The EPIC-WE project addresses several specific needs within the context of game-making, cultural participation, future opportunities for youth, and democratic empowered participation:
1. Game-making: The project recognizes the untapped potential of game-making as a practice within Cultural Heritage Institutions and Creative Industries to stimulate cultural participation and empower youth engagement. By exploring the cultural significance of games and their impact on societal values, EPIC-WE aims to navigate the dual nature of games as both potential disempowering and empowering cultures. Through research and innovation, the project seeks to equip the domains of culture and games with frameworks and resources necessary to understand and harness games and game-making as valuable components of cultural heritage and empowered participation.
2. Cultural participation: Cultural Heritage Institutions face challenges in engaging young people with cultural heritage and European values due to the lack of accessible and attractive participatory models. EPIC-WE proposes the concept of Cultural Game Jams as a novel approach to bridge this gap, inviting young people to take up game-making as a form of culture-making in turn becoming active co-creators of culture. By contributing with participatory cultural-creative models and methods, the project aims to create inclusive and empowering cultural ecosystems.
3. Future opportunities: With young people preparing to enter a competitive economic market seeking transferable creative, cultural and critical skills. By engaging youth in Cultural Hubs and Cultural Game Jams, EPIC-WE aims to provide young citizens with opportunities to gain cultural-creative imagination and competencies that tackle cultural and societal challenges with curiosity, creativity, agency and imagination – what we call Empowered Participation.
4. Democratic participation: European organizations often overlook youth as co-creators of their futures in cultural and societal domains, leading to disengagement and a lack of participatory models. EPIC-WE advocates for the integration of youth perspectives in quadruple helix innovation systems, where CHIs, CIs, HEIs, and youth collaborate to co-create cultural value and drive societal change. By embracing youth as equal collaborators, the project aims to foster a culture of democratic participation and empower young people to shape Europe's future.
To achieve this, the project explores the potential of cross-sector co-creative partnerships in culture, creative industries, research, and higher education to include youth 1) as empowered culture-makers through their participation in culture and their game jamming with cultural heritage, 2) as empowered co-creators of cultural innovation through their partnership with experts and professionals from culture, creative industries, research and higher education in Cultural Living Labs, 3) as empowered game-makers through their participation in Cultural Game Jams and their creation of games through and for culture.
More specifically, EPIC-WE targets the following four objectives:
ASSESS. Explore the potential of games through/for culture and game-making as culture-making to empower youth and contribute to the strengthening of European values and cultural participation.
INNOVATE. Develop and validate a framework for cultural game jams and cultural hubs in quadruple helix ecosystems.
TRANSFER. Produce accessible resources that enable organizations to replicate the quadruple helix cultural game-making ecosystem across Europe.
SCALE. Equip quadruple helix actors with knowledge, skills and policy instruments to exploit the potentials of cultural game-making with youth for the benefit of European society
