MGSN co-directors, Paul Wake and Chloé Germaine will be presenting at the Ecogames Symposium being held at Utrecht University on Tuesday October 12th and Wednesday October 13th.

With the climate crisis and its short-term repercussions becoming more and more ‘tangible,’ games are increasingly participating in the production, circulation, and questioning of environmental assumptions. Whether they are providing new spaces to practice alternative ways of living, or reproducing ecomodernist fantasies, games as well as player cultures are increasingly tuned in to the most pressing environmental concerns.

The symposium explores games in preparation for the publication of an edited volume on the topic of ‘ecogames’ to be published next year. The mission of the book is to demonstrate the variety of ways in which environmental questions, hopes, and concerns surface in games and player cultures, the different roles they can play in fomenting ecological awareness and activism, as well as the ethical, political, and aesthetic pitfalls that continue to challenge such examples of ludic engagement.

Paul and Chloé will be talking about the ‘Games Imagining the Future’ project and sharing the methodology of ‘hacking’ as one way to explore the theme of metagames and climate crisis. Their talk, ‘hacking at the Orchard’ theorises hacking as a way of researching (with) games, using the example of the popular Haba game, Orchard!

You can attend the symposium online using the following URLs:
Tuesday 12th October: https://live.starleaf.com/ODQxMDg6NTM3MzQx
Wednesday 13th October: https://live.starleaf.com/ODQxMDg6NDgzNDk4

If you want to attend the symposium in person (for the whole day or a specific time slot), please fill in the following Google form: https://forms.gle/6BYhN5Kvgfyi25CL6. (The organisers will get back to you briefly via email with more information.)