Hacking at the Orchard: A Methodology for Games Imagining the Future

MGSN co-directors, Paul Wake and Chloe Germaine have been busy setting up a research project for Asmodee/ Game in Lab. Play and the Environment: Games Imagining the Future is a project that works with young people to ‘hack’ contemporary board games in order to explore climate change futures. One of the aims of the project is to provide the board game industry with youth-led perspectives on how to better design games that interrogate anthropogenic climate change.

Our game-hacking methodology has been presented at the Ecogames symposium at the University of Utrecht in October 2021 and will be published in the open access anthology Ecogames edited by Prof. dr. Joost Raessens, Laura op de Beke MA, Prof. dr. Gerald Farca, Dr. Stefan Werning (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). You can see a video of that paper here, including questions from the audience.

As our project is in its planning phase, we welcome feedback on our research design. You can get in touch with us on email through our staff page. We’re happy to provide more information on the project if you’re interested in taking part. Recruitment for participants will begin in November.