HARRISBURG, PA — Greg Loring-Albright, Ph.D., who teaches and conducts research as part of the Game Design and Interactive Media programs at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology (HU), will serve as a panelist for the MIT Global Humanities Initiative on Friday, August 1, at 10:00 AM Eastern Time. The panel is entitled, “Playable Public Literacies.”
According to MIT, the Global Humanities Initiative (GHI) “proposes a hands-on approach to addressing the pressing challenges of our time.” With a motto of, “Legacies for Our Future,” GHI’s goal is “promoting human flourishing now, and creating good legacies for the future of humankind and our planet.”
Loring-Albright will join scholar and game designer Sherria Ayuandini (“Kartini: From Darkness to Light,” Ion Game Design, 2025) and host Mikael Jakobsson (“Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games,” MIT Press 2023, with Mary Flanagan) to discuss critical innovations in board games. The abstract reads:
Games turn global history into active playgrounds with varying amounts of respect given to the portrayed events and cultures. The burden of Eurocentric biases and Western colonial propaganda continues to weigh heavy on modern games made for entertainment and education. But there is a growing global community of gamers, designers, publishers, educators, academics, and content creators who advocate for games that center critical engagement with subject matters of history, culture, and conflict through play. Just as the ‘Changing the Game’ project centers community building for engagement and education, the objective of this panel is to share insights from studying and making this new kind of game, as well as establish and strengthen ties between academics and practitioners interested in these issues.
In addition to his work at Harrisburg University, Loring-Albright works as a freelance board designer on hobby strategy games (“Ahoy,” Leder Games, 2022), games with a critical approach (“Bloc by Bloc: Uprising,” Outlandish Games, 2022, with T.L. Simons), and games with a scholarly focus (“Keep the Faith,” Central Michigan University Press, 2025).
“Analog games, despite being an ancient form of play, are seeing a real resurgence in interest as tools to playfully engage with difficult topics,” said Professor Loring-Albright. “I’m honored to be joining this panel out of the MIT Gamelab to discuss games and their potentialities.”
Dr. Loring-Albright’s students, in a recent special topics course (GAME380: Games as Simulations), created an analog tabletop game to explore moments of political tension, and a research project built on their work is ongoing. Email Dr. Loring-Albright to participate in this research.
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