Teaching Video Games in Catastrophic Times: Perils, Pleasures, and Possibilities

Though video games are played widely across North America, they rarely register as an influential cultural media that comments upon and critiques our political and social worlds. Despite their ability to connect players globally, video games are rarely seen as opportunities of empowerment, solidarity, organizing, and community building—but are rather understood as frivolous objects inciting moral panic. Why play, teach, or study games, when the world is on fire? 

This panel gathers three game studies scholars to discuss the meanings and stakes of game studies today, focusing on the political purposes our work has taken on, and the forms of social justice organizing that video games can imagine and enact. 

We ask: How do video games actively participate in our present time of economic precarity, environmental crisis, resurgent fascism, and war and genocide enabled by our own governments? How do we teach and understand video games—a media understood as a form of pleasure and escape—during times of fear, loss, and violence? How can teaching games with political themes (Neofeud, 1000xRESIST, Citizen Sleeper, Umurangi Generation, Butterfly Soup) reveal new ways of seeing and understanding our present political moment?

We invite students and faculty alike to join us in a conversation about the perils, pleasures, and possibilities of video games, and the role game studies can play in imagining more just futures. 

This event is open to the general public and does not require registration (but please note that our seating is limited). This event is co-organized with and sponsored by UBC's Pop Culture Cluster. There will be a reception hosted in the Piano Lounge following the event.

Sarah Christina Ganzon is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at SFU. Her research revolves mostly around game studies and digital fandom. Recently, she finished her thesis on otome games in English, and otome game players. Some of her work has appeared in journals such as Games and Culture, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Human Tech, and Transformative Works and Cultures. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies at Concordia University and an MA in English Literature from Cardiff University. Previously, she also taught courses in the University of the Philippines, University of Santo Tomas, Far Eastern University, and Concordia University.

Chris Patterson (they/he) is many things: a cheap traveller of both real and virtual worlds, a wandering and weary widow, a sole parent to a fantastical eight-year-old kid, and a neurodivergent Filipinx-pixie punk. For this context, they are an award-winning author and associate professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, focusing on media and transpacific empire. Chris is the author of three academic books (Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literatures of the Transpacific, Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games, and Domesticating Brown: Movements of Racial Imagination, forthcoming in March 2026 with Duke University Press), as well as two edited collections (Transpacific, Undisciplined with Chienting Lin and Lily Wong, and Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never [Really] About Us with Tara Fickle). 

Under their matrilineal name Kawika Guillermo, they have published two award-winning novels, All Flowers Bloom and Stamped: An Anti-travel Novel, which won the 2023 Asian American Studies book award for creative prose, and which Chris later adapted into a video game, Stamped: An Anti-travel Game. They also authored the experimental prose-poetry book Nimrods: A Fake-punk Self-hurt Anti-memoir, which was nominated for a LAMBDA award for best bisexual nonfiction. In September, they published their first creative non-fiction book Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games. A mixture of memoir, cultural commentary, and game analysis, Of Floating Isles is an immersive journey into the author’s lifelong attachment to video games, revealing how they shape us, shatter us, and give us the courage to start again.

Jentery Sayers is an associate professor of English and the director of Media Studies at the University of Victoria, where he also teaches courses on games and interactive fiction. 

He’s recently written about Citizen Sleeper, Unpacking, 80 Days,Strange Horticulture, and activity theories of genre.