From Archives to Currents:
Designing Games That Carry the Weight of Memory

February 24, 2026 at 12:00 PM
Verna and Peter Dauterive Hall (VPD), Room 203
Join us in person or on Zoom

A public lecture by Ana Hunter (USC)
2025 Charles E. Scheidt Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow

Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research

Cosponsored by the Interactive Media and Games Division, USC School of Cinematic Arts

(Join us in person or online on Zoom)

This past summer, in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Ana Hunter (undergraduate student majoring in Game Development and Interactive Design, USC) began crafting a game based on her research on intergenerational trauma and the consequences for the Black and Jewish communities of perpetrators going unpunished in the Jim Crow South and the Holocaust.

Inspired by didactic and emotionally resonant games like Papers Please, Not for Broadcast, and South of Midnight, Hunter aimed to design an interactive experience where users could experience for themselves the insights and discoveries that emerge from historical research and, in her project, the analysis of testimonies, legal documents, and family interviews.

In this talk, she traces her creative process so far and explores the choices, challenges, and breakthroughs in designing a game that invites emotional investment, that translates research findings into interactive form, and that transforms the act of preserving memory into a narrative journey. She discusses how games can communicate histories of trauma, silence, resistance, and survival.

REGISTER HERE

Lunch will be served.

Ana Hunter is a poet and game designer from from Memphis, Tennessee, studying Game Development and Interactive Design with a minor in Video Game Programming at the University of Southern California. She relishes in a foreign character’s perspective to establish empathy and a connection – a practice that extends from her poetry into her game design work. She was named Memphis’ First Youth Poet Laureate and Tennessee Youth Poet Laureate Runner-Up. For Ana, creating impactful personas and captivating narratives means shaping player experiences that resonate beyond the screen, crafting stories that confront, comfort, and invite players to grow through what makes us most human. Read more about her here.

Lecture images: Top, an image of the game Ana is creating in one of its iterations. Bottom, a photograph of Mildred Woodson (left) and relative (right). 

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