Summer School: Planetary Futures

Games interested contributing to a more sustainable future have, historically, tended to be very technocratic, or very nice. They either approach sustainability issues as management or technology problems, or as fun little puzzles to solve. Sustainability is about doing good things for the world, so the games should be harmless and good and educational, right? In reality, however, the fight for the future is intensely political, dramatic, often absurd and dark. And actually, this dramatic reality is perfect for game development. After all, the best games are also dramatic and complex and challenging. So how do we make intensely political games that give fighting for a better future a sense of dark joy?

In this workshop, we will discuss the principles of making challenging, political games. We will go on to play the game All Will Rise, a ‘gloriously unearthly anticapitalist deckbuilder’ (RockPaperShotgun) about taking a billionaire to court for murdering a sacred river.

Preparation for Participants (optional): Play All Will Rise Demo (Speculative Agency 2026), Free Demo on Steam

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3165340/All_Will_Rise

Joost Vervoort is Associate Professor of Transformative Imagination at Utrecht University, member of the EU Horizon project STRATEGIES, and Impact Director for All Will Rise. Joost has a long background in sustainability, systems complexity and future scenarios, but has in the last 10 years focused on what futures are being imagined in culture and media, with a special focus on video games. His particular interest is in how creative sectors can contribute to societal transformations.

Modern science and modern culture have been excellent in shaping objects as isolated entities, subjects as autonomous agents, products as identifiable goods, rules as unambiguous principles and knowledge as residing in minds. This is helpful for mobilising capitalist production but not for living with planetary futures. In recent decades scholars of the social sciences and humanities have proposed the notion of the planetary to encourage a shift in modern culture to think differently, shape different beings, ontologies, care and knowledges. A key contemporary challenge is to imagine futures as planetary and design futures that are planetary. Drawing on anthropological science and technology studies, as well as on feminist and decolonial studies the keynote first proposes a relational and materialist approach to the planetary as extended relations through one shared world. Secondly, it turns to planetary knowledge. Knowledge is particularly challenging and interesting to consider as planetary, because it interferes with the separation of matter and mind, which is foundational to modern culture. Thirdly, the keynote draws on my team ethnographic research, revealing what it means to infrastructure planetary knowledge. It ends on a hopeful note.

Estrid Sørensen is Professor for the Anthropology of Knowledge at the Ruhr University Bochum. She has done extensive ethnographic research within the field of digital science and technology studies, including on educational technologies, cultures of media harm, epistemologies of digital data and on scientific data infrastructures, particularly on data centres. Her recent speculative ethnography ”Staying with the Planet” engages critically with scientific data infrastructures and their planetary relations.

Poster presentation Group A (Aquarium) Group B (Room 204) in 20-minute slot (5 minutes presentation + 15 minutes discussion) per participant.

Please bring a printed poster according to our guidelines.

Planetary futures demand futural imaginaries which emerge through (among others) games of the future. But games of the future are not necessarily games about the future. In fact, most of the latter are driven by and structured around very much present (and past) motivations and mindsets, even if their surfaces seem to offer fantastic visions of the times and places to come. Consquently, in my talk, I would like to think through what it would/could mean to design (and play) games of the future and offer some examples of what such games can actually look like.

Preparation for Participants (optional): Read: Philip Steinberg & Kimberley Peters “Wet ontologies, fluid spaces: giving depth to volume through oceanic thinking” 
Play: In Other Waters on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/890720/In_Other_Waters/ 

Paweł Frelik is Associate Professor of Screen Cultures and the Co-Leader of Speculative Texts and Media Research Group at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. His teaching and research interests include cultures of speculation, science fiction, video games, and fantastic audiovisualities.

Join this optional evening gathering to meet other participants and dive a bit deeper or hands-on into your projects, ideas or prototypes. This is an informal event in a relaxed space, open to what you want to make of it.

You can host a workshop or play session, exhibit your game or prototype, plan an activity or just hang out and catch up with others. Feel free to share your ideas and plans on discord.

Drawing on a long-term tradition of developing video games with environmental themes, Lukáš will introduce how Charles Games approaches their design. The talk will cover awareness games intended for global audiences, such as Beecarbonize (700,000+ players), as well as more context-focused games for various educational programs and schools.

In the practical part of the workshop, participants will apply this design approach by adapting the mechanics and narrative of one of our environmental board games for a different use context.

Preparation for Participants (optional): Play Becarbonize (Charles Games 2023), Free on Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2486750/Beecarbonize/

Lukáš Kolek is the co-founder and CEO of Charles Games, a Prague-based studio behind award-winning games such as Playing Kafka, Svoboda 1945: Liberation, We Grew Up in War, and Beecarbonize, played by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. He has been creating computer and board games for over 14 years, focusing on game design and production, and his PhD research underpins the studio’s evidence-based approach to games on serious topics with a positive social impact. Lukáš also teaches game design at Charles University and serves on the board of the Czech Game Developers’ Association.

Poster presentation Group C (Aquarium) Group D (Room 204) in 20-minute slot (5 minutes presentation + 15 minutes discussion) per participant.

Please bring a printed poster according to our guidelines.

A small public event to play, connect, and mingle. Cologne Game Lab opens its doors for a showcase featuring games, demos, and prototypes created by Summer School participants and CGL students. Visitors are invited to explore interactive projects, meet the creators, and exchange ideas in a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere, with affordable drinks

This closing keynote reflects on current developments in how games (mis)represent environmental threats, sustainable practices and climate futures, drawing on two years of comparative ecogame analysis within the STRATEGIES project.

First, it analyzes why the current abundance of climate- and/or nature-themed games is not always beneficial from an environmental communication perspective and how many games gradually reify these themes and their underlying framing by utilizing them akin to ‘media franchises’.

After briefly exploring the importance (and potential benefits) of franchise logic for ecogames design, the second part, based on Nicole Seymour’s notion of Bad Environmentalism (which not only calls for exploring ‘irreverent affects’ but also constantly experimenting with ecomedia aesthetics to prevent their rhetorics from becoming formulaic and to address a broad range of ecological identities), explores selected contemporary ecogame developments like ecohorror, the potential of live-service games or specific aesthetics like cottagecore and the ‘cozy apocalypse’, which have the potential to inspire this ongoing experimentation.

Finally, the keynote discusses how concepts like a design pattern language can provide a useful tool to map these developments, i.e. variations and connections between patterns over time, to keep ecogames design responsive and able to adapt to changing discursive environments and audience expectations.

Preparation for Participants (optional): STRATEGIES Report on Design Patterns
https://www.strategieshorizon.eu/reports/white-paper-design-pattern-research-and-its-applicability-to-ecogame-design

Stefan Werning is working as an Associate Professor for Digital Media and Game Studies at Utrecht University, where he founded the Utrecht Game Lab and co-coordinates the Green Media Studies Initiative. He previously worked as an Assistant Professor for Digital Media at the universities of Bayreuth and Bonn as well as at the Fraunhofer Institute Media Communications in St. Augustin. During his PhD trajectory, Stefan worked in the digital games industry, most notably at Codemasters (2005) and Nintendo of Europe (2007-2009). Since completing a DAAD-funded visiting scholarship at MIT (2006), he has been a fellow of the Convergence Culture Consortium. Stefan’s last monograph Making Games was published by The MIT Press in 2001, his last edited volume (together with Joost Raessens and Laura op de Beke) on Ecogames was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2024.

Two Dutch virtual reality projects, SpaceBuzz and Our Future on Earth, allow schoolchildren and adults, respectively, to experience what it is like to look back at Earth from an astronaut’s perspective. Participants experience the so-called overview effect, which is believed to promote climate awareness and encourage more sustainable behaviour. In his talk, Joost presents the design patterns that make these VR experiences effective and explores whether viewing Earth from space depoliticizes the complexity of the climate crisis.

Joost Raessens holds the Chair of Media Theory at the Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University, he coordinates the Horizon Europe project STRATEGIES: Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries (2024–2028), and is a member of the Supervisory Committee of CIIIC: the Creative Industries Immersive Impact Coalition (2026-2029). His research examines how games and extended reality (VR, AR, MR) can both raise climate awareness and encourage sustainable behavior, while also assessing the ecological footprint of these technologies in the context of the climate crisis. More broadly, he investigates how immersive experiences—such as games and XR for change—can contribute to advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

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