These design activities are meant to help designers engage with the SERG framework, either guiding a process of reflection or creation. We have provided several activities that may serve useful regardless of stage in the game design process. This, alongside the next section “Goal Setting” should be used as a set of tools to engage with the framework. Underlying any game using such should be clear and intentional choices around how a game might engage concepts of race as well as real-world impacted communities.
INSTRUCTIONS: Ideation activities are for generating or brainstorming new ideas. These ideas could be for entirely new games or could be for a new component for an existing game project.
ACTIVITY - Take Your Shoes Off! What’s a cultural or family practice that you didn’t realize was not the “norm” until later in life? What practices have you learned from others? Design a game that centers around narratives or mechanics of surprise, cultural exchange, and reactions or horror or delight.
ACTIVITY - The Zombies are Anti-Capitalist! What’s your favorite monster, creature, or fantasy race from media? What metaphors have been explored? Which have not? Design a game engaging the interplay of metaphor and reality in fantasy.
ACTIVITY - Omiyage Think about a recent trip you went on. Consider omiyage, the Japanese tradition of bringing a gift home for a friend or loved one. Design a game that you would “bring back” inspired from your trip to “give to a friend.”
ACTIVITY - Osteomancy Grab some paper. Sketch a grid for placements on some of the spectrums that most excite you (e.g., a 2x2 grid for “meaningful mechanics” that says no / low / medium / high). For each spectrum you sketch, take a coin (or other trinket, runes, bones, etc.) and cast them onto the sketch to decide what placement you are aiming for. Design a game around the placements you divine.
ACTIVITY - Fusion* Mechanics Blend together two or more cultural influences into the mechanics (i.e., rules, win conditions, interactivity, etc.) of a game.
ACTIVITY - Resistencia* “Build around themes of resilience, survival, or standing up against oppression.”
ACTIVITY - Utopia Build a utopia. Where can diverse peoples of color live and thrive without racial violence and oppression? What does the friction of the game become? Build a game with heterogenous multiplicity of race and no acknowledgement of racism. How can race and racial and cultural differences still feel significant and meaningful? Can they?
Inspired by Latinx in Gaming’s UNIDOS Game Jam https://itch.io/jam/unidos-jam-2025
INSTRUCTIONS: The iteration activities are like lenses* to analyze your game through.
LENS - Engaging Race and Racism Analyze your game based on acknowledges racism and acknowledges race. How does the world your game is set in view race? Does it affect the characters at all? Do the game systems you create (collecting, gathering, fighting, etc.) insinuate or enforce stereotypes intentionally or unintentionally?
LENS - Culturally-Relevant Mechanics Analyze your game mechanics based on meaningful mechanics. If you removed the cultural background from your game, would your mechanics still make sense? Are they inherently tied to the culture you are representing? How might you inject culture into your systems? What invisible cultural values might be embedded that are going unquestioned?
LENS - Fine-Tuning Select a Spectrum that you’d like to consider. What could you adjust within your game to change the placement of your game along just one spectrum? - E.g., If you have a racially homogenous game, what characters can you add or what storylines could you adjust to make the game heterogenous? - E.g., If you have a game with low meaningful narrative, could you start by writing one significant subplot that engages a main characters’s cultural heritage directly? What could that “unlock” in terms of story potential and richness of the character?
LENS - Engagements with Oppression Where do systems of oppression show up in your game? How are they observed by the player? How are they felt by the player? Is that oppression necessary to the plot? Why? How can unnecessary components be altered or changed to be sensitive to contemporary players? How can the necessary components contribute clearly to the larger mission or narrative of the game?
*Inspired by Schell, J. (2008). The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses. CRC press.
This Guiding Design Questions Worksheet is meant to help designers think about engaging race with attention to detail surrounding essential concepts addressing the SERG framework. Questions are separated into sections on how the designer is approaching SERG based on the stage of development of a game.
Building Upon Foundation Guiding questions meant to build upon an existing idea that has an identity through goals and a purpose. Each section holds specific questions centered around different forms of engagement.
Engagement through Breadth vs Depth There are hundreds of distinct races, each an umbrella to dozens of unique cultures, languages, and traditions. You may resonate with one in particular or engage with many. Consider the extent to which you are going to express one or more races, cultures, and traditions. - Does your content center around an individual race, or is diversity a larger part of an overarching narrative? - How far are you diving into these lineages? To what extent are you exploring these in the game design process? - Is your attention focused on engaging with a specific ethnicity, or is it divided amongst an entire caste? - Sometimes, addressing race in breadth might prevent you in addressing race in depth. Where does your game fall upon this spectrum?
Engagement with Target Audiences & Lived Experiences Players may feel enriched when engaging with something that resonates with themselves, such as through identity or lived experiences. Consider how your game might express cultural concepts that privileges the perspectives of different players. - What expectation do you have about someone's prior familiarity with the race and culture you are exploring? How might this add or lessen their experience? - Who is going to play your game? What impressions or thoughts would they have in relation to your game’s genre or style? - How do players engage with their experiences? Are there ‘in’ jokes or traditions that they are able to play into?