University for the Creative Arts

Speculative Games: Games Envisioning Possible Futures

This paper, presented as an extended abstract from the Speculative Games Project, examines how games engage with possible futures and proposes principles for designing speculative games, with particular attention to tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs).

• Speculative games are defined as featuring plausible, fact-based mid- and long-term future scenarios, mainly extrapolated from current scientific, technological, social, and environmental trends, though they may also move beyond contemporary conditions.
• The paper treats game design itself as a form of speculative design, inviting players to reflect on plausible futures rather than predict them precisely.
• Games represent futures through several modes: foresight games that expose bottlenecks in local issues, alternate reality and playful foresight games that surface players' biases, and technology demonstrators that simulate emerging technologies to anticipate social, economic, and cultural impacts.