Carolin Becklas
Kontakt
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.
Kurzbiografie
seit 10/2020
Stipendiatin im MWK-Promotionsprogramm ‚Gestalten der Zukunft. Transformation der Gegenwart durch Szenarien der Digitalisierung‘ an der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg
10/2014 – 03/2019
Internationales Masterstudium der European History am University College Dublin und der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
10/2010 – 09/2014
Bachelorstudium der Amerikanistik und Deutschen Literatur an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Lehre
Sommersemester 2021: Themen der Nachhaltigkeit in digitalen Spielen. Projekt Medienforschung des Masterstudiengangs Medien Management an der Jade Hochschule Wilhelmshaven.
Weitere wissenschaftliche Tätigkeiten
05/2019 – 09/2020
Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin in der Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung (BBF | DIPF) im Rahmen des BMBF-geförderten Verbundprojekts „Bildungs-Mythen – eine Diktatur und ihr Nachleben. Bilder(welten) über Praktiken und Wirkungen in Bildung, Erziehung und Schule der DDR“
10/2017 – 12/2018
Studentische Hilfskraft im Interdisziplinären Labor Bild-Wissen-Gestaltung der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
10/2013 – 11/2016
Studentische Hilfskraft in der Zweigbibliothek Germanistik/Skandinavistik der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Vorträge
06/2023
„Sinking Strangers no More? Playing Climate Refugees in Digital Games.“ DIGRA International Conference, 19. Juni 2023, Sevilla
11/2022
„You and the climate are done too now: Representations of Climate Change in Early Video Games.“ Playing the Field: Video Game Ecologies and American Studies, 18. Nov. 2022, München.
06/2022
„Den Klimawandel ins Spiel bringen: Ökologische Zukunftsentwürfe in digitalen Spielen.“ 23. Juni 2022, Zentrum für populäre Kultur und Musik (ZPKM), Freiburg.
04/2022
„Playing Climate Change: Cultural Representations of Climate Change in Digital Games.“ 12. Apr. 2022, Oxford University
11/2021
„Teaching Sustainable Decision Making Through Online Video Games.“ DSI Annual Conference Decision Sciences Institute, 19. Nov. 2021, Dublin. (gemeinsam mit Prof. Dr. Sabine Baumann)
10/2021
Game Over for Climate Change? Simulating and Communicating Global Warming in Digital Games. Vortrag auf der Konferenz "emma2021 – Media management and sustainability" der European Media Management Association, Jönköping, Schweden, 27.-29.10.2021
06/2020
Entkrampfen, fantasieren, experimentieren: das szenische Spiel als literaturbezogene Praktik im Deutschunterricht der DDR exemplarisch erläutert an einer Unterrichtssequenz; virtueller Workshop zur Geschichte der Praxis des (Fach-)Unterrichts. Zur Nutzung neuer Quellengattungen in der historischen Bildungsforschung, DIPF|BBF, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 25.-26.06.2020