Stefan Werning

This keynote aims to show how critical metagaming practices (Boluk and LeMieux 2018) – i.e. repurposing and ‘recycling’ existing games as material – already tentatively enrich climate communication, specifically the formation of sustainable future imaginaries (Milkoreit 2017), and discusses how these processes could be institutionally supported to increase their societal impact, taking in-game nature photography and game modding as examples.

Despite the undeniable ambiguities imposed by the carbon footprint of – both analogue and digital – gaming (Abraham 2022), the medium’s potential benefits for understanding and tackling the climate crisis are increasingly being acknowledged by academics (Holzbaur 2001; Chang 2013; Bianchi 2019). However, even though games are allegedly “unfinished media” invite ecological imagination (Bendor 2018, 146), ‘ecogames’ as well as popular games with ecological motifs (e.g. Frostpunk or Spirit Island) or ecology-oriented expansions (e.g. The Sims: Eco Lifestyles) are usually played as ‘products’, which easily induces simulation resignation (Bogost 2008) and limits (co-)creative engagement, i.e. the capacity of these games to address the current “crisis of […] the imagination” (Ghosh 2016, 9).

The first part of the keynote examines how players are remediating nature photography, an epistemically as well as materially significant eco-practice (Cronin 2011; Drake 2014), in games like Red Dead Redemption 2 or Death Stranding[1], but also acknowledges the creative and institutional constraints that still limit its potential as a replicable heuristic for climate education.

The second part shifts the focus towards the modification of analogue and digital games to explore ecological motifs, an approach tentatively called ecomodding (Bohunicky 2017; Werning 2021), e.g. in terms of how it facilitates the acquisition and active performance of environmental literacy/ecoliteracy (McBride et al. 2013). It conceptualizes these modifications as part of an ongoing eco-critical discourse between players and developers, and outlines how specifically modifying popular analogue games as boundary objects can harness schools but also families as small-scale “sustainability communit[ies] of practice” (Benn, Edwards, and Angus-Leppan 2013).

Roundtable with summit speakers.