The Resilience of Game Design Education

The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated calls for digital skilling and literacy in the arts sector. The authors reflect on their experiences with games education during this period and offer insight into how game design as a creative process, rather than the consumption of games, offers a model for resilience in education. We present how games learning and industry practices, particularly from the independent and art-games sectors offer a de-siloing between traditional approaches and inclusivity towards digital practices. The de-formalising of games has granted more creators to access the means of production to create digital interactive experiences. We discuss how games design offers collaborative thinking between creative artists and technical systems experts, which offers a timely challenge to the individual centricity of practices in traditional or establishment arts. Additionally, the producers of games are leaders in the discourses of gender diversity, non-binary representation and support for neurodiversity, despite perceptions of the field being to the contrary. Ultimately, a shift in the perception of games and gamers has opened the doors to creatives institutionally and otherwise towards adopting such practices and experimenting in the media of games.