Fully-funded PhD - Game Design for Post Climate Futures: A Practitioner-led Approach

Games have a massive global reach among diverse populations. The transformative potential of the game industry is therefore huge, but research is needed if this potential is to be realised. The idea that games address the challenge of climate change has been established through the study of ‘ecogames’. However, optimism about the potential of ecogames is undercut by research into the negative material impact of game development, raising the question: how can we make and play games sustainably?

This PhD opportunity is part of a Team Project that addresses this question through interdisciplinary research across art and design, English studies, philosophy and cultural sociology. It is one of three PhD projects that will investigate the ecosystem of game design, game artefacts, and game consumption. This particular PhD proposes game-making as a research practice. It will be undertaken by a practitioner in game design, who will explore games as a transformative mode of art and investigate and test their affordances in radically reimagining climate futures. The student will gain supervisory expertise from within the games industry, and focus on the nonhuman processes at work in game design, specifically AI. 

Project aims and objectives

The project aims to explore game-making as aresearch practice that can address the issue of sustainable play. The project will investigate how game-making can be leveraged as a transformative mode of art and seek to identify what the affordances of games are in radically reimagining climate futures. In relation to games’ transformative effects, the project will investigate the role of nonhuman processes in game design, specifically AI.

The project will be met through four key objectives:

• Conducting a review of ‘ecogames’ with a practitioner focus on how critical discourse in material game studies and community-created resources such as the Sustainable Game Design Playbook, alongside algorithmic critical theory, can critically and practically inform new approaches to design.
• Testing questions derived from this review using creative praxis and design thinking research methodologies.
• Creating three significant works or prototypes suitable for playtesting. The creative portion of the thesis may be presented as a series of playable prototypes or as a final summative work that is subsequently evaluated following a final test event.
• Evaluating algorithm narrative features through iterative design and playtesting, considering their effect in relation to their ecological cost.