Joost will discuss how the game industry can be understood as imagination infrastructure, how it can help societies imagine better futures and live through what it means to try to achieve them. He will discuss a concrete example that he and his team are building – the game All Rise, a Phoenix Wright-meets-Citizen-Sleeper style of game that lets you take major fossil fuel corporations to court. Using this example, Joost will talk about how to connect games explicitly to activist movements and radical change.

Joost Vervoort is Associate Professor of Transformative Imagination at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University. His research team on games focuses on how the game industry might act as ‘imagination infrastructure’ – helping to open up societal imaginations around better futures and the struggle to achieve them. This includes breaking down barriers between commercial games and games for change; and connecting games explicitly to activist practices.