Games Imagining the Future: Project Update #2

As part of the ‘Games Imagining the Future’ project, we have made a series of visits throughout May and June to St Peter’s RC High School to play, make, and hack boardgames with the school’s fantastic pupils. During our visits to the school, we asked the students to hack Orchard, Forbidden Island, and Ecosystem and remake the games with new rules, mechanics, materials, and stories.

Through the creativity of the young participants, Orchard, a simple fruit-picking game, became a Gothic playground for two opposing cults. One cult wished to revive the great crow with fruit picked from the trees, while the other cult sought to see it remain dead. This hack emphasized the dark play implicit in the game, which suggests that only one creature (human or crow) is allowed the fruit: no sharing! Another iteration of the hack saw Orchard become a horrific financial game where inflation caused the price of fruit to rise so dramatically that neither the players nor the crow could ever afford them; only the banker, an independent player, could hope to win. One pupil commented wryly, ‘that’s capitalism!’

To hack Ecosystem, a card-drafting game where players must place cards in a grid to cultivate their own ecosystem, we asked the young people to think up a different ecosystem with new habitats, creatures, and relations. In the original game, the objective is to score points by positioning certain cards next to one other; for example, bees will score points when adjacent to meadows. In one hack, participants created a fantasy ecosystem with dragons, unicorns, castles, chocolate rivers, candy trees, four-eyed fish, and peppermint caterpillars. In this version, fairies score points adjacent to their homes in the candy trees, witches need unicorn hairs for their brews, so they score points adjacent to unicorns, and dragons are hungry, scoring points adjacent to their prey: fairies. Another group created a hellish incarnation of an ecosystem, complete with hellsnails, a Cerberus, and, of course … Godzilla chickens!

Although not all the hacked games were entirely playable, from the chaos of hacking, the young people could imagine worlds and tell new climate stories by dismantling and then reassembling these boardgames. Hacking Orchard , for example, allowed them to talk about the role of capitalism in fuelling ecological and humanitarian crises and told the story of conflicting ideologies and how creatures, humans included, can be caught in the crossfire. Hacking Ecosystem highlighted that no matter who you are, a mighty Godzilla chicken or a humble peppermint caterpillar, you are entirely reliant upon your relations with others in your ecosystem.

Our project sessions with young people at St Peter’s are now finished, but we will be working with some older participants in the coming months before reflecting on our findings with our young co-researchers and workshop facilitators. Watch this space!