Seminar: Critical Game Design in Practice
- Feb 9
- 1 min read
Seminar: Hanna Wirman
09 Feb 2026
Social criticism through video games has been explored since the early 2000s, when game designer and theorist Gonzalo Frasca (2001) poignantly borrowed approaches from experimental theatre and proposed that “the goal of these games is not to find appropriate solutions, but rather to trigger discussions […] games would work as metonyms to guide those discussions and explore alternative ways of addressing real-life issues.” By drawing together traditions of such 'critical game design' (Flanagan, Grace, DeLappe, Ryding, Sicart, Bogost), this talk examines where games’ strength lies in helping people engage complex issues without easy answers – such as the climate apocalypse.
Hanna Wirman is an Associate Professor and the Head of the 'MSc in Games' study programme at the Center for Digital Play, IT University of Copenhagen (ITU). She has studied and made games for more than 20 years with an interest in marginal and critical ways of playing and making them. Some of the topics she has covered in her research are game fandom and player productivity, gender and inclusivity, serious games, critical game design, and animal play. She has done smaller studies on protest gaming, game arcades in Hong Kong, game jams, women's esports, games in China, and games targeted at children with autism.