At Clitical Hits sex educators and game designers team up to create new sex ed lessons that are playful to their core.
Learn from industry-leading speakers
Practice new skills through design challenges
Create and share bold, immersive edu-games
Applications for the event are closed.
After payment if you need to withdraw from the event, we prefer you let us know. Before August 6th we'll give you a refund. August 6th and later we will not refund you. For everyone's health, we will give you a full refund at any point in time if you need to withdraw from the in-person event due to a covid exposure or the online event due to a positive covid test.
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. Your final project will be to create a new sex education lesson that uses games.
The format for this professional development workshop 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 workshop, 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.
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 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 attendees to this game jam 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.
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 game jam is on Saturday and Sunday, August 20-21st 2022. This schedule is displayed in your local time zone.
North and South Americans will be able to attend in their morning and afternoon. Europeans and Africans will be able to attend in their afternoon and late evening. Folks in Asia and Oceania, unless you keep very strange hours this one’s not for you.
This professional development workshop will have two types of participants: online and in-person. Because the international educational games community is small and distributed, having an online track is the best way to gather a broad range of expertise. For those who can make it to Saint Paul, MN, USA you can take part in the in-person groups, camaraderie, and catering.
Online Venue
Online attendees will a proximity based video call platform, themed like a retro video game. Attendees will occupy this shared virtual space, purpose built for the conference, which allows for the same kind of spontaneous and intuitive collaboration you’d get at an in-person game jam. For accessibility reasons, we have a discord server that will allow for full participation as well.
In-Person Venue
671 Vandalia St, St Paul, MN 55114
This building is ADA-compliant, climate controlled, and immediately adjacent to rapid mass transit. In-person attendees will need to bring a photo id that matches their registration and be checked in by building security. In-person attendees are welcome to bring networked devices and headphones to visit the online venue during the conference as well.
The in-person portion of the event will be capped at 40 participants and follow the covid guidance of our venue. As of now, that’s likely to include a requirement for indoor masking. Attendees need to be vaccinated and boosted to the extent recommended by the CDC for their demographic group.
Bring proof of your vaccination status for inspection during check in on the first day. If you have any symptoms of covid, stay home. We are asking attendees to take a rapid test the morning of the first day before arrival. If you aren’t able to test before the event, we’ll have rapid tests available.
Workshop Organizer
Hazel Dixon is a PhD researcher at Newcastle University in the UK. Their research focuses on how playful, immersive experiences can be used in the design of sex and relationships education. Hazel has also designed games including Escape to the Future which was nominated for the Games 4 Change XR for Change award and the larp Nimble Things.
Workshop Organizer
Jon Lutz is a sex educator in Minneapolis, MN. Jon has taught sex ed professionally in clinics, schools, 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.
Presenter of "Sex on the Table"
Meguey Baker is a game designer and sex education teacher. Her work in both of these realms focuses on agency and consent, raising questions, and encouraging personal discovery. Meg has basically not shut up about the importance of fact-based, wide-reaching sex ed for at least the past 35 years, starting as a peer-to-peer sex educator in high school during the height of the AIDS crisis. She is currently back in high school, designing and delivering material for parents to support their middle and high school students in developing holistic wellbeing in their sexual expression and gender identity, With her husband, she designed the award-winning ttrpg Apocalypse World, which was ground-breaking work in bringing better sex ed practices into tabletop roleplaying.
Presenter of "Sex Ed for Game Designers"
Lindsey Hoskins (Director of Health Education at Family Tree Clinic) is a deeply committed sex nerd who dove into this work in 1999 and fell in love with helping folks relax and start talking about topics that can often be challenging. Lindsey is most proud of the sex ed programming she runs in juvenile corrections, the peer sex educator program she started for queer and trans teens, and her work with parents of young children. Lindsey is happiest when teaching puberty, and don’t even get her started on lube. In 2017, her book, Principles of Pleasure: Working with the Good Stuff as Sex Therapists and Educators, was released. Her mother is very proud.
Presenter
Katherine Castiello Jones is a queer Latina game designer and sociologist. Katherine’s interest in sexuality is reflected in their research, game design, and teaching. She has co-authored two games featured in Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Games, and has written and spoken extensively about thematizing sexuality in table-top and live action role-playing games.
We are most interested in attendees that are analog game designers and 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 either analog game designers or current sex educators. 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.
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.
Shoot us a email at sexedgamejam@gmail.com, or hop into our discord server with questions.
Follow us on Facebook to stay up to date with us and witness our sweet sex ed memes.
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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
