The Visualizing Impact research project is a participatory action research project that explores the impact of feminist, grassroots inclusivity initiatives. Our team explored two key questions:
What kinds of impact do such inclusivity initiatives have?
What is the best way to communicate these impacts?
We worked with Pixelles, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting gender marginalized game makers, to better understand the impact of their 10+years of organizing work. Through interviews, workshops, and co-design sessions, we explored the diverse outcomes that initiatives like Pixelles can achieve. We also considered how we can convey these impacts to different audiences. These activities allowed us to collaboratively develop a “visualization game” that creatively communicates the highly personal and deeply cultural reverberations of the labour of volunteer-run inclusivity organizations.
Our Team
Visualizing Impact is a community-engaged project bringing together the expertise of community partners, graduate students, and designers.
Soft Chaos Cooperative is Allison Kyran Cole, Jess Rowan Marcotte, and D. Squinkifer: a chaotic good bunch of critically-engaged, award-winning game designers known for great games and even greater hair. We create intimate, vulnerable, and unique interactive experiences, which include experimental videogames, tabletop games, larps, art installations, and interactive performances. After many years of creative collaboration, we legally founded our worker-owned cooperative in 2021 to help us reflect the kind of structures we want to see in the world. What brought us together are our shared values of solidarity, playfulness, queerness, and compassion, plus our talent for meaningful, thoughtful design that sticks with you long after you've finished playing.
Pixelles is a non-profit organization committed to empowering women and other underrepresented genders in game development. Volunteer-run and based out of Montréal (Canada), we organize free career development activities, both in-person and online.
Alison Harvey is Associate Professor in the Communications program at Glendon College, York University and the Director of the Institute for Research on Digital Literacies.
Stephanie Fisher is a Co-Director at Pixelles, a non-profit organziation dedicated to supporting gender diversity in the video games industry.
Erika Chung is a Writing Centre Facilitator at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU).
Outputs
A number of exciting research and community-driven outputs, including conference talks, academic articles, book chapters, and digital game have grown alongside this project. See a sample of these outputs below!
This research snapshot provides an overview of the impact of Pixelles Montreal's community organizing based on analysis of interviews with Pixelles community members.
In March 2023, team members Dr. Alison Harvey, Stephanie Fisher, and Erika Chung presented at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, California. The team was top ranked speakers at the GDC that year, check out their talk below!
Other Conference Talks by the Research Team:
2024: “Sustaining Change: Community-Based Inclusivity Organizing in Games.” Media Industries, King’s College, London, United Kingdom, 16-19 April.
2023: “‘I probably wouldn't be in games if it wasn't for Pixelles’: The Impact of Inclusivity Organizing in Games.” Console-ing Passions Conference, Calgary, Canada, 22-24 June.
2023: “Communication, Care and Consent: Assessing and Visualizing the Impact of Inclusion in Games Organizing.” ICA GSD Preconference: Games and the (Playful) Future of Communication, Toronto, Canada, 25 May.
Other relevant conference talks by Dr. Alison Harvey
2024: “Making an Impact: Challenges and Opportunities for Sustaining a Feminist Community”, HCI Seminar Series, Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University, September 6.
2023: “Good Intentions: The Power and Challenges of Community-Engaged Games Research”, ETHOS Lab, IT University of Copenhagen, September 8.
Published in Feminist Media Studies in 2025, this article by Alison Harvey, Stephanie Fisher, and Erika Chung outlines the Pixelles community practices of intersectional feminist activism in games and argues for the importance of bringing non-digital practices in conversation with networked feminist activism. Access the article here. Pre-proof draft PDF available upon request.
This book chapter is a part of "Subversive Gaming", a forthcoming edited volume on the topic of subversion in games and gaming culture edited by Aparajita Bhandari & Sara Bimo, published as part of the Games in Context Series at Palgrave. Pre-proof draft PDF available upon request.
This event brought together Pixelles community members and the Visualizing Impact research team members to collaboratively develop a “visualization game” to creatively communicates the highly personal and deeply cultural reverberations of the labour of volunteer-run inclusivity organizations. The event was held at the Grande Bibliothèque in Montréal, Canada on April 12th and 13th in 2025. The workshop was facilitated by the Soft Chaos team alongside Alison Harvey, Stephanie Fisher, and Hana Holubec and was attended by 17 Pixelles community members.
Pixelles Catbus Game
Soft Chaos has created a game showcasing the research and work of the Pixelles community!
Partners and sponsors
Visualizing Impacts was supported by the Digital Justice Research cluster at York University, Mitacs, the Glendon College of Community Engagement Research Grant, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.