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game design gaming

Exploring possible futures

Josh Tanenbaum

How to use narratives as a way of exploring possible futures – both desired futures and frightening futures.

Dr Josh Tanenbaum Assistant Professor at UC Irvine. He runs the transformative play lab, focussing on the experiences of traditionally marginalised. We also talk narrative games and ask what can we learn from steam punk?

Talking points

Designing for character transformation in games

How do you design a game that gives people an understanding of what the experience of being transgendered? Or the experience of living below the poverty line? Or the experience of being racially marginalised. Without stereotyping or appropriating. It combines participatory design, designing within these communities.

How to produce empathy?

Games that are successful in transformation are not that those tat providing with knowledge – what games do really well is provide experiences.

“Tomorrow as it used to be” provides a retrofuture lens, that has values for sustainability, it does a really good job of re-appropriating technology.

Steam Punk struggles a lot with the fact that the era that it draws its aesthetic inspiration from is really politically problematic -it was the colonialist time, women were treated terribly, ethic minorities were treated terribly – it was not an era of equality by any imagination. But the retrofuturistic lens provides a means to critique those aspects.

The closest analogue is the Arts and Crafts movement, and if you look at Ruskin you can see that it was a reaction against industrialisation, against mass production, against mass labour, it was a return to handicraft, a return to individual practice, the Arts and Crafts returned to the ornamentation of baroque and Gothic, and steam punk returns to the ornamentation of the Arts and crafts perion in a fantastic bit of historical cannibalism.

You see the same ethos in the Steam Punk making where you see people say I don’t want my mobile phone to look like everyone else’s I want it to reflect something about myself. People are rejecting at the cheap plastic things that result from industrialisation – these material outcomes of mass industrialisation are no longer satisfactory or acceptable.

Steam punk is characterised by a sense of optimism. This can be problematic if people whitewash and sugar-coat the past. There are post-colonial and indigenous steam punk researchers that doing very interesting work.

Unknowable what is the right thing to do.

Right now we are living with the consequences of choices just being made in the Victorian era, the outcome of 150 years of “isn’t this amazing we have all this power now!” but not realising the consequences of the power that industrialisation gave us. Its more nuanced than simply saying let’s learn from the mistakes of the past.

Every technological epoch is unable to look past its own assumptions.

Previously inconceivable resource consumption.

Modernism believed that there was a knowable truth in the universe that if you designed things according to the principles of modernism, that you would produce something that was empirically and objectively good, and good for all people. But in the process it spackled over and covered over a bunch of historical beauty – it tried to reshape into the vision that it had, of this attainable perfection. And then the post-modern realisation that we were only designing one vision of perfection, and that this vision didn’t serve the majority of humans in the world. We’re still grappling with that.

We have an infinite diversity on this planet with an infinite set of optimum needs, how do we reconcile that with a system that’s been designed to produce material goods and industry… in a way that tends to be very homogenising.

Games allow consequence free exploration of alternatives.

(How can games go beyond resource use?) What explores spatial impacts? Minecraft. Experiments where resource areas are limited, quickly result in decimation of the game landscape. But in games there’s very little promotion of living harmoniously, as soon as you take away the resource frontier, most game environments fail.

There has been a successful pacifist WoW player – but he was so unusual he made the news.

Journey is based on helpful interactions, cooperation and a sense of connectedness to other people and the world around you.

We have sunk ourselves into spatially biased communication. And sustainability asks us to move more to the temproal bias (see Harold Innes – bias of communication).

Games to experience loss of agency – it’s easy to judge someone of not properly exercising agency when you have lots of it.

Situations where you are given only bad choices

(Success in last couple of years?) Captain Chronomek

(Activist?) More and more so. Activist is a title like “artist” in that you are one if you say so. Meaningfully express changes I want to see in the world.

(Motivation?) Doing more things I love. For a long time that was enough, but now we’ve got a kid on the way, that’s changed a lot of my motivation, it’s changed a lot of how I think about the future. Its very easy when presented with the realities of our current situation, our environment, to give in to despair, but the current situation is the result of people giving into the easy choice. So giving in to despair as the easy choice is not the right choice. If I can do work that in some way participates in the conversation that leaves a little bit more of the world for my daughter, then I guess its worth it.

(Challenges?) Articulate work in a way that attracts funding.

(Miracle? or smallest thing that would make the biggest impact?) Tell a story that could actually stir people to reexamine deeply held partisan biases, tell a story that would really stop and question.

(Advice for listeners?) Take ownership of what you what want to do in the world – its not enough to wait for other people to do it for you. You have to determine what your goals and values are, and work your ass off to acheive them. If enough of us do that, we’ll find the world that we want.

This Sustainable Lens is from a series of conversations at University California Irvine. Sam’s visit was supported by the Newkirk Center for Science and Society, and coincided with Limits 2015.

Categories
education game design gaming

Talking about a game for talking about sustainability

Patrik Larsson

  I thought the solution should be something to inspire the generation that are coming after us.

Patrik Larrson is creator of GaSuCo “Gaming in Sustainability through Communication”. We talk about his motivations and the role of discussion in sustainability. This conversation was recorded after we talked after we played the game with Elina Eriksson and Daniel Pargman‘s Masters course in Sustainable Media Technology at KTH in Stockholm (flickr set).

Talking points

The game focuses on interaction between players

Not only do you get to talk about the things you feel are important, you also get to listen to other people’s thoughts on the same subject

I was challenged (in my Masters) to think what is the next big thing? I thought the solution shouldn’t be to invent something for the future, I thought the solution should be something to inspire the generation that are coming after us.

Interaction and discussion is a much better way of sharing knowledge than just looking something up.

The questions are designed for discussion…both viewpoints are correct..there are no right or wrong answers.

The questions are designed to be tough and hard and difficult, but however you approach a subject it is still correct.

Your lack of knowledge might be someone else’s chance to talk about a subject, what they feel is important about that subject…then next time you can relate to what that other student said

You bring other peoples’ knowledge with you – to create your own base of knowledge.

The questions are written in a way that they are supposed to be challenging.  It’s no fun if you always know what the answer is.

If you always know the answer, you don’t progress, you don’t get challenged in your way of thinking.

When discussing things with no actual answers you get all different kinds of viewpoints.

You don’t have to agree, you just have to talk about it.  In the process of talking you get to hear so many different kinds of unexpected  (and expected) aspects of subjects that are so important but too easily forgotten

There’s a discussion question “Is it OK to buy second hand Christmas gifts?” and this can be followed in the discussion with “…and do you?”.  There is a difference between acting and saying, we also highlight that,. it is easy to have a viewpoint of the correct thing, but when you discuss it these differences become clear.

You’re entitled to your opinion, but you have to motivate your answer.  You have to be able to stand up for what you think.  As long as you can do that, you’re entitled to whatever opinion you want.  I’m not here to change anybody to think what I think, I just want to engage people in talking about it.

I cannot force someone to think what I think.  But this is a way of helping them discuss it, and understanding themselves that we cannot continue business as usual.

Wealth is not only based on economic growth

The main thing is that people play the game and understand that there are different ways of looking at how we are living, and talk about it.

People have this feeling that someone, somewhere is going to make a change.    That itself has to change.

Motivation: understanding that we are all different but cannot continue what we’ve been doing, this is my way of contributing to that change.

Activist: I’m just a regular guy trying to make education more fun.

Challenges: High school, and then try for a computer version without losing the core of interaction.