Matthes Lindner is a researcher, consultant, and lecturer. He heads Spielfabrique’s acceleration programs for video games and is a researcher in the Horizon Europe project “STRATEGIES” (Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries). As such, he dedicates his work to fostering a strong Indie games ecosystem and sustainable practices in the games industry through connecting stakeholders from industry, science and policy.
After studying anthropology and sustainability, Matthes worked as project manager in an international science communication NGO. Since then, he has also been teaching university courses, producing multimedia projects and hosting events on topics ranging from career design to futures literacy.
Champions for hope: The power of futures-literate game developers
FROG 2024 – Talk
Games may help us understand the challenges moving forward, but to fully harness the medium’s potential, game designers and developers need to be both motivated and literate in the transformative potential of their creations. In short, only futures-literate game developers can create games that foster future literacy in their gamers.
Past research (McGonigal 2011, Vervoort 2022, York 2023) has shown that playing games can develop key skills to tackle 21st-century challenges. However, with apocalyptic visions for the future being commonplace in mainstream games, the medium still does not necessarily inspire the necessary sense of optimism and agency in gamers required to translate these skills into positive action.
What is missing, then, are games that instill futures literacy and urgent optimism in their players. The mainstream hits that provide this experience have yet to be created. These games will likely be created by futures-literate developers who can effectively and consciously design moments of transformation towards futures literacy in their games.
In this talk, Matthes Lindner explores the work needed at the source: the studios developing tomorrow’s games. He presents a framework for co-developing future-literate games with developers, already in use with indie game developers at Spielfabrique. Finally, the talk explores an unexpectedly hopeful scenario for the future of the games industry, where game developers become champions for better futures.
6
