBMG), mobile games that overlay a virtual world on top of the physical world and use the player’s movements as inputs in the virtual world. Players of LBMGs like Pokémon GO are encouraged by the game to treat the local environment as a means of accruing as much power as possible and claim land that doesn’t belong to them through dominance and subjugation. 

Reflecting on this, my colleague and I created a framework for developing decolonial games based on prior literature and used it to produce a concept for a decolonial LBMG. We found that games developed with decoloniality in mind center on interrogating colonial systems and tropes (Kurniati and Mwariko, 2025; Trammell, 2022), listen to Indigenous perspectives (Kurniati and Mwariko, 2025; Trammell, 2022), and revolve around a responsibility to the community rather than the individual (Kurniati and Mwariko, 2025; Pearce, 2009; Quijano, 2019; Trammell, 2022). The goal of our game concept is to give players an opportunity to reflect on their actions in the game and encourage them to be critical thinkers and active participants in their local communities.

To meet our goal, every game mechanic we chose had to be based in our framework. To move away from gameplay about conquering the land for individual gain, we developed the game concept around players working together to reclaim and maintain areas in the game world from an all-encompassing force known as “The Corp” which is transforming the world into parking lots and crumbling buildings left for property speculation. We developed player classes that accommodate many different playstyles and commitments to the game; one class can reclaim land from a distance, for example. LBMGs can exclude players who have impaired mobility. Therefore, a decolonial LBMG needs to be rooted in mobility justice (Sheller, 2018) and provide an equitable experience for all players. Overall, we found that decolonial games are founded in cooperativeness among a community who shares a responsibility to the well-being of every player. Thus, we constructed a game concept that was about fostering a bond between fellow players, the game world, and the local neighborhood.

Me and my colleague have been developing the concept as well as a manuscript for a full article about the concept from 2022 to 2025. The goal is to develop our concept into a fully-fledged mobile game. My colleague and I presented our game concept at the 57th annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) in 2024 and the Society for Philosophy and Technology 2023 conference in Tokyo. I also workshopped the concept at a seminar at the Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute 2023. Following the suggestion of one of the attendees at HICSS, we plan on first testing this concept as a board game or developing it on a web-based platform. This provides a low-cost way to test the concept while also potentially leading to alternatives for players who do not have smartphones. We hope to work with a variety of community and Indigenous stakeholders as their experience in grassroots collaboration and community building is necessary to realize our vision. 

You can learn more about our concept in the proceedings of the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Art below by Mar Scardua - https://raposabranca.art/

Duke University Silent Vigil AR Experience (2022)

Memorial games (Rughinis and Matei, 2015) represent an opportunity to engage university students in meaningful historical events the local community and culture. For an interinstitutional course at Duke University in 2022, I created a concept and prototype for an AR experience that invited students at Duke University to reflect on the connection between civil rights movements then and today by allowing students to occupy both the present moment and an experiential representation of a student protest in the past. By engaging students as active participants rather than passive learners, my project aims to further our understanding of not only how we can design memorial AR experiences but how we can contribute to free expression and a deeper connection to the past to encourage reflection on the present.

I chose the Silent Vigil, where Duke University students occupied the main quad of Duke and mourned the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I picked the protest for its cultural significance for Duke University, the ease of access of the site, and the opportunity for self-reflection through embodied digital practice. I used photogrammetry of my body to create 3D models of concrete statues in Maya as stand-ins for the protestors. I used Adobe Aero to arrange them into the formation that the students of the protest took based on historical documentation (Sites of Memory). However, I created gaps in the rows to invite users to fill the space and join the protest. I also included a sign with instructions on how to behave just as the students did: standing in revered, respectful silence. The augmented reality experience could be accessed via a QR code that can be placed in front of the James B. Duke statue. These design choices were inspired by Foss and Griffin's (1995) concept of invitational rhetoric, or when the presenter invites the audience to consider their perspective (5). They were also inspired by Brock and Shepherd's (2016) concept of the procedural enthymeme, where a procedural system constructed of operations or rules work together to induce some sort of action in a user (21). The gaps in the virtual art installation invite users to fill the gaps, while the instructions encourage users to essentially role play as the protestors. In this way, they embody (drawing from Hansen, 2003) the protestors by completing the formation in a way that is authentic to the original protest. This is how I bridge the gap between the past and the present. 

The project is inspired by research on memorial games, or games that “encourage players to remember meaningful historical events and to consider their significance” (Rughinis and Matei, 2015, 629). Rughinis and Matei (2015) argue that a strong memorial game is not only able to invoke a historical event but uses credible information and offers chances for empathetic understanding of the event as well as self-reflection on its significance. Memorial games can also take advantage of the “rhetoric of time”; not only can developers use time to control the pace of the game to encourage moments of reflection but also craft the game to create a “temporal attitude” that posits an argument on how we should think about the memorialized event in relation to the past, present, and future (Rughinis and Matei, 2015). The project was also inspired by the Virtual Martin Luther King, Jr. Project, an immersive experience preserving one of MLK’s speeches. My public speaking students who experienced the event not only reflected on MLK’s speaking techniques but also about the speech’s relevance to our current moment of civil rights struggles and how they can carry the speech’s message forward.

While the project aims to create a memorial for the Silent Vigil and draws from archives, the experience itself does not rely on presenting archival materials. Memorials of the civil rights movement rely on archival footage to illustrate stories and for emotional effect. As Brasell (2004) argues, news footage is chosen for its newsworthiness which often involves conflict and spectacle. Using archival footage, therefore, risks showing a skewed account of the movement and presenting it “as a spectacle, frozen in times past” (Brasell, 2004, 12) and therefore divorced from our current movement for civil rights. Therefore, this project takes a representative and experiential approach. By embracing the project as an experience rather than something that purely serves as an archive, I go beyond just educating students about the Silent Vigil to create an embodied experience meant to invoke empathy and understanding as well as self-reflection on the current moment.

Through this project, I invite students to exist in two places at once: 1968 and today. Through a representational experience, I avoid relying on mediations of the past from news outlets that present the civil rights movement as frozen in time. The AR experience takes advantage of the rhetoric of time to transport students to 1968 while still existing in the present moment, creating a bridge between the two. Key to this process is attention to detail on how the vigil worked in real life so students can immerse themselves in a way that is authentic to the vigil, helping to preserve the vigil in a way that allows for deeper engagement with the campus. By using abstract representations of people, I invite students to see themselves in the protestors and better immerse themselves in the moment. Instead of just reading about the Silent Vigil, they get to live it. The virtual representation encourages students to imagine and understand what it must have been like to be a part of the event and ask themselves what they can do to carry the purpose and message of the Silent Vigil forward to today’s world.

In the future, I plan on recreating the project in Unreal Engine or Unity as the original files have been lost with the discontinuation of Adobe Aero (Adobe, 2025). I also plan on updating the original models to include more diverse body types and also incorporate links to archival materials for students who want to learn more. Once the new prototype is done, I plan on using a focus group (Kitzinger, 1994) to playtest the experience so I can make sure that it is having the intended effect.

You can read more about the project in the Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games.

Untitled Photo Button Project (2022)

For this project, I drew a picture and cut it up using a button maker. I then crafted buttons from the cut out circles. The buttons can be arranged to form the original face, or even create a new face. 

The project is meant to represent how we come to know people. We start with an incomplete picture - a piece (or single button) of information. But as we learn more about the person, we create a fuller picture of who they are. This picture may never be fully complete since it's our own interpretation of how the other person presents themselves. I was inspired by Prelli's concept of rhetorics of display (2006), and how displays make claims upon us and reveal and conceal possible meanings. I was also inspired by theories of form (Levine, 2015) - how arrangements of elements create sensory experiences that lead to understanding. The forms of physical appearance combine with what we know about a person to create an arrangement, or display, that carries of possible meanings that are then subject to interpretation and even rearrangement. 

Bitsy Looks Pretty Sus (2022): https://psyjacked.itch.io/bitsy-looks-pretty-sus

Just a little experiment from when I first used the free game engine Bitsy.

Teaching Philosophy (2022): https://psyjacked.itch.io/crd-704-teaching-philosophy

This project was created for an assignment in my Pedagogy and Technology course in 2022, where I turned my teaching statement into an interactive game! Decide the fate of Jack's career!

Covid-19 Shopping Simulator 2020 (2022)

For my final project for an interinstitutional course at Duke University, I wanted to capture a moment in time during the Covid-19 pandemic. I decided to digitally recreate the experience of shopping during the height of the pandemic.

I wanted to immerse players in a story during a specific and relatable period in time. I had the player collect soap, eggs, toilet paper, and diapers. These were all items that were in short supply during the early stages of the pandemic due to not only demand for them going up but people hoarding them. With the diapers in particular, I wanted players to have some sort of sense of who the player character was (i.e. someone with a family to provide for instead of just providing for themselves). I wanted to recreate some of the challenges and frustrations of navigating the spaces of grocery stores during the pandemic. For instance, the diapers were hard to reach and required clever use of the environment (i.e. picking up a grocery item on the shelf and throwing it to knock down the diapers). One shopper had a cart full of diapers, but I didn’t make them interactable because you can’t just grab an item from someone else’s cart. 

I put a big green bubble around the other shoppers to represent social distancing. The act of social distancing felt like a game to me, in that it added a new contingency to life. Thomas Malaby (2007) argued that games were “domains of contrived contingency” where the rules calibrate predictable and unpredictable outcomes that were then subject to interpretation by the player.  With Covid, I now have to consider my movements in spaces and around people a lot more carefully. Especially narrow grocery stores suddenly looked like death traps to me. In fact, with the narrow design of grocery store shelves, I felt like Pac-man running away from deadly ghosts. I thought I could capture that same experience in a ludic experience in VR very effectively. That’s why I made the other shoppers red ghosts. The player wouldn’t be punished in game for entering these bubbles (though the real life consequences for doing this are very real), but I thought that players already used to social distancing in the physical world would still be encouraged to keep this contingency in mind. It was also important for me to keep the experience somewhat light hearted while still respectable since this is a pretty heavy subject for many people. The immersion of my project came from embracing the Kairos of a particular moment in time – doing my best to recreate a recent, relatable, and significant moment in many people’s lives today. 

Working with VR gameplay in Unity was challenging.  With VR, the player is rooted by the XR Origin. They are bound to a space in the virtual world by a box that correlates with the physical play area. I can’t use teleportation to have the player move with the XR Origin because the player needs to grab things off a shelf, put it in a basket, and carry it around. Then I had an idea. I knew how to make something move in Unity via keyboard inputs, so what if I could move the XR Origin with the arrow keys? Then the player could move the box wherever they needed to, grab the items off the shelf, put it in the cart, and then move again. 

However, it would be pretty disorienting to have the “magic carpet” of VR move around without the player moving with it. I had to come up with a way to have the movement of the “magic carpet” make sense within the context of the game. So I came up with the idea of having the players sit in a mobility scooter before moving the XR Origin to make the game mechanic make more sense within the context of the game. Players would sit in a chair in the physical space and move the XR point with the keyboard in front of them. But instead of seeing a chair and a keyboard, they would see a mobility scooter with a D-pad in the virtual world. I also added bandages to the keyboard so the player knows what buttons to press without taking off the headset. Not only did the addition of a mobility scooter give added context to the player’s movement but allowed me to explore the concept of disability through games – to explore what it’s like to have to use a mobility scooter to navigate a space that isn’t necessarily designed with it in mind.

The Other Side (2016): https://psyjacked.itch.io/the-other-side

The Other Side was created in Inform 7 for an undergraduate Honors College seminar about interactive literature under the supervision of Professor Stuart Moulthrop at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. Our team wanted to create a game that not only had fun puzzles and dialogue but would engage the player beyond a standard adventure game. We incorporated themes of love, death, loss, and acceptance as players collected memories of the protagonist’s family to help defeat the monster in the closet. The whole process not only trained our problem-solving skills and determination needed for a game’s designing, testing, and debugging phases, but gave us invaluable skills in how to make digital media meaningful.