Start Where You Are: Using Worldbuilding Tactics in Serious Games... | Vector Festival 2024 Workshop

Start Where You Are is a serious games workshop. It is a “game to build a game.” This collaborative, facilitated experience focuses on the complex, real-world problem of climate crisis adaptation in Toronto, specifically the neighbourhood around InterAccess.

In this experimental workshop, participants will build a potential game world based on the observable world right now, using smartphone photos, publicly available information on the City of Toronto website, and content generated through rapid timed writing and sketching exercises.

This three-hour world-building workshop has five parts:
Part 1 – The Model: Serious Games in Disaster Preparation
Part 2 – Deep Dive into the Present
Part 3 – Deep Dive into the Future
Part 4 – Backcasting Futures to the Present
Part 5 – Mapping Choices

The artist developed this creative method in order to counteract cognitive dissonance due to climate grief that she experienced at a global energy conference during COP21 in Paris 2015. Workshop participants will be led through a similar brief experience, which will be no more stressful than real life.

Applying the method together, participants follow a deliberate route that repurposes their experience and generates potential adaptation strategies for tangible action in the game world. The workshop activities focus on environments, from city infrastructure to systemic patterns of oppression. The facilitation focuses on participant’s lived experience and collaboration in real time during the workshop.

Please note that the causes or reality of climate crisis will not be debated during this workshop.

This workshop is presented as part of the Vector Festival 2024.

WORKSHOP REQUIREMENTS

• Smartphone (optional). The workshop includes a 5-minute sidewalk excursion to collect photos of the streetscape. Participants are invited to use their own device or share with their group. iPads will be available for anyone without access to a device.
  
• An acceptance that climate crisis is real is required for the duration of the workshop.
  
  

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Hilary Martin is a multi-disciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, sound, geography, and serious games. Her current work addresses cognitive dissonance in climate grief and aims to bring the functional, expressive, and aesthetic realities of climate crisis adaptation closer to her current locations and the lived experience of her audiences. This workshop is part of the artist’s larger ongoing project, Microlocal.

ABOUT VECTOR FESTIVAL
Vector Festival is a participatory and community-oriented initiative dedicated to showcasing digital games and creative media practices. Presenting works across a dynamic range of exhibitions, screenings, performances, lectures, and workshops, Vector acts as a critical bridge between emergent digital platforms and new media art practice. The festival was founded in 2013 as the “Vector Game Art & New Media Festival” by an independent group of artists and curators: Skot Deeming, Clint Enns, Christine Kim, and Katie Micak, who were later joined by Diana Poulsen and Martin Zeilinger.

More festival programming at vectorfestival.org

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

MEMBER PRICING
InterAccess Studio Members receive a 35% discount on all workshops. To activate Studio Member pricing, click "Do you have an access code?" at checkout and enter your Member discount code.

EQUITY ACCESS PRICING
To reduce financial barriers, a pay-what-you-can (PWYC) discount is available for any community members that self-identify as part of an equity-seeking group, which includes (but is not limited to) disabled, Black, Indigenous, students, and newcomers. To request an Equity Access code to use for workshop registration, please email education@interaccess.org. To activate Equity Access pricing, click "Do you have an access code?" at checkout and enter the Equity Access code.

ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION
We regret that at this time InterAccess does not have barrier-free access; we are currently working to improve the accessibility of all facilities. There are five steps up to our main entrance, with automatic doors. Once inside all facilities are on the same level, and there is an accessible single-user washroom inside the unit.

CANCELLATION AND RESCHEDULING POLICY
Please email education@interaccess.org to request a refund. We are unable to accommodate attendee cancellations or refunds less than 1 week prior to a workshop or event. InterAccess reserves the right to cancel or reschedule this workshop if necessary.

COVID-19 INFORMATION
For indoor events, InterAccess strongly encourages all attendees to wear masks/face-coverings to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission and to ensure the continued health and safety of staff, facilitators, and fellow attendees. We ask that staff and participants screen themselves for COVID-19 symptoms before visiting our space.