“You’re standing there on the screen, and you’re inundated with a deluge of objects coming at you, like social media icons coming at you, and little sprites that represent books – positive influences,” Ciampaglia says. He also likes one of the games designed by a girl who expressed the difficulty of achieving and maintaining a good balance in life. You have to jump over different obstacles, go under fences and reach the border before daybreak. “You have to make your way through the rough terrain that leads to the U.S.-Mexican border. “When the game starts, it’s nightfall,” Ciampaglia says. There is a way to win, he says, but that’s a secret for the players to discover.Īnother game challenges players to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Players are given their choice of character they then find themselves on the set of a movie, trapped inside a locked room and battling zombies.
“He told me that often, when he watched an action movie, the black character didn’t survive in the end, but the white character did,” the professor says. One teen’s game examines stereotypes in movies, particularly the roles white actors and African-Americans play in action movies.
“I am very happy with not just the subject matter – the social issues that the teens chose – but also with the way they participated in the creative process all the way through, and how committed they’ve been.” “The games are really good,” Ciampaglia says. The games will be projected onto the façade of the art center. Participants will find old-school arcade cabinets, red-knob joysticks with buttons and a group of mostly 14-year-old designers ready to talk about what they did during summer vacation.
The game of life video game free#
Ciampaglia and Richardson are co-founders and directors of the “nomadic” collective of artist-teachers who partner with community centers throughout the Chicago area to offer free art and technology programming.Īnd, just days before the Chicago Public Schools open, the public is invited to play the games and chat with the artists during “The Street Arcade,” an outdoor, retro arcade event scheduled from 7 to 9:30 p.m. Young artists came each week to Hyde Park Art Center, which provided physical space and administrative support for The Plug-In Studio’s free and collaborative programming. Steve Ciampaglia, an assistant professor of Art + Design Education at NIU, knows those answers: They’re amazing.Ĭiampaglia and his partner in the arts and in life, Kerry Richardson, spent the summer guiding 13 adolescent artists – a nearly equal split of boys and girls – through the intersection of art and technology. Many parents shake their heads when they hear stories about what some of the most popular video games glorify.īut what if video games could explore contemporary social issues such as racial profiling, bullying, white privilege, peer pressure and immigration? And what if those games were designed and created by inner-city teenagers coping with those realities every day?
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