S03 Episode 05 - Social Impact Games

The Tao of WAO

Today we talk to our guest, Adam Procter, Interim Head of the new Department Art & Media Technology at University of Southampton about social impact games, game design and more. Support the Tao of WAO: https://opencollective.com/weareopen/ Adam Procter: https://discursive.adamprocter.co.uk/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/procter/ https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/feb/21/spawn-of-wordle-five-of-the-best-riffs-on-the-hit-word-game Adam's sites and tools: https://adamprocter.co.uk https://nodenogg.in/ https://discursive.adamprocter.co.uk/2021/07/06/wayfinder-game.html https://www.southampton.ac.uk/courses/games-design-and-art-degree-ba https://www.instagram.com/gamesdesignart/ Social Impact games: https://news.sky.com/story/climate-change-can-gaming-make-us-go-greener-12372861 https://playing4theplanet.org/news/ggj21-gamers-to-act-for-nature/ https://webpages.tuni.fi/gamification/gamiforest-coffee-talks/ Daybreak https://www.daybreakgame.org https://medium.com/climate-crisis-the-game The homelessness game and others from Adam's students: https://kompile.co.uk/university/ PlayMob - take UN's SDGs and see if there's a way to influence design https://www.forbes.com/sites/afdhelaziz/2019/08/09/the-power-of-purpose-how-jude-ower-and-playmob-are-using-videogames-for-good/?sh=338b9d263791 The list of books Adam mentions: - teaching to transgress (bell hooks) - deschooling society (Ivan Ilich) >"Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting." — Ivan Illich - passion projects peers and play (Mitch Resnick) - Dune - Fight club (true I picked the weakest one :) - the monsters of education technology (Audrey Watters) - surveillance captalism (Shoshana Zuboff) - Nudge (Richard H. Thaler) - Catch 22 - The Catcher in the Rye - The design of everyday things (Don Norman) In a short commentary posted to her website in 2004, science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that the concept of technology is “consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialized technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.” Rather, she argued, technology should be understood more expansively, as the way “society copes with physical reality… the active human interface with the material world.” Technology, as the sum of “what we can learn to do.” - https://newpublic.org/article/1610/introduction