Games can be used as speculative design to allow players to consider alternate presents and plausible futures. Speculative design uses fiction without commercial constraints to prototype possible futures through design fictions. Critical games have primarily critiqued current events or games themselves. Persuasive games can influence players through procedural rhetoric and by appealing to logic, credibility, and emotions, but should avoid reductionism and promote minor behavioral changes. Games as speculative design should enable consideration of multiple plausible futures through both narrative and simulation, be developed iteratively in an interdisciplinary way, and remain free of commercial influence.
Games as Speculative Design: Allowing Players to Rehearse Alternative Presents and Plausible Futures
1. Games as Speculative Design:
Allowing Players to Consider Alternate
Presents and Plausible Futures
Paul Coulton, Dan Burnett, Adrian Gradinar
@ProfTriviality
5. Past
“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.
We march backwards into the future”
Marshall Mcluhan
6. Multiple Realities
Present
History, Reality,
and Fiction
Past
Future Gonzatto, R. F., van Amstel, F. M., Merkle,
L. E., & Hartmann, T. (2013). The ideology
of the future in design fictions. Digital
creativity, 24(1), 36-45.
8. Design Fiction
“deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend
disbelief about change... It means you’re thinking very
seriously about potential objects and services and try to
get people to concentrate on those – rather than entire
worlds or geopolitical strategies. It’s not a kind of fiction.
It’s a kind of design. It tells worlds rather than stories”
Bruce Sterling
10. are games diegetic?
mimesis and diegesis describe ways of
presenting a story. In mimesis, the story is
acted out. In diegesis, the story is narrated.
Mimesis is show. Diegesis is tell.
11. The Present is the Future Mundane
Present
Future
Domestication
Emerging
Technology
Far Speculative Futures
Design Fictions
Vapour Worlds
Past
Near Speculative Futures
Design Fictions
Vapourware
Alternate Presents
or Lost Futures
12. Critical Games
thus far the focus of the critical
games created has primarily
been either: critiques of current
events or practices; or critiques
of games themselves
15. Persuasive Technology
B.J Fogg
Captology - reduce a problem so
that it can be addressed through
the promotion of minor behavioural
change for easily understood and
uncontroversial goals.
20. Game
Game Designer Player
Rules
Interaction
Game Design as Rhetoric
Rhetoric of Design
the basic representational mode of
videogames is “procedurality”,
enacted through rule- based
representations and interactions
and, when used to reveal
processes or concepts of another
system, present the player with a
procedural rhetoric
Ian Bogost
21. Interactive System
Interaction Designer User
System
Logic
Interaction
Interactive Systems as Rhetoric
Rhetoric of Design
Coulton
“code is the only
language that is
executable” -
Alexander Galloway
26. Games as Speculative Design Should:
Enable a Plurality of Futures
Be Plausible
Embrace both Mimesis and Diegesis
Be developed iteratively and interdisciplinary
Not Resort to Reductionism
Be free from commercial constraints