This January, with the support of the Cabot Institute for the Environment Community Event Fund, Dr Lewis Alcott and Dr Richard Cole organized the “Can Games Teach? Games and the Environment” symposium. Bringing together industry experts and leading scholars alongside practical demonstration from games, the event examined the potentiality games have in stimulating environmental discussion amongst players of all ages, and enquired of the practical deployment of games across all realms of education, academia and pedagogy.
The symposium offered a number of talks from across the above areas. Lewis’ talk took a bipartite approach to demonstrating the environmental thought happening with the Pokémon games. In the first instance, using examples of particular Pokémon being based on fossils, Lewis asked how these games represent an environmental history of the past. Lewis also considered how, via subtleties of the game-world, recent Pokémon games present a climate positivity via the environmentally-sustainable elements normalized in their gameworlds. Richard’s talk on the Virtual Reality Oracle project’s reimagining of the Oracle of Dodona emphasized how essential deep environmental reflection was when recreating an oracular experience in the ancient world, and the extent to which assiduous attention to geological, ecological and dendrological detail shone through in player-responses to that experience. Jacob Thomas added a talk incorporating computer science, arts and theatre studies to explicate the relationships within immersive experiences that interrogate environmental issues.
Simon Clark investigated the scientific communication of the board-game Daybreak, interrogating how its messaging on climate allowed players to theorize alterities to the current state of environmental precariousness, as well as examining areas for improvement in the game’s communicative approach. Pete Rowley demonstrated for the audience a role-play exercise deployable across levels of schooling from primary education to undergraduate study. The exercise oriented around the management of potential volcanic eruption in an inhabited area and exemplified the compatibility of practical knowledge and gamic scenarios in allowing learners to work through and apply their knowledge. Andrew Brennwald, of Yaldi Games, delivered a talk on Out and About, a game incorporating botany, taxonomy and roaming in the natural world, which provided the symposium with an alternate angle, discussing not so much how pre-built games can be used to teach but how a game can be built to teach.
Reflecting on the symposium with Lewis, many pertinent strands of thought were seen to have emerged from it. Encouragement was witnessed in the evident engagement with games as academic sites, the diversity of fields attendees came from, and, more specifically, the productive entwinement of games with certain fields, such as geological and veterinary science, computing and history. The event was found to stimulate the organizers’ thoughts on how games, and the use of games in education, demands a straddling of the allure of fun and the educative message communicated. It is the universal appeal of play that makes games such a fertile teaching tool. This innate appeal of play and the potential for educative communication thus then requires a negotiation where messaging does not override the basal attraction of fun but is verified through it. Lewis pointed to his work with Access to Bristol as indicative of this, where entwining the simplicity and approachability of a game such as Mario Kart with geographical teaching had proved productive.
The symposium was thus fruitful in numerous ways. Due to the levels of interest and network established, further Can Games Teach? symposia are being planned, included an upcoming event on history and games, and a potential collaboration with veterinary science further down the line. A game jam, in collaboration with the School of Computer Science, has arisen as a prospect. Lewis drew attention to the event’s successful enmeshment of speakers from both academic and commercial backgrounds, highlighting how the connections shown between the two led him to contemplate intersections between his own field, geological science, and the contextual requirements of industry. Whilst historical games might employ scholarly consultants, ludic geologies and geographies tend to be more approximate, introducing discrepancies between real-world environments and ludic ones. So how could a platform such as Can Games Teach? interrogate the desiderata for games grounding environmental depictions in reality, in a manner comparable to historical games? In its capacity to catalyse lines of enquiry ranging from the optimization of games as teaching tools to the lacunae in accurate representations of that which can be taught, plus stimulating a number of collaborative branches between disciplines and professions, the symposium might be called both a beginning and a blossoming.