Ecogame Playtesting Series 2024/25

In September 2024, the Network for Environmental Humanities (NEH) and the Utrecht Game Lab are launching a new series of events playtesting and discussing ‘ecogames’: or games that engage with the environment and with the climate crisis.

Editorial Team
23-08-2024 // Events // Games and Sustainability

“Hacking Board Games” Workshop at RMeS 2024 Summer School

Concluding the RMeS Summer School 2024: Environmental Media, Laura op de Beke and Stefan Werning of the Utrecht Game Lab organised a workshop for RMA students to facilitate ecological thinking by redesigning (or: ‘hacking’) board games. 

dr. Stefan Werning, dr. Laura op de Beke
14-07-2024 // Events // Criticism and Analysis

Franchise Hacking – Magic: the Gathering

'Franchise hacking’ within Magic: The Gathering (MtG) means to creatively alter game elements to embed urgent real-world ecological narratives into the game’s design.

drs. Timo Fluitsma
19-04-2024 // Insights // Games and Sustainability, Games Beyond Entertainment, Social Games and Play
Seeds of Resistance

STRATEGIES: Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries

Learn everything you need to know about STRATEGIES , the recently started research project, spearheaded by Utrecht University.

Editorial Team
14-04-2024 // Insights // Games and Sustainability
ABZU

Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis

Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis brings together authors who explore the aspects of ecocritical engagement in and through games.

Editorial Team
22-01-2024 // Books // Criticism and Analysis, Games and Sustainability

Spationomy 2.0

The Spationomy 2.0 project was started in October of 2019, and concluded with a final conference held in November of 2022. The project was funded by the Erasmus+ program of the European Union.

Editorial Team
22-11-2022 // Events, Insights // Criticism and Analysis, Games Beyond Entertainment, Social Games and Play

Ecomodding: Understanding and Communicating the Climate Crisis by Co-Creating Commercial Video Games

This article explores how the climate crisis and specifically the underlying “crisis of the imagination” (Bendor 2018, 132) exacerbate the entrenchment of environmental communication, and how modifying commercial video games (ecomodding) can facilitate the use of games as effective communication infrastructures to address this issue. Environmental communication challenges are well-studied, but remain difficult to tackle in practice.

Editorial Team
20-10-2021 // Insights, Publications // Criticism and Analysis

Taking Playful Scholarship Seriously: Discursive Game Design as a Means of Tackling Intractable Controversies

The article at hand explores the concept of playful scholarship, focusing specifically on the use of playfulness in re-assessing the collaboration between academia and societal partners to tackle “intractable policy controversies” (Schön and Rein 1994, p. 23)—i.e., challenges in which opposing parties operate with conflicting frames (often without even noticing).

Editorial Team
14-09-2021 // Education, Insights, Publications // Criticism and Analysis, Games and Sustainability, Games Beyond Entertainment, Multi theme

Playable Personas: Using Games and Play to Expand the Repertoire of Learner Personas

This article explores how playing and co-creating games in higher education contexts contributes to expanding learner personas and facilitating a multimodal learning experience. Working from the interdisciplinary perspectives of media/games studies, pedagogy, and linguistic anthropology, Stefan Werning, Deborah Cole, and Andrea Maragliano conceptualize in-class learning as the making and playing of games, reporting on game experiments and playful practices targeted at learning key theoretical concepts in our disciplines.

Editorial Team
16-03-2021 // Insights // Criticism and Analysis, Games Beyond Entertainment

Making Games – The Politics and Poetics of Game Creation Tools

In Making Games, Stefan Werning considers the role of tools (primarily but not exclusively software), their design affordances, and the role they play as sociotechnical actors. He frames game-making as a (meta)game in itself and shows that tools, like games, have their own “procedural rhetoric” and should not always be conceived simply in terms of optimization and best practices.

Editorial Team
16-02-2021 // Books // Criticism and Analysis