EXPLORING THEMES OF JUSTICE
JUST PLAY toolkit
Want to learn more about concepts of justice? Looking for inspiration for your justice-themed Just Play game? Read on for some of Cinereach’s research into justice and interactive storytelling.
✦ The Cinereach Justice Workshop
In 2022, Cinereach conducted a workshop in partnership with the Guild of Future Architects to explore narratives of justice and how they influence our understanding of the unjust systems that challenge our culture. Our ultimate goal was to understand what stories and forms of entertainment can support the cultivation of a more just society.
In order to explore this complex topic, we invited over 50 participants from all aspects of the justice ecosystem to answer the following questions:
What's your definition of Justice?
Do you believe Justice should have a universal definition?
Where do you see your work intersecting with or expressing justice?
Where in the world do we/you feel we need more Justice?
Is justice a moral standard?
What is your reference for justice?
Can you reform/reframe your position to Justice?
Are we willing to create something completely different?
How do you manifest Justice in your choices?
What institutions would you design?
What we uncovered were a variety of truths that have informed Cinereach’s approach to storytelling. We identified five degrees of the way justice manifested for individuals, in narratives and within institutions:
State — Process: Justice can be experienced as a state of being or as a process. These are not mutually exclusive.
Past — Present — Future: Does the experience explore the past for precedents and models of justice; the present for creating systems and practices of justice in the contemporary context; the future in imagining and prototyping justice models to be developed later?
Direct — Intersects: Are you practically touching on justice directly (lawyer, psychological service provider, policy maker, etc) or does the work only intersect with theories and practices of justice?
Small — Medium — Large: At what scale is justice operating? The small scale (interpersonal, family/friend groups, small networks), the medium scale (institutions, larger networks, small communities), or the large scale (cities, systems, larger organizing structures like the state, etc).
Single — Multiple: Are you exploring justice through a singular justice or the intersections of differing theories of justice?
✦ LENSES OF JUSTICE
There were eight fundamental lenses through which justice most often appeared for individuals, narratives and institutions:
COMMUNITY
Humans and other humans/human-constructed institutions (i.e. interpersonal relationships, social structures, in/formal systems, and institutions)
NARRATIVE
Humans and the different types, modes, and processes for storytelling, myth making, and values transmission (documentary, archives, museums, arts)
ECOLOGY
Humans and the other parts of nature (environment, food, land, energy, etc.)
POST-COLONIAL
Humans the aftermath & continued effects of colonial histories
ECONOMY
Humans and labor, employment, compensation (new economies, organizational structures, reparations, etc.)
SPIRITUAL
Humans and the greater than (religion, theology, philosophy etc.)
HEALTH
Humans and the body (individual physical and mental health, community health, restoration, etc.)
TECHNOLOGY
Humans and the toll we create (digital, analog, social, etc.)
For the Just Play Game Jam, we encourage developers to consider these eight lenses of justice, but we are also open to submissions that explore other ways of thinking about justice through narrative, mechanics or other design elements.
The biggest conclusion from this workshop was that the greatest opportunity for impactful justice narratives that leverage the power of engagement is in interactive gaming. This is what has led us to create the Just Play game jam.
✦ What is justice in interactive storytelling?
The purpose of storytelling, at its mechanical core, is the sharing of experience. Whether for warning, empathy, inspiration or communion, story allows us to hear and understand the experience of another, through their own words or expressions. Though we do not embody that person in a tangible way, we are able to embody the storyteller in the ending of our minds.
Interactive storytelling, though, is a different beast. The presence of interaction tools allows us a measure of agency within the storytelling space– rather than being told of an experience, we are invited to live within it. As players we’re able to embody a person, a creature, a thing, an idea, within a curated narrative experience. In here, the storyteller or designer can apply tension and alter circumstance, can adjust levers of emotion and expression, and ultimately build a world all their own, with forces acting on and within it.
So then, if we understand interactive storytelling as an exercise of curated embodiment, what do we as designers need to ask ourselves? We can ask “what are we making our player do?” or “what are we making our player experience?”, or even “what do we hope our player will feel?”. And it’s from there (or from a myriad other similar questions) that we can work backwards to find and implement the best systems and mechanics to elicit the feelings we need our players to feel, and the knowledge we want them to gain.
So when we talk about justice in design, then, the goal of the game designer is to think not only about what justice means and the many ways it is experienced (like the eight lenses provided above), but also its opposite — the exploration of injustices. We have the opportunity to think beyond the surface presence of injustice and uncover the root causes and multilayered effects. And in that deep examination, we as designers can build something entertaining that is informed, with mechanics that communicate their interpretation of justice directly to the player.
In short, the game designer creates a situation, and gives the player a carefully arranged set of tools to dismantle, act on or simply perceive that situation. Justice and injustice must be experienced and explored, not simply discussed.
✦ What are we looking for?
We are looking for games that provide unique, nuanced and unexpected ways of incorporating themes of justice into the narrative and the design. This can show up in any way that is exciting to you: the world, the characters, the circumstances you design and any other element you can dream up. The goal is not to create “The Justice Game!!” where players wear a cape flying from building to building defeating injustice one challenge at a time (although, if you can make that work and it’s fun and creative, please go for it!). The goal is to use the incredible power and flexibility of game design to invite players to live, learn and play in the world of a game that has considered and intricately woven elements of how we build a relationship to justice (or injustice) throughout.
✦ Some helpful questions to get designers thinking…
Do we want to encourage players to act on other people, real or virtual?
Do we want players to give more than they take?
How do we want our players to wield power or experience the loss of their own power?
How do we want privilege to manifest in the game, tied or untied from progression?
How are players’ individual identities being considered in our design?
✦ What aren’t we looking for?
Games that overlook the importance of engagement and entertainment
Games where justice is a trigger-pull away
Games where justice is a solvable system
Games where technology alone saves us
Games that ask “what about the oppressor?”
Games that give us simple answers for complex problems
Games that do not give the players the tools to perceive their situation
Games that encourage resource-hoarding
✦ Themes of Justice : A Collection
COMMUNITY
The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series is a constant exploration of what it means to raise a community. In doing so, we see themes of how people penalize each other, how we use one another and the conflicts that arise from how groups manage scarcity.
ECOLOGY
Never Alone tells the story of an Iñupiaq girl named Nuna, who embarks on an adventure to save her village after it’s ravaged by a storm. The game focuses on the environment and the effects of the weather, but connects them very deliberately to people, and how greed, violence and discord can ultimately affect both communities and the land they exist on.
ECONOMY
Dot’s Home is a game about a young Black Woman dealing with housing inequality, gentrification, racism and generational trauma as she spends time in her grandmother’s home in Detroit. Originally conceived as an educational project about structural inequality, the game was made by a team of Black creators drawing from their own experiences. One of the ways in which the game tackled the oppressive nature of economic injustice was through the illusion of player choice in some unwinnable systems– there isn’t always a way to succeed, but there are often ways to persevere.
HEALTH
That Dragon, Cancer is an immersive, narrative video game that retells a child’s 4-year fight against cancer through about two hours of poetic, imaginative gameplay that explores medical bureaucracy and the impending loss of a child.
NARRATIVE
Dialect is a tabletop game about language and how it dies. Players act as a community in isolation, building their language and narrating the process of that language becoming lost to history. Justice as a theme, here, is expressed in discussions of what forces are responsible for language being lost.
POST-COLONIAL
Dog Eat Dog is a tabletop game about imperialism and assimilation in the Pacific Islands. It tells the story of the natives of a small Pacific island as they come into conflict with a foreign occupation force attempting to seize it from them. The game begins when the war ends and asks important questions about what building community in a post-colonial space can mean.
SPIRITUAL
Pentiment is a game where you play as a 16th century monk solving a murder and dealing with the fallout of sentencing someone to death. The game spends its time exploring punitive justice between church authorities, the people of the abbey, and the parties affected by the oppressed.
TECHNOLOGY
Citizen Sleeper is a game where you play as a Sleeper, an artificial body with a copy of a human consciousness inside. When you arrive at a lawless space station at the edge of society, you must contend with what it means to do right by others in order to make a life. Uneven access to resources and technology is a major theme of the project.