Walking the Digital Woods: P-Logging the Mesocosm of Walden
Walden is presented as an educational game that invites players into an immersive digital mesocosm. It is designed to encourage multimodal learning and several critical literacies that involve both intellectual reasoning and embodied interactions. The game was easy to navigate, with simple game mechanics such as running, walking and picking up items. What stands out immediately is the game's pace. Once play begins, players are given simple instructions on the game mechanics and a clear outline of the module's goals. There was no timed play, and I noticed how quickly I could situate myself within the environment. If one is used to a more high-intensity form of game play, this leisurely walk in the woods could present a level of frustration; however, the pace allowed for reflection and meaning-making as the player navigates the environment while collecting ecological data.
Walden is a good example of a walking game that allows for skill-building opportunities throughout play. In part one, the key skill was survival. Ensuring adequate food, fuel and shelter, while familiarizing oneself with the digital surroundings. Chang (2019) discusses how mesocosms simulate ecological relations rather than replicate them. In Walden, players use cartography to situate themselves in the game and note where key resources for survival and inspiration are placed. Players are given cues to learn about native plants, rocks and trees in the space. The digital landscape reminded me of hiking trails I regularly visit, with worn paths where others had traversed. Instinctively, I drew on those real-world skills to navigate the environs around Walden Pond, which relates to Marin & Bang's (2018) argument that “storying the perceptual field” and the use of semiotic resources can create opportunities for knowledge transformation.
Players learn this situated meaning in a relatively short time during gameplay. The temporal dynamics accelerated cycles from days to minutes. I learned to fish, identify and pick edible berries, mend clothing and chop wood in a matter of 30 minutes of play. Chang (2019) describes this as digital mediation, the ways technology translates complex ecological data into interactive and understandable experiences. I became entangled with the game's systems and rhythms. Even though there was no timer present, I was aware of the shift in time due to the sun setting and the dimming of lights. I was also given mechanical cues, such as using a lantern in the early evening. Similarly, when I found the fishing poles and began sourcing food, a cue would pop up saying I had reached the limit of resources I could collect at that time. Chang (2019) refers to this as Anthropogenic Impact Modelling. It prompted me to think about consumerism and how overconsumption can destabilize ecological relationships, even in digital ecosystems.
In part two of the game, titled, Where I Lived, players are invited to find artifacts, “traces” left by marginalized people who had previously inhabited the digital space. Rather than becoming a centred narrative voice in the game, they became the backdrop. Scattered artifacts such as Indigenous arrowheads and letters advocating for the enfranchisement of enslaved people become background details in a hegemonic Eurocentric narrative. Arrowhead became a static ecological representation rather than a vivid expression of what Marin & Bang (2018) refer to as land relationality and the interplay of complex knowledge systems, movement and presence.
I also critically examined the idea of reclusiveness, rest, and reflection demonstrated throughout the game. It led to critical questions like, who has the freedom to rest and reflect, even in a digital ecosystem where it was explicitly demonstrated that enslaved people who lived previously had their freedom restricted. It created a paradox within the game. Chang’s mesocosm becomes relevant here as we see how what the game excludes or includes shapes ecological and historical narratives.
Reflections on Critical Play: Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield and South of Midnight
My earliest encounter with digital games was in the 1990s, playing Quake on my family’s PC in Jamaica. At that time, owning a computer or console was a privilege because access to digital play reflected larger hierarchies of power and class. While play has always been woven into Jamaican culture, digital play introduced new layers of exclusion.
Within this context, play carried deep ancestral roots, drawing from African, Indian, Chinese, and British colonial influences. It was both creative expression and quiet resistance that offered a counter-narrative to enslavement and colonial rule, preserving histories that could not be easily erased or decoded by oppressors. Flanagan (2009) positions play as both artistic and political praxis for questioning dominant systems, while Gray (2025) reframes it as lived resistance shaped by race, surveillance, and power. In a recent lecture, Gray describes how Black community members watched over children playing Pokémon Go in heavily policed neighbourhoods, a reflection of how even leisure requires protection in predominantly Black spaces in America (2025). Similarly, in Jamaica, socioeconomic inequality and gang violence continue to define who has access to safe spaces for play, both physical and digital.
In this reflection, I bring Flanagan and Gray into dialogue through two contemporary examples of play: Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield and South of Midnight to explore how Black game designers use critical play to embody freedom, refusal, cultural memory, and offer counter-narratives to hegemonic views of Black Culture in North America.
Flanagan (2009) posits that games allow players to challenge systems, while Chang, Gray & Bird (2023) remind us that play is never neutral. Both Aerial_Knights Never Yield and South of Midnight represent an embodiment of critical pedagogy where game mechanics through movement, sound, and storytelling become sites of resistance. “Critical play can be understood as a means to create or occupy play environments and activities that represent one or more questions about aspects of human life.” (Flanagan 2009) While the “ magic circle” of play is positioned as one that is protected, Gray demonstrates that issues of race, hierarchy and gender are of significant influence (Gray 2025). While Flanagan asks how play can critique systems ( 2009), Gray asks how we play when those systems are already “playing in our faces” (2025).
Aerial_Knights Never Yield was developed by Neil Jones, a Black Indie game developer from Detroit. The intentional choice to include hip hop as the sonic backdrop, along with vivid urban landscapes, offers an authentic representation, while “Never I Yield” flashes across the screen. While critics question the limited mechanics of the game and its emphasis on specific movements like sliding, jumping and running, this embodies critical play and the protagonist's continuous motion as Black persistence. Black Scholar and Historian, Kellie Clarke Jackson, offers 5 remedies or acts of resistance, one of which is flight/fleeing as political refusal (Carter Jackson, 2024). In essence, Black Bodies in Motion design their own freedom, and Jones allows players to embody this experience.
South of Midnight, created by Compulsion Games in 2024, is a visually stunning game featuring a black female protagonist exploring an Afro-Gothic World through myth and folklore. This is one of my favourite games to play because no detail was missed. From the protagonists' braided hair and golden adornments to the southern cadence and vernacular storytelling, which challenge dominant linguistic hierarchies observed in America. South of Midnight embodies Flanagan's Critical play through narrative design and subversive aesthetics. “Artists and writers aim for subversion of romanticized norms, of existing systems of power, of authority, and of aesthetic associations in each of these categories.” (Flanagan 2009). Within the game, the landscape of the Southern States is reclaimed as a site of Black Spirituality and creative homeland and serves as a counternarrative to its deeply racist past.
In an era of synthetic media and algorithmic culture, these games remind us that play, like freedom, is something we must continually remake, in our image and on our terms.
Reflection 4: Games as (Re)membering
It is not often that a narrative game opens with a black female protagonist. I was captivated by the game's description and compelled to purchase it on Steam. Released in 2023 by Scavengers Studio, Season: A Letter to the Future allows us to explore a narrative arc, rich with metaphor and symbolism. Designed to be both visually compelling and thought-provoking, Estelle, the player character, leaves her mountain-top home to collect artifacts that symbolize memories before the mysterious disaster brewing causes all memories to be lost. Estelle creates these artifacts by taking Polaroid pictures, recording audio and collecting various tools, carefully selected before embarking on the journey by bicycle.
One of the most compelling scenes of the game is the ritualization of memory-making. Estelle stands in a cozy kitchen, amber fire glowing in the fireplace. She selects various items from around the room: a silver spoon, dried flowers, and a 100-year-old Ginger tonic. Her mother explains that in preparation for the journey, they would create a pendant, filled with the stories of these artifacts, and use it as an anchor for the mind in challenging times along the journey. The catch? Each artifact represented a memory Estelle's mother would lose if placed in the pendant. The items inspired reflective dialogue between Estelle and her mother, and the soft, quiet sounds create the soundscape for the scene. With each click of the mouse, more dialogue is generated. This beautiful exchange is one of the highlights of the introduction to the game. It is both interactive and immersive. Estelle (the player) chooses/clicks on various artifacts around the room, and her mother’s voice stitches the object to its past. The player is invited to engage the senses through sight and sound, and to imagine the smell and feel of the items in the digital space.
Fortified with her pendant and other memory artifacts, Estelle is ready to explore and gather memories.
Games as (Re)membering: An Appendix of Bosost’s How to do things with Video Games
Bogost invites us to consider that games enable players to become active practitioners through systems of participation (2011, p. 141). Season: A Letter to the Future offers further discursive exploration of this by transforming digital play into ritual, situating the procedural act of archiving through storytelling as a means to avoid the loss of critical memories. In addition, Estelle, the black female protagonist, symbolizes the keeper of ancestral memory as reflected in many indigenous African and Afro-Diasporic Traditions, positioning games as a tool for cultural preservation.
Systems of (Re)membering
Bogost describes procedural rhetoric as persuasion through process (2011, p. 14). Each memory added to the pendants in the ritual between mother and daughter represents the procedural rhetoric of the game, demonstrating the care and sacrifice made for the sake of protecting the most deeply valuable element on the journey- the mind. This invited me to reflect on the tokens enslaved Africans might have taken from their homeland as reminders of their culture and heritage. The resilience of the mind and how these artifacts represent fortification.The rice grains that were often braided into the hair before being packed in ships to ensure that there was a source of food as they embarked on a journey to a future unknown. Further to this, the visually captivating scenes in the game and the intentional placement of items in the room add layers of meaning to the ritual and system of (re)membering. “From the perspective of form, proceduralist art games tend to combine concrete, identifiable situations with abstract tokens, objects, goals, or actions like the abstract tokens in Rohrer’s treasure chest”. (Bogost, 2011, p.16)
Games can make the act of (re)membering playable. With the onslaught of short-form videos on social media in the current media ecosystem, bite-sized packages of information flood the working memory, much of which is lost to the average user. The leisurely pace at which players can journey as Estelle allows for meaning-making through the narrative arc that unfolds, the longer one spends in the game. This creates an environment where novelty is decentered and memory allowed to structure engagement. Season: A Letter to the Future serves as the “buttress” to other forms of media used for the sake of influencing culture. ( Bogost, 2011, p.6)
Image 1 From Game Play
Image 2 From Game Play
Image 3 From Game Play
Official Game Trailer
As I explore how meaning-making can be made through gameplay, I reflect on the work of Caillois and his key traits of play. I examine how various cultures and modern digital games may or may not fit within the somewhat rigid definition of play as outlined by the author. Caillois (1961) defines play as “ an activity which is essentially free, separate, uncertain, unproductive, governed by rules, and make-believe.” (p.129)
While Caillois assumes a strict boundary between play and real life, cultural rites of passage and Game Transfer Phenomena suggest a more porous relationship between game play and the experiences of real life. (Ortiz de Gortari & Diseth, 2022). From the perspective of cultural rites of passage, lessons learned help to shape both individual and collective life experiences.
Monument Valley, Chapter IV: Water Palace
Monument Valley is an iPad game that demonstrates how Caillois’ categories can be observed in digital games, but also stretches that framework by identifying how learning emerges through essential elements like creativity and imagination, as demonstrated in traditional rites of passage and cultural games in Africa and the Diaspora.
There were no explicit instructions at the start of the game. I was given the freedom to choose my starting point. The game is described as a silent Princess’s journey to forgiveness through a series of puzzles and pathways (ludus). Gameplay was truly fascinating. There was an element of freedom as outlined by Cailllois, since there was no timer, and I could spend as long as I wanted navigating the level I chose. Through a series of rotating blocks and staircases, the pathway would reveal itself. Progress was recursive. I would often have to rotate one staircase and then go back to the beginning to reveal another pathway. Trial an error, strategic thinking and experimentation allowed for creativity and imagination as well as patience with the process. At a certain point, unlocking a pathway would result in quake-like shaking within the game, a moment of ilinx, which Caillois (1961) defines as “an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic on an otherwise lucid mind”. (p. 138)
In reflection, Monument Valley closely mimics what exists in some ritual and rite of passage practices from Indigenous cultures. Individuals are taught perspective-taking through seeing challenges from different angles, patience and persistence through trial and error, and cyclical learning through unlocking progress by returning to earlier pathways. Play, in essence, becomes constructive, challenging Caillois' idea that play is largely unproductive. Caillois’ ethnocentric perspective overlooks the communal learning and meaning-making that occur during gameplay. Furthermore, digital games, as demonstrated in Monument Valley, go beyond rigid rules and can be deeply aesthetic. As Zimmerman reminds us, “ games are beautiful, they do not need to be justified” (2013).
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Week 2: Gamification, Play & Digital Game-Based Learning
Gamification has often been touted as the new frontier for learning in modern classrooms, extending its tentacles beyond powerful companies that have gamified everything from online purchases to social media. Nolan and McBride describe trends towards commercial use of gamification as “surface-level game features such as badges, achievements, or rewards as an incentive for consumer loyalty.” (Nolan & McBride, 2014, p 595). The promise of more engaged learning, better academic performance and overall “success’ as defined by traditional school systems has heralded in a new era in many classrooms. Gamification may have its place in certain spheres of education; for example, math drills for learning the multiplication table. The use of badges, leader boards and other mechanics can reinforce declarative knowledge. The monotonous function of rote learning can come alive through the concept of power and progress. This, however, runs the risk of reinforcing the hidden curriculum of hierarchy and compliance; the social norms that have larger implications once outside the classroom setting .
I argue that Digital Game-Based Learning offers deeper, more meaningful engagement in ‘play” than superficial offerings for otherwise laborious learning tasks. This distinction becomes more meaningful when I also reflect on non-Western cultures, where time is not necessarily experienced as a linear progression through life, but as a cyclical, seasonal and sometimes recursive reflection. This allows learners to infer deeper meaning and gain wisdom. Gamification’s emphasis on power and progress, as noted by Nolan and McBride, may not appeal to those from cultures that value intrinsic motivation to help guide the process of gaining knowledge and wisdom. These cultures often value creativity, imagination, and inspired flow states. For example, in the Mahumbwe and Magure games played in Zimbabwe, play and traditional rites of passage intersect. Social and cultural skills are developed through mimicry of adult responsibilities, and a ceremony marks their graduation from childhood games. This reflects Gee’s Regime of Competencies, where, “the learning gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge of his or her resources” (Gee, 2014, p.209).
As we consider the migrant patterns of families from non-Western cultures to Canada, how might we imagine play and digital game-based learning through diverse cultural perspectives? What aspects of the null curriculum can we make explicit through the inclusion of DGBL that reflect the identities of those in today’s diverse classroom?
Even within the process of writing this reflection, I engage in playful constructivism. By drawing on readings, personal narratives and using cultural experiences, I transform writing into a kind of play for making and remaking meaning. Marone references theories in constructivism, “ The learning theory of constructivism holds that individuals, through experience and interaction with persons, objects and situations, actively construct most of their knowledge rather than just acquiring it (Bredo, 1997). Digital game-based learning lends itself to active construction of narratives and elucidates lessons through an interactive process, actively reflecting the ways that some non-Western cultures create epistemological traditions. Gee’s principle of affinity and identity is reflected in the anchors of these epistemological traditions. The idea that belonging, intergenerational wisdom sharing, and some level of risk-taking, as seen in some rites of passage, make for good games. In many classrooms, community, imagination and identity are often overshadowed by power and progress.
Through the study of non-Western knowledge systems, we can see how DGBL offers the opportunity to imagine play as culturally sustaining, iterative and ‘spiralic’. We are also reminded that in cultures steeped in tradition, learning emerges from a sense of belonging, imagination and creativity. We are therefore invited to design educational games that reflect diverse world views. Play, then becomes a tool for liberation and rejects compliance.
Week 1: Manifesto for A Ludic Century:Defining Game Play
I approach this reflection in the manner in which Zimmerman describes. Playfully, I arrange the pieces of memory and theory like a puzzle. Zimmerman calls our current age the Ludic Century, defined by play and co-creative systems design. This resonates as I recall my earliest interactions with games as a child.
I had the great privilege of growing up in the Caribbean, where games are an integral part of the early development of children. Most of the games I played have a long history, with many originating from West African traditions and others representing an amalgamation of cultures and British colonial games. These traditional games served as tools for place-making in the community, fine and gross motor skill building, storytelling and mastery.
Chinese Skip, Dandy Shandy and Ring Games are standout memories and examples of:
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Systems: Rules, patterns and rhythms (these rhythms are typically reflected in song and dance)
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Playful Mastery: Using elastic bands to create a rope that was stretched between two players, while other players tested their agility and ability to contort themself between the intricate shapes made with the bands.
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Cultural Storytelling: communal memory
The Molleindustria generator deepens reflections on a more expansive definition of games as it relates to the Afro-Caribbean context. This communal memory can be described as “ a cultural form in which players interact with each other to build a sense of belonging to a social group”. It has long been held that African and Afro diasporic cultures see the individual identity in relationship to others. Ubuntu- I am because you are, represents the underlying values system within which most of these cultures operate.
One might also argue that Caribbean children are systems designers, exercising resourcefulness as they use rudimentary tools and everyday materials to become more than just players.
The need to be playful
I remember the distinct excitement of the recess bell in Prep (Elementary) School. Some of us had spent significant time weaving elastic bands. Others were forming a ring to play bull in a pen. Some sneaked their brand new Game Boys out of their homes to show off to their friends. All of it represents both the innate childhood desire for belonging and the desire to break free of the traditional school system. Zimmerman posits that a “playful system is a human system, a social system rife with contradictions and with possibilities”.
I end this reflection as I began. The final piece of the puzzle is left to the imaginings of Afrofuturist thought. Black Panther- like gamification of liberatory acts. Gamification as a tool for mutual aid, communal care and land defence. How do we continue to expand our definition of play when oppression persists?
*For more information on Caribbean games and theories on play from an Afro-diasporic perspective, check out the Afro-diasporic Play Archive and the Game Theory Codex under the resources tab.
Pictured below: Girls from my former high school in Jamaica playing Chinese skip.
