Climate Games? Playful Practices to Explore Game Design and Consumption

Dr Chloé Germaine and Professor Paul Wake

This session explores game making and play practices as aesthetic interventions in addressing the challenges of global heating. We focus on hacking and jamming, which are two modes of game creation and critical play we have developed as such interventions. Our work aims at unravelling commonplace assumptions about what games are, especially the mechanistic, systems-thinking that characterises game studies. Game systems are stories. Hacking and jamming games can therefore offer alternative stories to the extractive and mechanistic understanding of nature and human labour that underwrites the climate and ecological crises.