TY - CONF

T1 - Rituals for building futures

T2 - Multiplatform 2025

AU - Cutting, Kieran

AU - Bates, Oliver

PY - 2025/6/12

Y1 - 2025/6/12

N2 - In the midst of a global polycrisis (Lawrence et al., 2024), threats to social, economic,and environmental justice continue to intensify. To respond to this polycrisis, we mustimagine new ways of thinking, being and acting. Yet the hegemony of neoliberalcapitalism has resulted in an impasse, a “suspended imaginary” (Berlant, 2011: 86)where existing practices fail and new imaginaries are yet to emerge. This has led to a“slow cancellation of the future” (Fisher, 2014: 11), in which it has become almostimpossible to imagine futures that centre alternative values. We must therefore workto create a collective radical imagination that pushes beyond the constraints of whatwe are told is possible (Benjamin, 2024).Games support people to develop a radical imagination by engaging players’ “doubleconsciousness” (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003: 455) of the game world and the realworld, helping them to find “forms of agency [they] might not have discovered on[their] own” (Nguyen, 2020: 2). The making and playing of games becomes a process ofworlding otherwise (Spivak, 1985) that invites players to engage in imaginativeexperiences centred on “the ongoing creation of further relations of possibility"(Colebrook, 2020: 365).In this presentation, we suggest that both the playing and making of games can act as a “speculative praxis” (Cutting, 2022), acts of speculative design that ritualisticallyprefigure futures which are more just, inclusive, and revolutionary. We discuss threeprojects that employ the mechanics, narrative structures, and world-building practices of games to enact a speculative praxis, inviting participants to engage in a “dramatic rehearsal” (Haarman, 2022: 56) through which they might imagine new worlds and develop their own capacities to build those worlds. In so doing, we suggest that making and playing games is a vital component in the development of “imagination infrastructures” (Oldham, 2021).

AB - In the midst of a global polycrisis (Lawrence et al., 2024), threats to social, economic,and environmental justice continue to intensify. To respond to this polycrisis, we mustimagine new ways of thinking, being and acting. Yet the hegemony of neoliberalcapitalism has resulted in an impasse, a “suspended imaginary” (Berlant, 2011: 86)where existing practices fail and new imaginaries are yet to emerge. This has led to a“slow cancellation of the future” (Fisher, 2014: 11), in which it has become almostimpossible to imagine futures that centre alternative values. We must therefore workto create a collective radical imagination that pushes beyond the constraints of whatwe are told is possible (Benjamin, 2024).Games support people to develop a radical imagination by engaging players’ “doubleconsciousness” (Salen and Zimmerman, 2003: 455) of the game world and the realworld, helping them to find “forms of agency [they] might not have discovered on[their] own” (Nguyen, 2020: 2). The making and playing of games becomes a process ofworlding otherwise (Spivak, 1985) that invites players to engage in imaginativeexperiences centred on “the ongoing creation of further relations of possibility"(Colebrook, 2020: 365).In this presentation, we suggest that both the playing and making of games can act as a “speculative praxis” (Cutting, 2022), acts of speculative design that ritualisticallyprefigure futures which are more just, inclusive, and revolutionary. We discuss threeprojects that employ the mechanics, narrative structures, and world-building practices of games to enact a speculative praxis, inviting participants to engage in a “dramatic rehearsal” (Haarman, 2022: 56) through which they might imagine new worlds and develop their own capacities to build those worlds. In so doing, we suggest that making and playing games is a vital component in the development of “imagination infrastructures” (Oldham, 2021).

M3 - Abstract

Y2 - 12 June 2025 through 13 June 2025

ER -