Paul Wake and Chloe Germaine will be sharing the results of their project, Games Imagining the Future, at this year’s Essen Spiel, the world’s largest board game fair and trade show.
Every year, Essen, in Germany, hosts world's largest public fair for board games, bringing together passionate game fans with national and international exhibitors. The fair this year includes a day of talks and discussions focussing on the issue of sustainability. Contributors will explore the impact of board gaming on the world, asking: How sustainable are games and how much ecological thinking goes into the themes of board games today?
Paul and Chloe are co-leads of the Horizon-UKRI funded STRATEGIES project, a Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries, which has work streams dedicated to the issue of sustainability in board game production and design. The development of STRATEGIES arose, in part, because of their previous work on the Game-in-Lab funded project, Games Imagining the Future: Play and the Environment. This project contends that the climate crisis is both a social problem and an imaginative challenge, especially for young people whose futures are most affected by it. Through participatory methods, the project sought to move beyond the consideration of board games as a tool for climate education and investigated them as a means for young people (aged 16–19) to explore and communicate their ideas about climate change through processes of playing, hacking, breaking, and remaking games. You can read about the methods developed in the project in the recent volume of essays, Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis, and the full report of the project results here.
In the talk at Essen Spiel, Paul and Chloe will share some thoughts about the results of the project and reveal how it led to the work on STRATEGIES before looking ahead to the ways in which this current research hopes to support the board game industry in its aims to support ecological thinking and a transition to a more sustainable and just society.
STRATEGIES is funded by the European Union under grant agreement No 101094373 and the UK Research and Innovation. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or UK Research and Innovation. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
