Clitical Hits is a course in educational games, where sex educators and game designers team up to create new sex ed lessons that are playful to their core.
Learn from industry-leading speakers in a four-session master class
Practice new skills in hands-on design challenges
Create and share bold, immersive edugames
6-9pm Central time Tuesdays in March 2026
We have three price tiers, in recognition that the sex education industry is quite varied. The professional price is for people who are able to subsidize this course as part of their business expenses or get their employer to pay for it.
Professional - $300
Personal - $95
Financial Need - $25
Get a $50 discount on each ticket if three people in your same organization buy professional tickets. That's a 17% discount!
Mentors are game designers who attend this course in order to shepherd a group of sex educators through creating a sex ed EduGame. For your volunteerism, you'll be paid a small stipend to attend Clitical Hits. We'll train you on sex education and making games for education, and of course you'll be supported by the sex educators on your team.
The best mentors are people with interest in analog games design, ideally with some experience in design. Paid professional experience is not a requirement: a hack, a homebrew, a half-built game are all examples of valuable design experience. This might include experience designers, escape room creators, ttrpg module designers, and more.
If you'd like to be a mentor, please fill out the Mentor Application instead of buying a ticket.
If you’ve never been to a game jam, it’s a space for playful and practical learning. You’ll be assigned to a mixed team of game designers and sex educators and challenged with a series of small projects to build your skills and teamwork. Expect to collaborate with people from outside of your region, with different professional backgrounds or design experiences. Your final project will be to create a new sex education lesson that uses games.
The format for this course is inspired by game design communities who gather to design, build, and share new creative work under tight time constraints. We know from experience that small-group collaboration under the pressure of a tight time limit can create wholly original things. For this course, the design challenge is creating interactive, immersive experiences that are also high-quality relationships and sexuality education. To meet this audacious goal, this practicum gathers sex educators and analog game designers into teams, trains them on the subjects least familiar to them, and supports them with hands-on coaching as they build new lessons.
This game jam is different than others in several ways. We assign participants into presumptive teams and have them complete short exercises together to see how they gel. People can and should change teams, but please don't enter the workshop with a team already planned out. Clitical Hits also includes a several hours of learning in workshops before you start on your own original design. We want edugames to be accessible to everyone, so expect lessons on sex ed, game design, and educational games. For more details, see the section titled Schedule Overview below.
A note about homework. This course is designed for working people with other responsibilities. We will assign a short reading, reflection, or game to play between sessions. However, we intend students to complete the bulk of their design and playtesting of their final sex ed lesson during our four course sessions.
Analog games are played in physical space with real-world components. Unlike video games, anyone can design and prototype an analog game in a weekend. We focus on analog games so that this event is accessible to newcomers. You don’t need to know how to code in order to participate fully. In an analog game the “software” of the game’s rules runs on the “hardware” of the players gathered in a room together, whether in-person or online.
We define immersive analog games as ones where participants portray characters or take on roles. This includes tabletop and live-action role-playing games, escape rooms, pervasive games, experimental games, and more.
We define Relationships, Consent, and Sex Education as high quality teaching and learning that positively influences learners’ sexual health. At this workshop attendees will strive to create lessons that are sex positive, LGBTQ-inclusive, intersectional, and informed by medical/scientific research. We especially hope people create games that are relevant to the learners they work with. As such, the whole world of sex education is open to create educational games about at this event.
Attendees might make educational games about:
Pleasure education
Kink, BDSM
Online dating
Queer sex
Consensual non-monogamy
self-advocacy with medical professionals, parents, or partners
Abortion
Body image
Asexuality, aromanticism
Setting and respecting boundaries
Media literacy as it pertains to sex
The Classics like barrier use, birth control, prevention of sexually transmitted infections
And more!
The educational games that participants in this course create will be collected by the organizers and shared freely with the public under a creative commons license. The organizers will host the games on an itch.io jam page for easy access. You can check out prior year's games here and here.
The license for the games is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. This means that anyone may use the games for free. This includes using the games as the basis of further development, including commercial work, so long as they attribute the original work.
The course is the first four Tuesdays in March, from 6-9pm in North American Central Time. You can click around in this calendar to see a blocked out schedule for the event. By exploring each entry you'll see we'll take breaks and NOT be hustling every minute of those 3 hours!
North and South Americans will be able to attend in their afternoon or evening. Folks in East Asia and Oceania will be able to attend in their morning. Europeans and Africans, unless you keep very strange hours this one’s not for you.
Because the international educational games community is small and distributed, having an online course is the best way to gather world-class speakers and a broad range of learners.
Online Venue
Learners will use the video call platform Discord and collaborate via Google Docs. If you have a concern about accessibility, please reach out to us via email or our discord server.
At Clitical Hits 2023, a group of folks in the same city asked to attend workshop together remotely, forming an in-person design team far away from what was then our in-person hub in Minnesota. Because they had both sex educators and game designers in attendance, we were happy to include them. If you'd like to gather a group to form a Clitical Node or you have some other zany scheme pitch us on, please reach out via sexedgamejam@gmail.com.
Course Co-Creator
Dr. Hazel Dixon is a researcher and games designer. Their PhD research focused on the ways we can work with local communities in order to design games and activities around Relationships and Sex Education. In this way, the research looked at embodiment and how the experiences of the learners can best be represented within the material itself. They also create escape rooms, RPGs and LARPs. Their larp “Eating Oranges in the Shower” was featured in Polygon’s Best Games we played in 2023.
Course Co-Creator
Jon Lutz is a sex educator and award-winning game designer in Minneapolis, MN. Jon has taught sex ed professionally in schools, clinics, homeless shelters, and the criminal punishment system since 2013. A specialist in edularp, he’s trained others at the International Edularp Conference, US National Sex Ed Conference, and PPFA’s Drawing Water from a Deeper Well.
We are most interested in students that are current sex educators. Other folks with related skills and interests are absolutely welcome as well, and if we come up against our attendee limit we will prioritize people who are current sex educators. If you're a game designer, look under the Pricing heading for how to apply to become a game design mentor. Finally, this event will be held entirely in English.
People with experiences as a sex educator, ideally people who currently provide education to learners. Paid public health work is not a requirement: parenting, volunteering, and other forms of professional teaching are examples of valuable experience. This might include health teachers, GSA advisors, public health workers, sex therapists, and more.
Previous attendees are welcome to challenge their skills on a new team. You should know that the course will cover similar material as the 2022 and 2023 weekend long conferences, so expect to either refresh your knowledge by attending the similar lessons or plan to attend the other cross scheduled lesson. We will prioritize new students over prior attendees unless they are paying the professional ticket rate.
These quotes are from the anonymous feedback survey at prior Clitical Hits weekend conferences.
"I found this experience incredibly helpful as a sex educator. It was amazing to hear from game designers and how to implement learning objectives into a game format that could be expanded upon for other topics, age levels, etc."
“I wanted this experience to last so much longer… I learned so much but I also realize how much I don't know. This was the best conference I have EVER been to and I would LOVE to attend again.”
"I learned a lot, made new connections, and feel like the game we made will be useful to educators."
"It was very cool to come into this with no game design experience but experience in sex ed and leave with more knowledge of each. It was nice to feel like both an expert and a beginner at the same time--it really leveled the playing field and made the experience less intimidating. I also love knowing that there are now 7 games... that I can directly apply to my work."
"I thought the base format of this conference was really great, and I was especially happy and impressed at the degree of connectivity I felt like we were able to have between the in person and online zones of the event."
For the big announcements, join our mailing list. You can stay up to date with our sweet sex ed memes on Facebook.
To talk to use directly, shoot us a email at sexedgamejam@gmail.com, or hop into our discord server with questions.
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Larp, Immersive education, Social emotional learning, Educational games, Educational roleplay, Edularp, Playful learning, Gamified education, Serious Games, Playful learning, Embodied Learning, Sex education, Sexual health education, Puberty education, RSE, Relationships and Sex Education, PHSE, Personal Social and Health Education
