The workshop is part of the ongoing USO project Crisis to Resilience (2024-2027), which develops and evaluates techniques based on creative practices like game-making and community gardening/biophilia to foster resilience counter climate anxiety as well as other negative climate emotions. The workflow used in this workshop is built on top of free and accessible tools and can be relatively easily replicated in class but also in informal learning context or ‘just for fun’.
On Friday, April 12, the Utrecht Gamelab in collaboration with Dr. Federico Andreotti and the WUR Games Hub organized a workshop at Utrecht University to explore how ‘franchise hacking’, specifically modifying the 30-year-old and widely popular card game franchise Magic: The Gathering (MTG), can be used to reflect upon and communicate research on agriculture and food systems conducted at Wageningen University.
The workshop is part of a course in which students interview WUR researchers about their ongoing projects, translate these insights into a board or card game prototype and playtest the prototypes with stakeholders from various societal sectors. The thematic scope of topics, ranging from agroforestry and pest control to e.g. the role of informal food systems in cities, led to a variety of different games.
MTG thereby serves as a tool to teach think through game design (see e.g. this clip by Distraction Makers on how MTG teaches players to think like a “game designer) but also to consider how popular games, played by millions of players world-wide, can provide a procedural ‘language’ to facilitate creative and constructive climate communication. The goal is not to co-design the game in order to ‘persuade’ players but to enable participants to express their own ideas through the game as a shared ‘vocabulary’. That also involves creating different, possibly conflicting versions of multifaceted concepts like seasonality or biodiversity, e.g. in the form of one card or a series of interrelated cards, that reflect different professional and/or personal viewpoints on the subject matter.
While we are still working on a teaching script, which will be shared along with the necessary materials soon via the project website above, you can contact s.werning@uu.nl if you are interested in utilizing this yourself. Apart from Magic: The Gathering, we are currently working on adapting the workflow to different game franchises like UNO or Fantasy Realms. More details to follow.
