Carolin Becklas

Kontakt

Carolin Becklas

Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg
Promotionsprogramm "Gestalten der Zukunft"
Ammerländer Heerstraße 114-118
26129 Oldenburg

Carolin Becklas

Promotionsprojekt

Playing Bees, Trees, and Degrees. Climate Change Imaginaries in Digital Games (working title)

Abstract

Extreme heat, hurricanes, floods, droughts – extreme weather events are part of our lives, either as personally experienced phenomena or through their media coverage. However, climate, defined as the average weather over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years (IPCC, 2012), can neither be directly experienced nor seen by humans. Thus, climate change as an epistemic object must always be constructed and mediated.

As genuinely procedural artifacts, digital games can compress global warming and its risks into a few hours of gameplay. As early as 1990, when SimEarth was released, different simulation and visualization techniques were already employed to make (virtual) climate change playable and visible in digital games. Since then, various other games have taken up the topic, yet the analysis of the different simulation and visualization techniques is still a desideratum in game studies. This dissertation will be first to focus on these issues by asking: How is climate change simulated and visualized and how do these different in-game simulations, game mechanics, and images frame global warming? What mitigation and adaptation strategies are offered in the game that can possibly already be tested in the here and now? And what global eco-utopian or dystopian future is thus designed? The answers to these questions may not only reveal “ways of worldmaking” (Goodman, 1978) but may also explore the pitfalls and potentials of digital games to make one of the most pressing problems of our time both visible and playable.

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