Engaging with imagined forests

In the research project, Playing with Disaster, we work with imagined futures – and as part of that imagined forests. The project develops and examines the use of a climate fiction roleplaying game as a playful research and educational practice that is intended to foster and cultivate ecoliteracy among students during lower secondary school. We understand the biodiversity and climate crises foremost as symptoms of how dominating humans have come to be in the world. To demolish, dislodge and transform these ways of being in the world, we build on research that demonstrate or argue that concrete experiences, storytelling, and play are needed to cultivate understanding, reflection, and, ultimately, transformation.

On this basis, we are excited about the Critical Forest Studies Collaboratory and would like to participate. With backgrounds in Philosophy, Environmental Education Research, Play Studies, and Media Studies, we offer to the collective our expertise in transformative learning processes, ecoliteracy, as well as play and games. Moreover, we are concerned with theories of interspecies relations, hope, practice, and much more.

We chose to examine the potential of roleplaying because the format offers players an opportunity to shift their perspectives, use their imagination, and be creative together with others within a highly flexible and modifiable, premade frame. The aim of our climate fiction roleplaying game is not foremost to impart students with facts about climate, environment, or the rest of nature. It is rather to give the participants an opportunity to explore agency, community, creativity, and hope in relation to questions to these dimensions, and, thus, to play with how more life-friendly ways of being in the world might look like. By taking this approach we seek to work with ecoliteracy at an existential and experiential level, playing and co-researching together with young participants on how to envision futures that are worth working toward and living. Without future visions, it is hard to change course.

The roleplaying game moves between a near future track, with a group of youngsters in Berlin who together have a plot in a city garden, and a far future track in which most of the world has been plunged into a new ice age due to failed interventions against global warming. It is in the far future that players encounter our imaginary forest and are asked to help envision it, using their own imagination and experience. The ecology of this forest is, among other things, inspired by the forest in the manga Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki. The imaginary forest confronts the players with existential and ecological dilemmas; dilemmas between a world manipulated by humans and a transcending, living world. Moreover, in connection with the forest we have drafted two different emerging societies – one based on posthumanism and one on transhumanism. This enables the players to explore and play with the two positions’ advantages and flaws, similarities and differences, as well as with the possibility of transcending both in-game. We play with how to be and live in and together with the forest (and its myriads of life forms).
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In front of you is a forest. You’ve heard about forests - in your mother’s lullabies. You’ve read about forests - in the fairytales you loved as a kid. You’ve seen forests on film - huge, green places, hard to navigate and often dangerous. But you’ve never before been close to a real, alive forest.

And if there’s anything you’re sure about it’s that this mass of trees in front of you is alive. So alive that you can feel it even as you approach.

As you move closer, you hear shrieky melodies from somewhere inside the woods. Birds calling out to one another, still far away. Underneath the thrills, the wind rustles in a thousand leaves. Somewhere close by, the whirring of tiny wings. And the smell, growing stronger and stronger. A smell of wetness and soil, of something herbal, tangy. Like a really strong tea.

You move past saplings and bushes in the tall grass. You’re confused, astounded, delighted to see how many different kinds there are.

And then, then you’re among the first trees. They’re so slim and about your own height with white and black-striped trunks. You reach out, touching the surface. You expect it to be pulsing silently with energy and growth, but the aliveness is not directly felt. The bark is cool and soft under your fingertips. You’re thinking, I’m touching the tree’s skin.

You move on, in between the trees. How will the forest receive you? How will you meet it?