Carolin Becklas
Carolin Becklas
Doctoral project
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 visualisation 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 visualisation 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.
Short biography
since 10/2020
Scholarship holder in the MWK doctoral programme 'Shaping the Future. Transformation of the Present through Scenarios of Digitalisation' at the University of Oldenburg
10/2014 - 03/2019
International Master's programme in European History at the University College Dublin and the Humboldt University of Berlin
10/2010 - 09/2014
Bachelor's degree programme in American Studies and German Literature at the Humboldt University of Berlin
Teaching
Summer semester 2021: Topics of sustainability in digital games. Media research project of the Master's programme in Media Management at the Jade University of Applied Sciences Wilhelmshaven.
Other scientific activities
05/2019 - 09/2020
Research assistant at the Library for Research on the History of Education (BBF | DIPF) as part of the BMBF-funded joint project "Bildungs-Mythen - eine Diktatur und ihr Nachleben. Images(worlds) of practices and effects in education, upbringing and schools in the GDR"
10/2017 - 12/2018
Student assistant in the Interdisciplinary Laboratory Image-Knowledge-Design at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
10/2013 - 11/2016
Student assistant in the German/Scandinavian Studies branch library at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Lectures
06/2023
"Sinking Strangers no More? Playing Climate Refugees in Digital Games." DIGRA International Conference, 19 June 2023, Seville
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, Munich.
06/2022
"Bringing climate change into the game: Ecological Futures in Digital Games." 23 June 2022, Centre for Popular Culture and Music (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. (together with Prof Dr Sabine Baumann)
10/2021
Game Over for Climate Change? Simulating and Communicating Global Warming in Digital Games. Presentation at the conference "emma2021 - Media management and sustainability" of the European Media Management Association, Jönköping, Sweden, 27-29 October 2021
06/2020
Relax, fantasise, experiment: scenic play as a literature-related practice in German lessons in the GDR, exemplified by a teaching sequence; virtual workshop on the history of the practice of (subject) teaching. On the use of new source genres in historical educational research, DIPF|BBF, Ruhr University Bochum, 25-26 June 2020