>> Hero, Not Case File: Community-Authored Game Design at Homeboy Game Studio 

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Abstract: The power to author precedes and shapes who and what ultimately gets represented. Court records, probation reports, and program evaluations assign young adults navigating gang involvement and reentry a durable, external identity (in Becker's (1963) terms, the master status of "criminal"), one largely immune to revision by the person living inside it. The same asymmetry operates one register up, at the scale of culture rather than case file. Open-world crime games such as Saints Row (Volition, 2006), True Crime: Streets of LA (Luxoflux, 2003), and the infamous Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA, Rockstar North, 2004) claim gang-affected neighborhoods and their residents as content yet are overwhelmingly authored in studios with no one from those neighborhoods in them. The result is spectacle — game systems and narratives that stylize and exoticize street life for players who will never live it, told by everyone except the people who do.

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In this presentation, we report on an ongoing project called Homeboy Game Studio, a partnership between our Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Center at UCI and Homeboy Art Academy, the arts wing of Homeboy Industries, the largest gang-intervention and reentry organization in the world. Homeboy Art Academy engages gang- and institution-impacted young adults (ages 19-26) in culturally competent, asset-based arts education to inspire transformation and reclaim self-agency by centering their lived experiences and cultural knowledge (Homeboy Industries, n.d.). Homeboy Game Studio is a weekly studio class offered within the Art Academy to young adults referred to us by the Los Angeles Police Department, juvenile detention centers, local school systems, and other community-based organizations. Since November 2025, students in our studio class (roughly 15-35 per class) hold full creative direction over all aspects (art style, world design, narrative beats, mechanics and mission) of a GTA-style open-world game set in their Los Angeles neighborhoods and streets (Boyle Heights/East LA, South Central, and Long Beach/Compton) with a Hero's Journey (Campbell, 1949/2008) narrative arc: “the life” of the streets of LA as ordinary world, Homeboy as threshold into the special world of hope and healing through radical kinship (Boyle, 2017), and the final return home to neighborhoods as hero rather than case file. 5-8 week design sprints are the studio's real curriculum, with generative AI (Anthropic, 2026; OpenAI, 2026; Kuaishou, 2026) currently used for concept art and asset development and a team of UCI game design majors soon serving as developers, thereby placing technical tools and skills in the service of community vision rather than the other way around. 

Here, we detail both process and dev product, highlighting how mapping character paths from "the life" on LA streets through the ups and downs of transformation into one’s true self is itself a kind of rehearsal of possible selves in actual worlds (Bruner, 1986; Gee, 2003), one tracing the same narrative arc that predicts desistance from crime (Maruna, 2007). Our students do not just write about redemption; they build the mechanics of it, mission by mission and narrative beat by beat. In so doing, we hope to shift community-led critical game design from critique of systems of power from the outside to something more akin to Boal's (1974/2000) rehearsal for reality: practice, undertaken collectively, for a self not yet fully lived. That collapse — between critique and rehearsal, between authorship and identity work — is, more than a final game product, what we hope this studio leaves behind.

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Bio - Constance Steinkuehler: Constance is a Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine where she researches cognition and social interaction in the context of multiplayer videogames. She is the Co-Director of the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Center at UCI where she teaches courses on games and society, games as social platforms, the sociology of games (in Donovan prison), research methods, and visual design. Current projects include Homeboy Art Academy game design studio, which engages gang-impacted young adults in Los Angeles the practice of critically conscious games design; research on a game-based program in San Quentin prison to foster safety, inclusion, and equanimity; development and production of an inmate-designed tabletop game entitled The Board that explores the parole process from the lived experiences of the incarcerated, and an upcoming 71-chapter and broadly expansive Oxford Handbook of Games & Learning.

 

Constance formerly served as Senior Policy Analyst under the Obama administration in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, advising on videogames and digital media. She is the founder of the Federal Games Guild, a working group across federal agencies using games and simulations as tools for thought, and the Higher Education Video Games Alliance, an academic non-for-profit organization of game-related programs in higher education. Her research has been funded by the Anti-Defamation League, the Samueli Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Universities of Cambridge, Wisconsin-Madison, and California-Irvine.  She has published over one hundred articles and book chapters including six conference proceedings, four special journal issues, and two books. She has worked closely with the National Research Council and National Academy of Education on special reports relate to videogames, and her work has been featured in Science, Wired, USA Today, New York Times, LA Times, ABC, CBS, CNN NPR, BBC and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

 

Constance has a PhD in Literacy Studies, an MS in Educational Psychology, and three Bachelor’s Degrees in Mathematics, English, and Religious Studies. Her dissertation was a cognitive ethnography of the MMOs Lineage I and II where she ran a large siege guild. Her husband Dr. Kurt Squire is Co-Director of the GLS center at UCI. They live with their two adolescent gamers in Southern California where they enjoy surfing, hiking, camping, travel, and all manner of headset-wearing, dps-flinging, computer-screened mayhem. 

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Bio - Kurt Squire: Kurt Squire is a professor of informatics and co-director of the Games + Learning + Society Center at UC, Irvine; he earned his PhD in 2004 from Indiana University. Dr Squire’s research is in understanding technology and society from a socio-cultural perspective. Most of his career has been exploring games for learning, including books on theories and approaches to game-based learning (Video Games and Learning, Teachers College Press), and the design of games for impact (Making Games for Impact, MIT Press). Squire has authored over 100 scholarly works around technology, learning, and games. Squire began his career as a blogger, having co-founded joystick101.org and then later writing with Henry Jenkins as a columnist for Computer Games magazine.

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For about a decade, Squire ran a game development group at GLS which developed 17 game projects and helped spin out Filament Games. In these game projects, he has developed games in collaboration with world renown scientists based on their work, including ecologist Stephen Carpenter, neuroscientist Richard Davidson, and stem cell scientist James Thomsen. His final game,  At Play at the Cosmos, published by Norton, was developed with astronomer Adam Frank and was used in college astronomy courses around the world. Squire is a former elementary and Montessori teacher, as well as games journalist. Squire currently teaches courses in UCI’s Game Design and Interactive Media Program and is working on technologies for wellness.

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More recently, Squire is interested in the interplay between social context and game design, working with youth at the Homeboy Art Academy in Los Angeles designing technologies, including games, responsive to their lived experiences in urban LA.

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