Student profiles
Matteo Menapace
Email: m@tteo.me
Thesis Title
Institution
Supervisors
Dr David Jackson
Professor Paul Wake
Research Summary
Despite scientific and popular consensus on the urgency of climate action, “there has been a widespread political and imaginative failure to confront the crisis” (Germaine 2023). This PhD will use analogue game-making as a research practice, to investigate games that explore political questions in response to the climate crisis. The PhD will start from an impact evaluation of my ecogame Daybreak (CMYK 2023), which won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award for the best “expert” board game in 2024, as well as similar games that ask players political and ecological questions, such as Catan: New Energies (Catan Studio 2024) and Carbon City Zero (Laurence King 2023). I will then design and playtest a new ecogame that addresses both the problems and the possibilities arising from the evaluation. I will integrate this creative practice with critical reflections that will culminate in a playbook for practitioners and educators who are interested in developing or using ecogames.
Research Interests
climate crisis, climate futures, radical imagination, ecogames, cooperative games, analog games, serious games, game design, impact evaluation
Publications
coming soon