We have an exciting new year ahead for Wireframe, beginning with a playtesting workshop during Professor Chang’s Fall 2019 “Green Games” course!
Date: Thursday, October 10, 2019
Time: 10:00AM – 12:00PM
Location: Wireframe and Digital Arts and Humanities Commons (Music 1410)
Immerse yourself in the struggles of “Bartertown,” a game and fictional land that asks how new networks of care and sociability can emerge in a world without money. This event stages Bartertown as a life-size board game, in which players must brave disasters such as climate change, a stock market crash or even a divorce. Players exchange favors and resources to survive, using unique ‘powers’ that trade in alternate forms of currency: property, inventiveness, mobility, generosity and influence. Whether they win or lose, dominate or inspire, players will explore unexpected ways to strategize, negotiate, and reshape both the city and the home through a new economy of favors and resource-sharing. Space is limited.
At 1:30PM, Janette will also give a talk entitled “Daylighting Conflict: Board Games as Decision-Making Tools, in the McCune Conference Room (6020 HSSB). She will discuss Win-Win, a series of board games that play out climate risk scenarios. By designing interactions among players, objectives and resources, these games model the social justice implications of innovative financial and legal strategies. Equally important, they model the space of cities, offering unique ideas about the built environment in direct relationship to such dynamics. Together, these two interpretations of a ‘model’ serve as a new kind of decision-making tool—one that imagines new relationships among economies, publics and architectural design.
Janette Kim is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Director of the Urban Works Agency at California College of the Arts, principal of design practice All of the Above, and founder of ARPA Journal. Her work spans across scholarship, research and design and focuses on political ecology and the built environment. Janette is author of The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform (Princeton Architectural Press, 2015). Her recent projects include Win Win, a series of climate change board games and designs for collective ownership of housing as part of the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge.
Sponsored by the Environmental Justice & Climate Justice Research Hub of the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Parameters of Play Research Focus Group
