Community, Socialisation, and Empowerment in Cultural Game Jams with Youth Citizens

This paper examines social and collaborative elements of Cultural Game Jams developed and implemented in the large-scale Europe Horizon research and innovation project, EPIC-WE: Empowered Participation through Ideating Cultural Worlds and Environments (2023-2026). The project explores and develops transdisciplinary collaboration and co-creation across cultural heritage institutions, creative industries, higher education institutions, and youth citizens (ages 16-25) towards Cultural Game Jam interventions across three European sites: Óbidos (Portugal), Hilversum (Netherlands), and Aarhus (Denmark). The Cultural Game Jams are held at cultural heritage sites and are aimed towards value-sensitive game design and youth empowerment. This paper explores Cultural Game Jams as a potential format for enabling and developing youths’ empowered participation, communality, and cultural socialisation by analysing the first Cultural Game Jam (2024). Framed by a Design-Based Research methodology and guided by experimental and short-term ethnography and design experiments, the analyses draw from qualitative empirical material, e.g., interviews, participatory observations, field notes, and the Cultural Game Jam participants' reflective process and design documentation. The analyses illustrate how co-creating games within cultural heritage contexts can develop youth perceptions of community, cultural socialisation processes, and individual/collective empowerment. Furthermore, the paper offers insights into the co-creation of games as new expressions of cultural heritage through epistemic collaboration and cultural participation in game jams while discussing possibilities for enabling new experiences of empowered participation, social learning, and community among youth citizens.