Inside our talk at the Serious Play Conference 2023

Last week, The Affordance team travelled to Toronto for the Serious Play Conference. two of our employees had the pleasure of presenting a talk titled "Co-creating serious games with Indigenous Partners". The Serious Play Conference is a gathering where professionals come together to explore and discuss the use of games as a learning tool. They exchange experiences and collaborate to positively influence the future of training and education.

Now in its 15th year, the Serious Play Conference is a three-day event bringing together serious game developers, educators, and training professionals from various sectors including government, businesses, healthcare, as well as primary, secondary, and higher education. The goal is to share experiences and knowledge about using serious games as a learning tool.

We've been fortunate to work closely with indigenous communities on several of our projects. This presentation highlighted our unique co-creation process, from the collaborative journey with our indigenous partners to the insights and lessons learned from this creative path.

This past year, we worked on a boardgame and video game in partnership with Indigenous companies and destined to Indigenous young players. During their conception, we learnt various ways of thinking and working to achieve the project’s learning objectives. In their presentation, they shared our experience going through this project, co-working with the different stakeholders that contributed to it.

Serious games are always a matter of being able to represent and share an educational content. But in the case of games with a very important cultural content, we had another point of view to take into account. We presented the different challenges we went through, what worked and what we wished we had done differently. We’ll also provided every time key takeaways, something you could learn from our experience (and our mistakes) and that could be applied to other situations and partnerships.

We're proud of the commitment and passion that our team brings to these partnerships and projects, and we're excited to continue along this path!