“Sustainability isn’t about sustaining, it’s about maintaining. We can’t just stop making, we must maintain what is made and the spaces we make them in.”
I was stolen from college by one of my faculty and dear friends, Tanishka Kachru, to Srinagar Kashmir upon hearing about my games and ideas for gamification in workshops. This meant I was to hold a game in Kani Home, a homestay in Srinagar, attached to a crat-based design studio Kilab (Kashmir Innovation Laboratory) and experimenting with a creative residency, an idea called Melting Pots, which proposes methods of alternative thinking.
After an evening of very brief preparation and changes or adaptations to Terra 2074’s structure, we began working towards the intent of this game and the gameplay shortly after. This was additionally a chance for me to work in a team instead of just myself, which was a swell experience. This opportunity I learnt to treat as merely an experiment to will some holes in my research so far. My reflections on my workshop games so far demonstrated a critical area I was hoping to investigate:
These games involve the active participation of a ‘gamemaster’, in this case me, who constructed the world with my own biases and perspective. It was a chance for me to see if the players of the game can build the world they play into as well. This may be truly participatory and to a greater extent, hoped to be a plural approach.