PhD Thesis: Survivance: An Indigenous Social Impact Game

Elizabeth Aileen LaPensee earned her PhD at Simon Fraser University, supervised by Ron Wakkary. She wrote a dissertation entitled “Survivance: An Indigenous Social Impact Game”. From her abstract: “Social impact games are on the rise as a means of encouraging social change through gameplay. This dissertation describes the outcomes of playing Survivance (http://www.survivance.org)—an Indigenous social impact game that honors storytelling, art, and self-determination as pathways to healing from historical trauma caused by colonization in Turtle Island (North America). The research addresses a gap in studies that specifically explore the impact of social impact games while uniquely merging Indigenous and Game Studies scholarship”.

Learn more about the Survivance game at http://survivance.org/ and read the thesis at http://summit.sfu.ca/item/13984