STRATEGIES at STS Hub 2025
Location: Berlin
STRATEGIES researchers Professor Sonia Fizek and Dr Ruth Dorothea Eggel will be presenting their research findings at STS Hub 2025, in Berlin. STS Hub is a conference series that brings together German organisations, labs, and research groups that are more or less closely related to Science and Technology Studies.
The theme of this year's hub is "Diffracting the Critical". According to the organisers, Diffracting the critical s an important task to re-equip STS in the age of climate change's poly-crisis, as we see natural disasters, demographic changes, economic instability, and democratic backsliding compound an already seemingly insurmountable set of problems. Questions about where these shifts are felt and how they manifest socially and politically are inextricably bound up with the legacies of colonialism, the ongoing injustices of resource exploitation, and rising right-wing populism. Our current predicament, thus, affords a return to a formative question in STS: what is “the critical” in a field that is methodologically, thematically, and theoretically as diverse as ours?
Sonia and Ruth will be presenting research as part of Panel 16: Transdisciplinary and Sustainable Cultures of Technology Development.
Their paper, Strategies for Sustainable Game Development: Between Planetary Impacts and Technoculture' explores some of the early findings of work package 2 - People and Planet.
Sustainability is an increasing concern in the game industry, where developers and researchers explore how game narratives, mechanics, and design can convey ecological messages, shift cultural values and promote social change. (Abraham & Jayemanne 2017; Chang & Parham 2017; York et al. 2022). Paradoxically, even green-themed games cause environmental harm due to extensive global value chains, precarious labour, and resource-intensive technologies (Abraham, 2022; Gordon, 2019 & 2020). Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this paper conceptualizes green game-making as a shared practice and socio-technical assemblage, analysing how developers’ local strategies address planetary concerns.
Drawing on the practical expertise of industry practitioners, we critically examine the socio-cultural and environmental implications of game production, including sustainability frameworks and extractivist logic (Cubitt 2016) within profit-driven game and hardware industries. We explore developers' struggles in challenging entrenched techno-logics (Sobchak 2004) and strategies for more sustainable game production.
This research is part of the transdisciplinary Europe Horizon project “STRATEGIES - Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries”, which aims to integrate sustainability across game design, production, distribution and policy-making. Collaborating with European studios and NGOs, we provide insights into the knowledge, skills, and obstacles in green game-making, promoting a critical discussion of sustainable cultures in game development.
To attend the conference or find out more, please visit the STS Hub Website.