Art & Design: Games + Playable Media (AGPM) values a joyful and rigorous critical discourse in order to build new imaginaries of climate, gender, racial, and disability justice.

Our program is a community of artists that believe in the power of games as an artistic medium for transforming how we experience agency in a world fragmented by capitalism, colonialism, and systemic oppression. We critique art and games that capitalize on systemically toxic player culture, industrial standards that homogenize our approach to storytelling, and exploitative technologies that continue to oppress. Students build toward a multidisciplinary arts practice situated within the broader landscape of contemporary art, media art, performance, and/or social practice.

Our approach to games as a contemporary art practice foregrounds the importance of designing more thoughtful, nuanced, and radical systems for participation that cross medium, positionality, and forms of cultural expression. We support work that self-reflexively acknowledges its context, community, and the ethics that underlie its intention. We work to co-create spaces for thoughtful and transformative play to cultivate the embodied experience of connection, collectivity, and co-liberation in action. Students learn to create projects that are accountable to communities beyond the institution and are guided by a decolonial, intersectional and antiracist framework.

The AGPM major focuses on the following areas of study—students interested in the major should expect courses and curriculum centered around these topics:

- Digital and non-digital games as art, activism and social practice

- Feminist, anti-racist, LGBTQ games, art and media

- Participatory or performance-based games such as role playing games, urban/site-specific games and theater games

- Interactive art, performance art, and new media art

- Exhibition methods for games in traditional art spaces and public spaces

The Art & Design: Games + Playable Media (AGPM) Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz, focuses on the creation of novel game systems, spaces, and configurations that can produce broad ranges of player experiences, for a wide variety of purposes.

Students in the AGPM major learn to understand game design as an art in and of itself, positioned within the context of a number of more disciplinary approaches. Furthermore, students understand game design as a practice of creation, within a much larger and deeper social and historical context.

Kết quả học tập của chương trình

✔ Aesthetics. Students demonstrate understanding of aesthetic fundamentals through sustained and intentional application of a range of visual arts and design practices, both physical and digital.

✔ Designing Experiences. Students critically engage with audience feedback to iterate and revise an interactive project in a way that preserves the artist’s creative and political goals.

✔ Games as Art. With a foundation in existing artworks, students design, develop, and create a series of interactive artworks.

✔ Games as Activism. Students develop a creative practice, and critical study, of games and interactive media by generating critiques of game systems through a lens of power and oppression, and utilizing these critiques in their artwork.

✔ Play as a Radical Endeavor. Students explore and create a series of playful experiments towards expressive goals that embrace risk and build upon failure. Students analyze play as a vehicle for disruption, resistance, and joy.

✔ Sense of Self As Artist. Students begin to establish and explore their unique sense of artistic identity and areas of intention and interest, demonstrated via a portfolio of artwork and written work, exhibition, or performance, that expands definitions of games, interactive art, and play.