Blog

The Arcade Our Way project lasted a year and three months, and it wrapped up recently with shrieks and giggles! Girls originally in grade seven, now in grade eight, at The Linden School in Toronto, teamed up with Angelique Mannella and undergraduate students at Concordia University, and McGill University, to create the video game Ghost Hotel. Ghost Hotel is about a girl named Violet, a mortal who is compulsively late for her job at a hotel run and populated by ghosts. She has to push back against assumptions made about girls, in order to bring the hotel from a state of disrepair, into the glorious hotel it has the potential to become. In order to achieve this goal you have to help her recruit ghosts by accomplishing a variety of tasks where she has to quickly overcome stereotypes about girls through a series of mini-games. Currently the game exists as a prototype, but girls from a wide variety of contexts will be invited to contribute their ideas for mini-games to the prototype. What assumptions does society impose on you?? My dissertation research is about this project, and how it can best be re-appropriated in future incarnations to support teachers in the creation of 21st Century learning opportunities through collaborative social justice game-design.  Find the prototype @ the project website: http://www.arcadeourway.ca/