“Jiselle and the Royal Jelly”: Power, conflict and culture in an interdisciplinary game design course

With the rising popularity of digital games, a growing number of universities are developing programmes in various areas of digital design and interactive media to meet the needs for game-related courses. Faculty of this emerging field are grappling with the complexity of developing curricula which integrate art, design and technology and of finding methods of integrating students from these diverse fields. The purpose of this article is to present a case study of an interdisciplinary undergraduate course in game design and to highlight some of the unforeseen challenges and issues that arose when attempting to integrate diverse students from various art, design and media fields with students from computer science. Specifically, this article addresses issues of (a) power, (b) conflict and (c) gender that arose among students during the development of a student-created game.