I taught a dedicated game studies class for the first time from January-May 2024. The second-year undergraduate course, called “Feminist, Queer, and Trans Game Studies,” introduced students to the main theories and debates in the subfield and was designed to improve their skills in “close playing” and thinking critically about videogames.[2] It was also designed to help students think about playing and making videogames in political terms and to challenge and resist the “hegemony of play” that narrowly focuses on capital-G “Gamers” and reproduces sexism, racism, classism, ableism and other axes of oppression.[3] That is, the course engaged with the fact that, despite the reality that people of all kinds make and play games, considerable boundary work is done by reactionary privileged players to reinforce ideas about “real” games and gamers that are underpinned by structures of domination.[4] To support this, I designed an ungraded game-making assignment that asked students to put the concepts, ideas, and game mechanics they were learning about into practice by making a videogame themselves. In a class that critiqued the sexist, racist, and classist construction of “Gamers,” making games felt like an exciting way to bring home the idea for these students that they have a place in gaming and game studies no matter their background.

While I am a game player and scholar, I am not a game maker. Similarly, while many of my students were interested in videogames and many played regularly, none had formal game-making training. Assigning game making would mean that both the students and I were stepping outside of our comfort zones and learning new skills. Therefore, grading students’ games based on quality was neither reasonable nor in alignment with the learning objectives, which emphasized the value of putting academic ideas into practice through creativity rather than mastery of technical or artistic skills. In this context, I see conventional letter-based grades as one of the “roadblocks” that indie game developer Anna Anthropy (quoted above) argues stifles creativity and the proliferation of zinester or hobbyist game making. To address these challenges, I made this assignment ungraded—or, more specifically, self-graded.

Assignment Description

To remove roadblocks and to encourage experimentation, risk-taking and creativity, I kept the assignment description relatively broad and centered it on how I wanted students to approach the prompt rather than on a list of requirements:

1. In this assignment, you will produce a short playable game that speaks to one or more of the class themes, to some aspect of feminist and queer theory, and to your own experiences (if you wish). It must be a digital game, not an analog game. This means it will use one of the tools discussed in class, including bitsy and Twine. It is likely that this is the first time you have done something like this—that’s great! The point here is to experiment and figure things out. You are not being marked on the quality of your game. Rather, this assignment is focused on thinking about how to translate issues and lived experiences into a game format, what opportunities and challenges arise when we do this, and how decisions about game design shape the meaning the game makes. I want you to feel that you can take risks, make mistakes and experiment.[5]

This game-making assignment was worth 35% of students’ final grade. The remainder of the final grade was made up of weekly reading summaries (24%), weekly play logs (21%) and two short game analysis papers (20%) designed to give students an opportunity to more fully explore their ideas from the play logs.[6] While the analysis papers were graded using conventional letter grades and rubrics, the summaries and play logs were graded using a simplified rubric (well done / needs work / unsatisfactory).[7] Therefore, the self-graded game project was one approach in a broader ungrading strategy.

The game-making project had four components. First, an intent letter where students describe their ideas and their personal goals for the process. The second component is the final game, uploaded to the videogame distribution platform itch.io. The third component is a short and informal class presentation (5–10 minutes) where each student presents their game to the class and their classmates ask them questions about their creative process, challenges they faced, etc. The final component of the assignment is a game development journal or some form of process documentation, submitted alongside a final process letter in which students describe the process of completing the assignment and give themselves a grade.

In addition, one of the two weekly classes was a dedicated make/play day where students could play games (and complete their play logs) or work on their game and get technical help from me or their colleagues. Classes were organized in this way for two main pedagogical reasons. First, it established a productive rhythm, with heavy reading and theory days on Tuesdays followed by a Thursday make/play day, which helped lighten students’ load while also reinforcing concepts and illustrating debates through the playing of relevant games. Second, bearing in mind the possibility that some students would not be experienced game players, I wanted to provide the necessary space and structures for them to find and play the assigned games and a low-pressure environment where they could ask their peers for help with their own game making.

Ungrading in Context

To the extent possible in the institutions where I teach, and as an early-career and precarious faculty member, I use ungrading. Often this means emphasizing various forms of participation, simplifying grading structures as described above (well done / needs work / unsatisfactory), and using self-grading models that emphasize the learning process over specific outputs or outcomes. In this section, I want to emphasize several factors that facilitated this approach.

I taught this course at Mount Allison University (MtA), a small undergraduate-focused liberal arts and science university located in rural Canada where I acted as a full-time sessional lecturer in 2024/25. Like many faculty members on temporary contract in Canada, I was represented by the faculty union. The total student population is 2,300, and the university advertises its small student-to-faculty ratio. The town punches far above its weight in terms of the arts scene, and the university has a well-regarded fine arts program. My experience at MtA was that professional development related to teaching was emphasized and valued and that there was considerable pedagogical freedom. Whereas at my previous institution, I had to contend with the expectation that my grades would fall along a normal distribution, at MtA I was encouraged to explore ungrading fully, and I was told that there were no university-wide grading standards (i.e., what grade counts as an A or B) or distribution (i.e., a requirement that a certain percentage of students receive a certain grade).

Like many upper-year undergraduate classes at MtA, this was a small class of 18 students. While I had no teaching assistant support in this course, the small class size facilitated hands-on pedagogical approaches and building rapport with students. This course was offered in the Feminist and Gender Studies Program, in which many of the students are cis and trans women, trans men, and non-binary people who face gender-based oppression and are interested in social justice. I taught at MtA for one academic year, and my experience was that students taking courses in the program were particularly willing to discuss the pitfalls of conventional grading, were receptive to different pedagogical approaches, and—while they were sometimes hesitant or nervous—quickly ascertained the goals and value of ungrading once we had built trust and rapport. Clearly, this is a fortunate and privileged position from which to experiment with ungrading.[8] While my approach may not be possible or desirable in every context, I hope that it works as another example among many of the ways that ungrading can serve as a mode of resistance to stultifying and entrenched norms.

Reflections on Ungrading Game Making

I suggest that the most important thing that ungrading makes possible in the context of game making for beginners is that it encourages creativity and risk-taking by allowing students to take big swings, knowing that whether they hit or miss, they will be rewarded for challenging themselves throughout the learning process. For example, rather than use a tool like Twine or bitsy, one student decided that they wanted to learn to code as part of their game making process. The assignment structure allowed them to set their own priorities and, in their words, take risks and push their limits. While their final game was only partially functional, the self-grading process allowed them to reflect on their many successes. They continued working on their game after the end of the semester and recently sent me an updated version. While still a work in progress, the updated version shows that they have continued experimenting with new tools and teaching themselves new skills. Similarly, ungrading can give students the freedom to try an idea, see if it works, and then decide to restart and try something new without worrying about the “sunk cost” of their first attempt.

During students’ presentations of their games, I was struck by the number that reflexively downplayed their accomplishments and compared their games unfavourably to others’. While I think this reflects an ingrained tendency toward modesty and self-critique among cis women and trans folks, it seems likely that it may also be a product of their internalization of the logics of normative letter-based grading systems, which insist on organizing submissions on a hierarchy of good to bad and thus foster comparison and competition. In such a framework, confident students may gloss over areas for improvement and less confident students tend to downplay their achievements when comparing themselves to others. Ungrading helped counter this in two ways. First, as the facilitator, I could remind students that there was no need for comparison, that they had set their own goals, and that everyone’s project would look different. Second, in their reflections, self-grading based on process allowed students to reflect in more vulnerable ways about what they were proud of as well as their work’s shortcomings and how they might improve in the future. They were particularly adept at assessing parts of the creative process that would not necessarily be captured in outcome-based assessment, including new skill acquisition, experimentation, and asking for and implementing feedback, among other important learning outcomes.

As a feminist educator, I also benefited from ungrading’s attention to the politics and ethics of grading practices, which provoked me to continually assess my pedagogical practices and ethics. For example, having students submit a game development log was born of my own insecurity and desire to exert some control and ensure they were working on this project throughout the semester. That is, its purpose was entirely disciplinary, and it arguably imposed a model of linear progression on students’ game development process (with the additional negative side-effect of adding to my workload as an instructor!). For a group this size, scheduling monthly check-ins or quick and informal midterm presentations of their progress would have been a more positive accountability strategy that contributed to learning outcomes by supporting them in reflecting on their progress to date, asking for the help they needed from their classmates, and planning their next steps. I plan on changing this in future iterations of the assignment.

Ungrading is not a panacea; it may be impossible for some precarious faculty to explore for myriad reasons. Nonetheless, as assistant professor of higher education Laila McCloud argues, despite ungrading’s tensions and challenges—particularly for pre-tenure Black women like herself—ungrading can be a transformative practice that allows “us to freedom dream with our students.” [9] Similarly, writing scholar-educator and ungrading advocate Jesse Stommel argues that ungrading supports equity.[10] Across all my experiments with ungrading, I have learned that ungrading practices like self-grading support creativity, risk-taking, and experimentation, which are things I think make university education more affirming, joyful, and challenging. While implementing these strategies across new institutions and contexts can be challenging, frustrating, and sometimes feel risky, I feel buoyed by the many colleagues, including those in this special issue of the Teaching Media Dossier, who are prodding at the boundaries of pedagogical approaches in higher education in creative and innovative ways, with their sights set on broader structural changes.

Jean Ketterling is an Assistant Teaching Professor (limited term appointment) in the Department of Culture and Media Studies at the University of New Brunswick. She received her PhD in Legal Studies from Carleton University, where she was a Vanier Scholar. Jean’s interdisciplinary research explores sexual video games: how they represent sex, their ability to make space for experimental sexual play, and how sexual content in video games is promoted, controlled, and regulated by platforms. Her classes are learner-focused, informed by queer feminist pedagogical theory, prioritize building intellectual community, and help students connect their lived experiences to the learning material.

1. Anna Anthropy, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People like You Are Taking Back an Art Form, Seven Stories Press 1st ed (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 111. ↑

2. Edmond Y. Chang, “Close Playing, a Meditation on Teaching (with) Video Games,” November 11, 2010, http://www.edmondchang.com/2010/11/11/close-playing-a-meditation/; Bo Ruberg, Video Games Have Always Been Queer (New York: New York University Press, 2019). ↑

3. Janine Fron et al., “The Hegemony of Play,” in Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Conference: Situated Play, 2007, https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/download/283/283; Edmond Y. Chang, Kishonna L Gray, and Ashlee Bird, “Playing Difference: Towards a Games of Colour Pedagogy,” in Critical Pedagogy, Race, and Media: Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education Teaching, by Susan Flynn and Melanie A. Marotta, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2021): 111–28, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003222835. ↑

4. One of the clearest and most impactful examples is Gamergate. For more on Gamergate, see Andrea Braithwaite, “It’s About Ethics in Games Journalism? Gamergaters and Geek Masculinity,” Social Media + Society 2, no. 4 (October 2016): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116672484. ↑

5. My syllabi are available on my website at https://www.jeanketterling.com/teaching ↑

6. My approach to play logs is informed by work done by Edmond Y. Chang. See Edmond Y. Chang and Amanda Phillips, “Game Play Logs, Or, ‘Plogs,’” 2020, https://doi.org/10.17613/42e9-dn13; Edmond Y. Chang, Ashlee Bird, and Kishonna L. Gray, “Playing Difference: Towards a Games of Colour Pedagogy,” in Critical Pedagogy, Race, and Media: Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education Teaching, eds. Susan Flynn and Melanie Marotta (London: Routledge, 2022): 111–128. ↑

7. Drawing on Elbow, Stommel describes such strategies as “minimal grading.” Peter Elbow, “Grading Student Writing: Making It Simpler, Fairer, Clearer,” New Directions for Teaching & Learning, no. 69 (1997): 127–40. Jesse Stommell, “How to Ungrade,” Jesse Stommel (blog) March 11, 2018, https://www.jessestommel.com/how-to-ungrade/. ↑

8. For more on the resistance and pushback that feminist educators may face when implementing ungrading, see Kristina N. Falbe, Christie Angleton, and Xiaoying Zhao, “From Our Ivory Towers: Enacting Our Collective Daily Resistance through Ungrading in a Feminist Co-Mentoring Group,” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy (July 2024): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2024.2368583. ↑

9. Laila I. McCloud, “Keeping Receipts: Thoughts on Ungrading from a Black Woman Professor,” Zeal: A Journal for the Liberal Arts 1, no. 2 (2023): 105, https://zeal.kings.edu/zeal/article/download/25/19. ↑

10. Jesse Stommel, “Ungrading for Equity,” Jesse Stommel (blog), August 22, 2023, https://www.jessestommel.com/ungrading-for-equity/. ↑