This talk presents the findings of the Speculative Games Research Project conducted at the University for the Creative Arts. It offers an overview of how games engage with possible futures, outlines key principles for designing speculative games, and highlights early findings of our ongoing practice-based research on speculative worldbuilding in tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs).

Games function as powerful speculative tools for exploring systemic dynamics, social trends, and technological trajectories by combining mechanics, narrative, and worldbuilding to embed socio-technical imaginaries within playable experiences. Scholars describe this capacity as a form of speculative design or “mechanics of speculation,” through which games may reproduce dominant anthropocentric or techno-optimistic assumptions, but also enable players to imagine alternatives that move beyond current trajectories. Games engage futures in multiple ways: as foresight platforms that convene stakeholders to explore political possibilities and local challenges; as immersive futures-thinking tools that foster collaborative storytelling and critical reflection on biases; as technological simulations anticipating societal impacts; and as commercial entertainment that shapes future imaginaries through fictional worlds grounded in contemporary trends. Central to these practices is uncertainty and experimentation, including forms of “dark play” that allow players to explore controversial or problematic scenarios and critically engage with their consequences from both subjective and systemic perspectives.

Drawing on concepts such as worldmaking interactions, second-order design fictions, and story-world databases, the talk argues that speculative TRPGs can function as flexible setting documents for plausible futures. In these contexts, game masters and players collaboratively navigate systemic issues and lived experiences, demonstrating how speculative play can frame, test, and transform understandings of possible futures. The ongoing practice-based research extends this framework by examining how imagined spaces in role-playing games can interrogate legal, political, religious, and financial power structures, and how speculative worldbuilding can encourage critical reflection on the ecological, socio-economic, and political uncertainties, risks, and opportunities shaping underrepresented non-Western urban futures.

Speakers:

Dr Tonguc Sezen is a Senior Lecturer in Games at University for the Creative Arts. He holds a PhD in communications and a habilitation degree in game design. His academic research focuses on the intersections of new technologies, design, and storytelling, including transmedia worldbuilding, narrative design in games, and toy studies.

Dr Digdem Sezen (she/her) is a Senior Lecturer in Games at University for the Creative Arts, exploring how games and stories shape culture. She teaches and researches interactive narratives, transmedia storytelling and critical theory. Her recent work focuses on generative AI in game writing and the social impact of games. Digdem also works on international collaborations connecting the UK and Turkish games communities.