By JOYA SAXENA
This week, Beloit College hosted the 2023 Annual Ousley Scholar-in-Residence. As part of this year’s theme for the Weissberg Program in Human Rights & Social Justice entitled “Misinformation & Media Literacy,” the Ousley Scholar this year was Ashlyn Sparrow, a game designer and educator. She is the Assistant Director of the Weston Game Lab at the University of Chicago and the Creative Director at Sunflake Studios. Sparrow teaches students how to design their own games while imploring them to think about the sociopolitical meanings behind their games, granting students autonomy over their own designs rather than young people being mere consumers of games, a pattern seen across the United States.
Sparrow began her career as a learning technology instructor at the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab. In that role, she taught underrepresented students in the South and West Side of Chicago how to design games that addressed issues related to public health. As part of Sparrow’s passion for game design, she decided to expand on her work by opening another game lab that focused on other issues besides public health. “You can make a game about anything,” says Sparrow, referring to the ability to design a game about any issue young people are passionate about. To this day, Sparrow teaches K-12 students, undergraduates, and graduates in the Weston Game Lab in Chicago how to create their own games in order for them to address the issues they care about in their communities.
On Thursday, September 14, Sparrow kicked off her 24-hour live-action game known as Tracked, an all-campus interactive game about the ways data moves. The premise of the game was that a group of Users have to navigate the Web to accomplish wants, needs, and goals. They also have to keep their data from being used by Trackers. In the evening at Grace’s Place, students were split into two groups: Users and Trackers. Trackers wore blue armbands and Users wore yellow. As a trading card game, Users must retrieve cards from Trackers without giving up data tokens. Each card obtained was worth one point. Trackers advertised their products to Users in exchange for data tokens. Each Personally-Identifying Information (PII) data token was worth five points while non-PII data tokens were worth one point. The team with the most points by the end of the next day would win.
On September 15, the night of Sparrow’s big keynote speech, it was revealed that the Trackers creamed the Users by over 100 points. The Trackers won approximately 142 points while the users won 14 points. One student, Aadi Joshi‘25, revealed to the audience, “Trackers were able to win because they used compliments to lure users into giving them their information. I told a girl in class that her Instagram feed made her look beautiful in order to persuade her to post more content on my platform, thus giving me more information about her.”
At the big keynote speech, Sparrow energized the audience with her content and sense of humor. Sparrow highlighted the balance between creating games that are fun for the youth and creating games that can educate youth about issues affecting their communities. Tonight, Sparrow said, “I think persuasive games have the power to either support existing social and cultural positions OR disrupt them. By nature, games give young people agency, encourage trial and error, cultivate a safe space for failure, and depict systems. My goal is to create games that actually help students learn something while being entertaining at the same time.” Jaida Wesley‘24 said of Sparrow, “I LOVE Ashlyn! Her energy and passion for game design is contagious. Ashlyn’s talk didn’t feel like another lecture. She was so engaging, and her one-on-one conversations were so personable.”
Featured Image: Ashlyn Sparrow
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