Krzysztof Chmielewski is assistant professor of game design & game studies at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland, and game producer at Flybridge Studio.
Krzysztof has been a serious games producer since 2008 – from military simulators, through LARPs, board games, finally landing in the video games industry (for two reasons: passion and mortgage). For the past decade, his main objective has been teaching video game adepts at various universities in Poland, France, USA and India.
Lawyer and political scientist by education, coffee addict by choice.
Convincing the convinced – games with a message of ecology and identity. Space Gliders case study.
FROG 2024 – Talk
Either cross-generation identity and responsibility or ecological safety become more and more visible topics that appear in games (Larreina-Morales, Gunella, 2023). The author, an executive producer of a medium-budget, independent videogame Space Gliders (2021), analyses the failure of a message included in the narrative. Its reception was investigated on the basis of a quantitative study among Polish youth – both engaged in environmental protection and distancing from this fondness.
Using a survey conducted on a sample of approximately 200 students of fields that forge leaders in diplomacy and international security who had played the game, as well as in-depth interviews with six young Polish gaming influencers, author tries to validate the hypothesis about an enhancement of pro-ecological and protecting the local identities attitudes among the young adults who already present such inclinations with a simultaneous internalization of the game’s message by the recipients who do not identify themselves this way. The author looks up to leading edu-games for the same target audience and runs a comparative analysis of selected solutions based on data provided by the users.
The following step was to learn the lesson regarding good practices that would increase the chances of building a deep, positive reception of an educational background in games designed for Central European youth.
To summarize this deliberation and help the future entrepreneurs to establish a greater degree of accuracy on this matter, the author provides a post-mortem analysis of the game narrative from the producer’s perspective.
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