The Sustainability Game

Course goals

Content

In the course The Sustainability Game you'll be the sustainability expert in a team of HKU game designers, artists and programmers. As a team, you'll be building a real life video game that helps people engage with a more sustainable world. You'll be getting classes by a mix of UU and HKU teachers on games and sustainability, worldbuilding and more. The course is conducted in close collaboration with partners in Utrecht City Council, the Social Impact Factory, the Regional Development Organization, and more. This course is available to all 2^nd and 3^rd year BSc students who have at least a bit of familiarity with sustainability (but it can be from their own disciplines). Students don’t need game design experience to take part in the course. Read all about it here in a blog, with plenty of examples! https://anticiplay.medium.com/take-a-course-build-a-video-game-change-the-world-532170cab1ec

In this course, you will use game design as a way to learn about science communication related to the future. UU bachelor's students specializing in sustainability topics collaborate with Games & Interaction students from HKU University of the Arts Utrecht to build and publish a fully functional prototype game! This means that at the end of the course, around 15 game prototypes about sustainable futures will have been developed (one per group).

UU students will follow lectures on game mechanics and academic game design theory - and a series of tutorials and lectures about games in a context of sustainable futures. This lecture series will pay special attention to science communication as a skill! You are really in the role of sustainability researcher in the project, and any involvement in game design is really up to you. The course is also flexible when it comes to accommodating your specific academic knowledge because students are participating from throughout the UU.

Games are an exciting tool for exploring interdisciplinary and complex sustainability problems, and an important, upcoming tool for imagining and experimenting with more sustainable futures. They can build directly on science to offer rigorous representations of human and natural systems and different societal roles and perspectives, while offering highly experiential, scalable modes of engagement. They allow people to step into future worlds and experiment with the rules and roles that make up those futures.

The joint course is kick-started with a game jam: a week-long process bringing together teams to build game prototypes. Interdisciplinary teams of ~5 students design games focusing on exploring sustainable futures, with UU students taking on the role of sustainability experts. Impression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH18LBtXFp8. After the game jam, students will continue to work with their HKU teams to finalize their games about sustainable futures.

How to apply:
The minimum number students for this course is 15, the maximum number is 20.  Registration will close once 20 students has been reached, on a first come first serve basis. If you are in doubt whether this course is for you, do contact the course coordinator Joost Vervoort at j.m.vervoort@uu.nl - the answer is very likely to be yes!

Please note: it is not allowed to take two additional courses in period 3 next to The Sustainability Game.