Games Imagining the Future: Project Update
This week we made the first of a series of visits to St Peter’s RC High School in Belle Vue where we’re working with pupils on the Game in Lab/Libellud Foundation funded ‘Games Imagining the Future’ project. The project investigates the ways in which board games might be used to support young people’s understandings of the crisis; to evaluate games as a tool through which they can explore and share their ideas about the climate crisis; and to identify the ways in which games mobilise individual or collective action.
The project draws on co-production and participatory methodologies, which we explore and develop through processes of playing, making and hacking games. In this first session we met the participants and, after explaining the project and running through the ethics forms (a process that was, quite fairly, described as ‘the boring bit’) we handed things over the pupils who joined us in playing games of Catan, Tiny Towns, Forbidden Island, Rhino Hero – Super Battle, Sequoia, and Planet.
Photography by Kris Hasford.
We couldn’t have wished for a more exciting group of young people to work with. Over the coming weeks we’re hoping to hear from them about what these, and other games, have to say about the environment. How, we wonder, might these stories be changed (for better or worse)? And what kinds of stories might they prefer?
The next stage of the project, if the participants are up for it, will be to start dismantling these games (and the stories they tell) and reassembling them into new games and new stories about their imagined climate futures.
