Group: Green Media Studies
Green Media Studies seeks to contribute to the understanding of the interconnectedness of media representations, media use, media impact, and media technologies in regards to addressing the climate crisis and imagining sustainable futures. For more info, see the project site here.
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.
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.
“Beavers don’t walk on roads”: Beaver-play for more-than-human cartographies
In this paper, Laura op de Beke, Linas Kristupas Gabrielaitis, Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk,Velvet Spors, and Ferran Altarriba Bertran introduce the notion of beaver-play to understand play that challenges spatial conventions, transgresses boundaries, and redraws territories.
Week of the Game @ Utrecht University
Here is the full up to date programme overview for Utrecht University's Week of the Game 2024.
Dark seasonality in videogames
"Dark seasonality in videogames" is a chapter in the larger book Changing Seasonality: How Communities are Revising their Seasons, which explores the role of calendars, seasons, and the cultural reaffirmations (or choice not to) thereof.
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.
Climate Larps: Environmental Design in Nordic LARP
In an article published in the Journal of Analogue Game Studies Laura op de Beke discusses the role of LARP (Live Action Role Playing) games in understanding the climate crisis. Within the article she explores how the environment is considered and included within the Nordic LARP sphere.
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.