Artist and game designer Ken Eklund shows how working with stories offers popular and accessible routes into the past and present of our life with energy, and imagining possible futures as part of the Stories of Change project.
880 words: estimated reading time 3.5 minutes
For the past three years, there’s been a digital storytelling initiative at Stories of Change relating to the national transition to lower-carbon energy. This AHRC-funded project draws on history, literature, social and policy research, and the arts to encourage more imaginative thinking about current and future energy choices. When Joe Smith from Stories of Change and I met last year, we knew from our research that people ‘don’t appear to think or care about their relationship with energy, because they can’t see it’ and that set off conversations about adding a storytelling game to the initiative to explore that dimension.
I’m an artist and game designer; I develop innovative game approaches to real-world problems. In my view, the key is to find a playful way to present the issue, one that encourages people to ‘play along’. In World Without Oil (2007), my gamerunning team pretended that an oil crisis had actually begun, and people played along by creating stories of how the oil crisis was affecting their lives. In FutureCoast (2014-7), a game about climate change, we pretended to be recovering voicemails made in the future – and people played along by creating those voicemails that sounded as if they had leaked back to our time.
FutureCoast: two players recover a voicemail from the future that had materialized in New York. By recovering this ‘chronofact,’ they revealed its voicemail, which is a robocall advertising ‘Glacierland Resort,’ an arctic theme park with an artificial glacier, from the year 2048. Tweet by Kate de Longpre’, 2014.Photograph: Ken Eklund © 2017
For Stories of Change, we decided to collect people’s personal stories about their relationship to energy, quite literally as their personal stories about “my friend Jules.”
A complicated relationship
“Like it or not, you’re in a relationship with energy. How’s that going for you:” is the beginning of the game’s storytelling prompt. Visualising energy as though it were a person in your life – your friend, Jules – is a fun exercise in imagination, but it can also be revelatory. On one level, Jules is undoubtedly a great friend: lighting up your home, whizzing you around the country, and so on. On other levels, though, Jules can be more of a problem friend: chronically hitting you up for money, occasionally abandoning you completely, and engaging in some questionable dealings in your name while out of your sight.
My Friend Jules opens up discussions about our complicated relationship with energy to the vocabularies we use to characterize our human relationships. At the game’s website you can find an elegy, a character reference, a how-we-met love story, a short play, a limerick, essays short and long, a video interview, superheroes, captioned photos, an Amazon product review, and more – all featuring the protean character Jules, standing in for some aspect of the role energy plays in our lives. The project is expanding the ways we can collaboratively envision the anthropocenic structures that shape our common future.
My Friend Jules: people describe their relationships with energy in the form of its persona, Jules. ‘Hey Jules, can we make a deal?’ Jules stories are told through a variety of media; this image comes from the Stories of Change photobooth at Didcot, May 2017.Photograph: Ken Eklund © 2017
Take the storytelling challenge
To weave these many threads together, and to reward people for their participation, Stories of Change has engaged artist (and ClimateCultures member) Vicky Long to create a work inspired by the ideas expressed in the first iteration of My Friend Jules. Jules stories received before midnight, Sunday 11th June will be considered for inclusion in her work, to be unveiled by mid-July. Follow My Friend Jules on Twitter (as @MyFriendJules) or Facebook for updates about Vicky’s creation and its possible live performances.
My Friend Jules is a storytelling challenge, as you will discover if you put pen to paper (or press RECORD) to create your own Jules story. It’s designed to be the easiest possible on-ramp to a difficult road: re-imagining what exists and what will come to pass in the Anthropocene.
If you take up the challenge, it’s easy to contribute your Jules story via the email link at My Friend Jules, site below.
Find out more
You can find out all the details (including all the entries) at My Friend Jules. And you can explore the Stories of Change project that the game is part of.
You can explore worldwithoutoil.org, another project that Ken has contributed to.
There’s an interesting CNET article about the World Without Oil game.
Ken Eklund
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Questioning Energy? Space for creative thinking... Unsurprisingly, our main creative thinking space this time is made over to My Friend Jules - so get over there and post your story! But I also found this excellent suggestion at World Without Oil (a quote from Stephanie Olsen, author of the CNET article mentioned above): “If you want to change the future, play with it first.” What do you think? What would you play with to help create a different path into the future? Share your ideas in the Comments box below, or use the Contact Form."