I was (naively) hoping it wouldn’t come to this!
“Methodology? Aren’t we being creative? Cannot the creative process be my method?”
Ah right, it can’t! Because that’s what my project wants to challenge in the first place:
Creators across media do stuff about the environment, hoping that their works will inspire people to act, but that most often doesn’t work out.
James Cameron’s Avatar is my go-to example of this. I’m pretty sure that Iron Jim thought “Let me show people a f—-d up future where humans are treating the environment really badly, that will make them do the opposite.” And it didn’t. Instead, ‘Avatar blues’ was coined as a widespread melancholia and defeatism that hit fans of the blockbuster movie around the world. “Whoops,” said James (can’t find a reference for that though).
I want my creative artefact – the ecosystem restoration board game – to actually inspire some people to get involved and give them hope about the future.
And I cannot assume that what I think the way to do that is, actually is the way.
So, okay: I said before that part of my project should also be an evidence-based toolkit for storytellers (perhaps focusing on interactive storytelling / gamification) on how to effectively (1) portray ecosystem restoration futures and (2) inspire players/receivers to get involved. Only once I have that can I make a game that I can confidently assign those attributes to. If my game ever has “inspiring people to become #generationrestoration since 2025”, and someone says “dude, it’s just a game, how can you say that?”, I will then be able to pull out my well-researched sources that made me claim such a thing.
I think that first, I will need to do a huge scoop of the literature into all possible evidence-based methods on:
- how to integrate ecosystem restoration (or, more broadly, nature) into future-oriented storytelling using both a suitable storytelling framework and also a futures studies framework for imagining “thrutopia” futures
- how to use (interactive) storytelling to motivate/inspire/engage/empower audiences, namely around socio-environmental issues
Second, I will begin applying my chosen frameworks from step 1 onto a selected ecosystem (imagining its future under restoration and associated challenges) to write that ecosystem’s “future story” (which may or may not branch out into different projected pathways – after all, it will inform a game). This will involve analysing a broad scope of mainly ecological and restoration literature and synthetising findings from various theories, praxes and case studies.
And then finally, after all that Apollonian work is done, I can take my tool-kit and my ecosystem story, and make a game!
Most likely, that will be the most time demanding and hardest part of the whole process. While the frameworks and toolkits from earlier steps should ideally inform my choice of game mechanics and other aspects of the game, there will likely still be space for a loooot of creativity. Yeey!
When this is done, how do I present it?
Well, the toolkit will speak for itself. But, I think, I will have to probably do two more things for the whole package: an academic-ish commentary explaining my whole process and rationale & a video in which I would talk about how I applied that to my creative artefact, my game. (Unless, of course, the examiners would accept my invitation to play the game with me, which would be most preferable.)
PS. If there is a fancy academic name for any of the “methodologies” I described above (meta-analysis of literature?), please let me know. 🙂 Else I’ll ask my good mate Chat G.
