About
While designing social and political futures through an ’eco’ lens is becoming more popular with movements like solarpunk in the media, there are fewer studies of their use and potential in critical games for climate change education, communication and engagement. In this workshop, we plan to bring together people with diverse backgrounds to collaborate and co-create mock-ups of play experiences following solarpunk and grimdark themes. Solarpunk and grimdark are two extreme ends of the spectrum of alternate
climate futures. While solarpunk presents a hopeful technological utopia, grimdark uses a more nihilistic setting. The workshop will take its participants through a series of exercises enabling a critical, rebellious and radical approach to their design processes and conclude with a critical reflection session. We believe that it will be a novel opportunity to explore and investigate the potential of playful and rebellious eco-envisioning or ’ecopunk’, artefacts in terms of their aesthetics, rhetoric and emotions as they get created side by side.
Schedule and Details
Preliminary Schedule (Timings are in EEST i.e. UTC +3 and GMT +3)
Phase 1 – Introduction
- 09.00 to 09:15. Arrival, introductions and sharing workshop agenda
- 09:15 to 09:45. Introduction to speculative design, solarpunk and grimdark
- 09:45 to 10:00. Group Formation and prompt distribution
- 10:00 to 10:15. Coffee Break
Phase 2 – Conceptualisation
- 10:15 to 11:00. Triadic Game Design Exercise [Harteveld. 2011]
- 11:00 to 11:45. Brainstorming – Design Box method [Altizer et al. 2017]
- 11:45 to 12:00. Sharing by groups (concept ideas, audiences and platforms)
- 12:00 to 13:00. Lunch
Phase 3 – Mockup Jam
- 13:00 to 14:00. Concept detailing using various tools
- 14:00 to 15:15. Mock-up creation
- 15:15 to 15:30. Coffee Break
Phase 4 – Critical Reflection and Discussion
- 15:30 to 16:15. Group-wise mock-up showcase
- 16:15 to 17:00. Critical reflection and discussion
Information and Games
What is Solarpunk?
Solarpunk is a literary, artistic and activist movement pursuing the dreams of a sustainable earth where humans and nature cohabit in a harmonious way. As the Solarpunk Manifesto [9] speculates a “post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic” world that prioritises “environmental sustainability, self-governance and social justice”.
Solarpunk Games
Solarpunk Futures: https://thefuture.wtf/
Currently in development Spilled
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240080/Spilled/
Currently in development Synergy
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1989070/Synergy/
Currently in development ReFresh
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2297650/ReFresh/
What is Grimdark?
Grimdark is a pervasively bleak, brutal and nihilistic setting, but the genre offers opportunities for an introspective kind of future envisioning. In “the grim dark future there is only war” [21];
Eco Themed Grimdark Games
Frostpunk
Death Stranding (Arguably Hopepunk but on the grim side)
Grimdark Games
References
9] A. Flynn. 2014. Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto. ttps://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/09/solarpunk-notes-toward-a-manifesto/2014/09/solarpunknotes-
toward-a-manifesto/
[1] Casper Harteveld. 2011. Triadic game design: balancing reality, meaning and play. Springer, London ; New York. OCLC: ocn502033376
[2] Roger Altizer, José P. Zagal, Erin Johnson, Bob Wong, Rebecca Anderson, Jeffery Botkin, and Erin Rothwell. 2017. Design Box Case Study: Facilitating Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Participatory Design in Game Development. In Extended Abstracts Publication of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY ’17 Extended Abstracts). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 405–412. https://doi.org/10.1145/3130859.3131333
Contact
Prasad Sandbhor at The University of York with iGGi
Sarah Masters at The University of York with iGGi
Registration
Link coming soon!