Since the emergence of game arcades in the 1970s, video games have been characterized as inter-active products. Players act upon games, and games act upon them. But what if we saw games as taking action upon the world around us, shaping our interactions with each other, setting the rules of our digitized lives, and helping us imagine our virtual selves? 

“Games in action: interactivity / activation \ activism" will be the largest event organized on UBC campus focused on video games and their impacts on our social and political world. This two day event will feature discussions among game designers, artists, musicians, scholars, and writers, to explore how games act upon us and through us, and how they compel us to take action for ourselves. Through various panels, roundtables, game demos, and keynotes, artists and thinkers will come together to ask how interactive media can affect and help better understand structures of power within multiple spaces (across nations, communities, and genders/sexualities) and scales (from the deeply personal to the broadly political, social, and economic). The event’s Pop-Up Arcade will host artists and games that do not merely reflect or represent marginalization, but that use interactive artwork to express marginalized experiences. Ultimately, this landmark event will seek to discover how digital forms of storytelling and art-creation can have the potential to enact system-failures, to hack the hacks, and to consider new decolonial actions, activities, and activisms, for our increasingly digitized age.