About TAG
We are a multiple-award winning design studio with a portfolio situated at the confluence of interactive media and games, participatory and social justice culture, non-fiction storytelling, and multi-platform media practices.
With the launch of the multiple award-winning documentary activist game Darfur is Dying, Susana Ruiz, Huy Truong and Ashley York founded Take Action Games, a studio that creates linkages between game creation and the histories and practices of documentary filmmaking, protest art, participatory culture, and community organizing.
TAG has worked with numerous educational, mission-based, and social justice organizations, including the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, the Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children, the International Crisis Group, the Bay Area Video Coalition, the Independent Television Service, the Center for Asian American Media, the University of Southern California, and the University of California Santa Cruz.
Awards and Press
TAG’s work has garnered multiple accolades, including the prestigious Governors Award from the Academy of Arts & Sciences (the Emmy’s highest honor) in recognition of the mtvU Sudan campaign and Darfur is Dying in partnership with MTV, the Games For Change Audience Award, top prize of the Ashoka Changemakers and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s global competition “Why Games Matter: A Prescription for Improving Health and Health Care,” the Adobe MAX Award for Social Responsibility, the Cable Television Public Affairs Association’s Beacon Award in the New Media Category, a Banff World Television Award, a Gold Davey Award for Activism, and Honoree status in the Webby Award Activism Categoy. TAG’s work has been featured in academic essays and institutional reports as well as covered by the media, including NPR, the New York Times, TIME magazine, the Washington Post, CNN, ABC, Gamasutra, 1UP, Jezebel, and Mashable.
As an internationally acclaimed design collective, TAG continues to gain visibility both domestically and internationally, having presented its work to members of the U.S. Congress and the United Nations, as well as at South by Southwest, Sundance New Frontiers, the Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival, the Games for Change Festival, the Visible Evidence Conference, the Digital Media and Learning Conference, the Geneva Forum for Social Change, the LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, the Silverdocs International Documentary Festival, and the Margaret Mead Film Festival, among many others.
Philosophy and Methodology
“Our methods are constantly evolving as we grow as creative professionals and as human beings.”
As an experimental project itself, TAG emphasizes the inherently collective nature of both social change and cultural production. The studio builds transdiciplinary bridges between scholars, cultural field workers, media makers, and audiences/participants. TAG practices and embraces the belief that both social justice and transmedia production are collective efforts, that they are beyond the capacity of any one individual, and that it is this collaborative nature that imparts legitimacy. TAG strives to integrate principles of anti-oppression as used in social work, community organizing, and Theater of the Oppressed. These principles broadly challenge power imbalances between different groups of people in society. We believe that a game can make an argument about a social system’s structure that can help support or challenge it. A game guided by anti-oppressive principles can inspire players to act in ways to break down everyday dynamics of oppression and privilege and can be a powerful tool in struggles for social justice. Anti-oppression is a practice that requires reflectivity and holds strong ethical implications for those who practice it. It also presents its own difficulties for project timelines and can be resource-intensive. Not driven by capitalist goals, these projects typically do not monetize products, presenting practitioners with pragmatic roadblocks to funding and sustaining their work.
TAG is invested in the evolution of design that advances ethical storytelling and direct action mechanics. As such, some key questions that drive the TAG team are: What might we collectively dream about to bring about the change we want to see in the world? How can we create exciting linkages between gameplay and the histories and practices of documentary filmmaking and activist art? What role should our public media institutions play, even as they also struggle to readjust to the demands of transmedia pipelines and stagnant budgets? How do independent creators sustain their work in a complex and evolving ecosystem that holds as much creative possibility as it demands fluidly leveraging new funding, development, and distribution models. Can the impulses behind this work infiltrate the commercial game and media industries, themselves infused by unequal power dynamics, familiar and dominant perspectives, and highly inaccessible technologies and processes?
Take Action Games is differentiated from traditional design firms in its incremental, iterative approach as well as its significant emphasis on individuals, their discipline, competencies, and abilities to work together fluidly and creatively. This functions in perfect parallel to our game design methodology where we design in an iterative way, constantly soliciting feedback from focus groups, experts and playtesters. This loop of feedback and iteration helps shape the basis of the play(er)-centric methodology we often adopt. While our methods are constantly evolving as we grow (as creative professionals and as human beings), you may read more about our philosophy and methodology here.