ASLE 2025 Panel: Playing Games in Climate and Energy Studies

deadline for submissions: 
December 19, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
Jason de Lara Molesky / Saint Louis University
contact email: 

ASLE 2025 CFP: Playing Games in Climate and Energy Studies

extended deadline for submissions: 

December 19, 2024

organizers:

Debby Rosenthal (drosenthal@jcu.edu) and Jason de Lara Molesky (jason.molesky@slu.edu)

Panel at Collective Atmospheres, ASLE 2025 Biennial Conference July 8-11, 2025 University of Maryland, College Park

Games are not diversions from real-world challenges such as environmental crisis; rather, games are already shaping the planetary future across scales and cultures. Climate-themed board games proliferate, inviting players to strategize potential solutions and envision novel infrastructures.

Video games from major studios bring environmental justice themes to enormous player bases, while indie developers experiment with the affects entailed in ecological collapse. Many of us recognize that exercising agency within a gameworld, whether tabletop or digital, collective or individual, can help players make connections, understand concepts, retain information, give and receive feedback, assess strategy, and risk failure in a safe space where experiential learning is inherent in the design. We see this panel as an opportunity for us to exchange ideas and questions in a spirit of collaborative inquiry.

This panel seeks proposals for papers by scholars who research games in the context of the climate and energy humanities and/or implement games in their teaching or community work related to these fields. We are open to many types of games: tabletop, digital/video, interactive, collaborative, zero-sum, RPG, trivia, strategy, etc. Papers are welcome on game theory, game-style models (war games or climate scenario / energy transition games), data science as a kind of game, and the theory and ecological ethics of game-based learning. We are also interested in the ludic structures of environmental literature–for example, detective novels as ratiocination games, or the game-like metrical rules of villanelles. Scholarly and pedagogical approaches of all kinds are welcome, as are community-based projects involving the use of games. We invite submissions from experienced dungeon masters and early-career gamers alike.

Please send 300-word proposals to Debby Rosenthal (drosenthal@jcu.edu) and Jason de Lara Molesky (jason.molesky@slu.edu) by Dec 19, 2024.