Research through Games Design is a design approach that helps explore and create knowledge about systems, through designing, mapping, playing with, and experiencing systems and their often invisible subsystems and interconnections. Games helped us explore how our focusing on techno-solutions limit the ways that we can intervene in complex (energy) systems. Following a Research through (Games) Design approach that builds on Speculative Design, Critical Design, and Futures Studies our RtGDs 1) help surface new knowledge and perspectives on the dominant imaginaries of energy and facilities management, 2) bring a broad range of people into a design research process, and 3) enable the design of speculative experiences for players grounded in our search for emergent and alternative systems.
- Optimise! Remy, C. and Bates, O. 2025
A game, interactive narrative systems, and playful exploration of energy systems and user expectations. Through the short gameplay loop of Optimise! the norms and affordances of the thermostat will warp and change, revealing what goes on beyond the dial. Optimise as a game design seeks to incrementally explore the complexity of optimising (Energy) systems through gameplay. Optimise also acts as sandbox for quickly playing with the parameters of energy control systems and peaking at the system behind sites of interaction.The game is designed for Web browsers and is currently not compatible with mobile.
- NotZero, Bates O., Tyler A., and Smith, M. 2025
NotZero is a rules-light story-creation game where players uncover how businesses used ICTs and other means to enact or resist organisational energy and carbon reduction policies. Play as a Climate Anthropologists, from the future, researching how organisations responded to net zero policies with ICT. - Energy Divination, Bates O. and Smith, M. 2025
Energy Divination is a quick visual prompt game about using only visual information to predict energy futures. It encourages an alternative approach and perspective to the data-centric thinking that happens in energy research and ICT interventions. - Making a Meal out of a Mountain, Bates O. and Kirman, B. 2025
A zine exploring what Research through Games Design can be and how you might use it in your research practice. - A Supervisor’s Quick Guide to Research through Game Design, Kirman B. and Bates, O. 2025
A living document to support supervisors when working with researchers and students who are making games as part of a Research through Design approach.