"Games for Future 2: Solarpunk" - a game design lecture at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle

Posted on Mon 13 May 2024 in misc

Logo of Games For Future v2

On the 9th of April 2024 I was invited to give a Solarpunk Game Design lecture within the "Games for Future v2: Solarpunk" course for Multimedia | VR-Design (B.A.) & Multimedia Design (M.A.) students of the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle in Germany.

You can find the recording of my lecture on Vimeo (sadly, without the Q&A with the students).

Please feel free to check out the project's wiki as well as its pad and zine!

I mostly focused on defining Solarpunk and sustainable futures and analyzing how to present them using emergent gameplay and emergent narratives, allowing players to intuitively and implicitly understand a lot of the issues which could be hard to communicate explicitly. Some of my examples feature the subtle mechanical encouragement to interact with the community in I Was A Teenage Exocolonist and geopolitcally problematic gameplay balancing of Daybreak.

Huge thanks to professor Jonas Hansen for inviting me and organizing such a wonderful course!