Latest / The Killscreen Podcast / Can Art Fight Climate Change? Kara Stone & Joshua Dawson on Solar Servers, Degrowth, and Making Work in a Crisis
Transcript
- This transcript follows the discussion between Jamin Warren, Kara Stone, and Joshua Dawson regarding climate, digital culture, and artistic practice. 00:00 - Jamin Warren: I just need to update the… it streams to other places, so I have to update it manually. (pause) All right, cool. All right, let’s get started. Let me share my screen. 00:59 - Jamin Warren: All right, hello everybody. Welcome, thank you so much for joining us. I’m really excited that you could make time on this Friday. My name is Jamin Warren. I run Kill Screen, write Kill Screen. It’s my baby. Thank you so much for signing up, and I’m really excited about this talk for today. If you’re unfamiliar with Kill Screen, we have a deep focus on games, games culture, and play, with a strong emphasis on independent practices. One of the things I’ve been doing for many, many years is bringing people from across different disciplines—so one person from games and one person from outside of games or in a games-adjacent space—to talk about a set of common themes. There is a chat bar on the right. If you have any questions that come up along the way, we can field those as we go. The format will be pretty straightforward: I’ll ask Kara some questions, and then I’ll ask Joshua some questions, and then we’ll do some cross-talk, and then if you have any questions, we’ll also open it up for the end. So, just by way of a preamble here: every new technology has some kind of supply chain. Every server farm needs power; every rendered frame, you know, ultimately costs us something. So, for artists who are working at the intersection of climate and digital culture, that’s not just an abstract problem; it’s the condition of the work itself. And so I’ve brought two people today who are both making work about a world in crisis, and both are reckoning with what it means to build things inside the systems driving that crisis—a deep sense of paradox. Stone is a game designer and scholar based in Calgary, the energy capital of Canada. As we’ll talk about, she runs Solar Server, a solar-powered web server hosting low-carbon games from her apartment balcony. Her latest game, Known Mysteries, is set in a near-future Alberta where oil and tech have fused into something indistinguishable. Dawson is a speculative designer and filmmaker, initially trained as an architect, who builds fictional climate futures from CGI and live action—of ghost towns in the Atacama Desert, deregulated water systems, server farms, all those types of things. And it’s hosted by me. So, we’ll go through each individual practice, and I’m hoping we can touch on some really big ideas: what does geography give you that abstraction doesn’t? What do constraints—technical, material, ethical—actually produce? And what does it mean to make something on a screen about things that we can all kind of feel in our bodies? I know for folks on the East Coast, it’s been like—at least for some of my friends in New York—it’s been like total whiplash between 85 degrees to 30 degrees, just these big, big swings. So we’re all definitely feeling it. Well, let’s start with you. We’ll start with Kara. Can you give me just a little bit of background on you and how you made your way to game design as a practice? And we’ll talk next about Solar Server. But just give me a sense of your background for people who aren’t super familiar with how you got to games as a way of expressing yourself. 02:39 - Kara Stone: Yeah, sure. First, thanks for having me. Happy to be here and hello everyone. Yeah, I’m Kara. I am a game designer. I’ve been working in games for a bit over ten years now. And I had come to it because I initially was working in film—like I did my undergraduate degree in film production and worked as an editor for a bit and a bit on set, and I thought I was going to continue working in film. But I came across a group in Toronto, where I’m from, that was organizing people to make their first video games. This was in 2013, and I had never heard of like indie games before. I didn’t know that people—it was kind of like just as personal games or indie games were really getting large and big and lots of people were starting to do them. And so I was very excited because I had been a gamer for a long time—like I grew up loving games and playing games—and had been in the arts for a long time before film; I was doing theater and yeah, had spent my life doing it. And so I was very excited to work in a new art form that I was really excited about and passionate about and I felt like had connections to already the different fields that I had been in. So I made my first game through this organization in Toronto where they kind of guided new designers to make a game, and it ended up being called Medication Meditation. And yeah, from there I just kept on with it. I just really loved it and took to it and yeah, still making games ten years later. 03:59 - Jamin Warren: Was there a moment where you’re like, "Oh, I can do this. Like, I can be someone who makes games"? 04:06 - Kara Stone: I honestly, like seeing the presentation of like first people making indie games, I was like, "I can do this." That’s kind of my attitude for everything, though, for better or for worse, because sometimes it’s really not true. But you know, having come and worked in the arts before, it was like, "I can do this." And so yeah, right away got into it. 04:24 - Jamin Warren: Yeah, that definitely tracks. I think that’s—it’s interesting now because so many people grow up playing games, you know, I think there’s often that perception like, "Oh, I play games, which is sort of like sometimes like well, I eat food, so therefore I should be able to cook food," you know. Cool. Well, let’s talk about Solar Server. You know, I’ve been following your work for quite some time. I think we met, gosh, I don’t know, maybe ten plus years ago. We had you speak at the Kill Screen Festival a long, long time ago. And so I’ve been following your work for a minute. So I was really excited when I saw Solar Server pop up as a project. Can you tell us what Solar Server is, why you decided to go this route, and ultimately how it functions? Maybe some practical tips for someone who is interested in doing something like this themselves. 05:21 - Kara Stone: Yeah, sure. So, Solar Server is a solar-powered web server that I have on my apartment balcony. This is a photo of it here, as well as my dog, you can see. 05:32 - Jamin Warren: Is a dog required for—do you need a dog? Is that a requirement? 05:37 - Kara Stone: It might prevent it more than help it. But yeah, and so a web server—this Solar Server holds a web page, solarserver.games, and a web server is a physical computer—in this case, a microcomputer—that holds website server data and the website data as well. And so every time you go onto a website, the server uploads it and then you on the client side download the information. So this one runs purely off of this solar panel here that generates energy for it. And so when it’s uploading the data of the website for you to see, it is running off of solar energy. And the idea—this has just been up, the first game released for it was like a year and a bit ago, Known Mysteries, and Solar Server was running just a bit before that with just its website. And so it’s been around for about two and a bit years and yeah, it will host a series of games that are designed to be low-carbon. So meaning that they’re going to be small, they’re going to use different tactics to reduce its energy consumption, both on the server side as well as the client side. And I came to this project because I was thinking about—and in my previous work have been thinking about—the climate crisis, like you know, we all are probably non-stop or at least every day. And was thinking about how can my work not just portray it? You know, like we all know about it, we know it’s a big issue, we don’t need to raise awareness about it. But how can I actually do things that will work in its production to lessen the amount of carbon that I am emitting in my work? And so all of my previous work on the app stores and on Steam and even on itch.io, they’re predominantly on fossil fuel powered web servers. So to play my work, you need to consume fossil fuels. So I wanted to make it so here at least you don’t have to, right? Like I’m an artist, I want to share my work, I want people to interact with it, but I also don’t want to require that people are consuming fossil fuels. So this was like a small step in that direction. 08:18 - Jamin Warren: Yeah. And this was all self-taught, right? You didn’t have any experience in like, you know, electrical engineering or anything like that, right? 08:26 - Kara Stone: Yes, and that’s I guess my can-do attitude of—I have worked in games and I know how to make games, but I had very little experience with electronics. I had some experience with Arduinos and this runs off of a Raspberry Pi. So I had some basic understanding. The physical stuff was actually quite easy to figure out for me. I didn’t have any web development skills and certainly not back-end web development. So I had to learn a lot in the process and you know, I still have lots of learning to do on that side of things. 09:05 - Jamin Warren: Cool. Well, let’s talk about Known Mysteries. That was the game I mentioned in the intro—the setting, the constraints you built it under, and what those constraints ended up producing like aesthetically. (A brief clip of Known Mysteries plays) 10:30 - Jamin Warren: Yeah, walk us through this title because there’s a bunch of things that stood out to me—like the look and feel of it, the subject matter. Tell me a bit about the process of developing it and how this game maybe interfaces specifically with Solar Server. It does feel like, you know, the history of games is often—games are sort of built for or shipped with the technology alongside of it, and they take advantage in some ways. Usually it’s around in the direction you’re working against, you know, to try and take advantage of, you know, photorealism or processing speed, and you’ve kind of—you’re kind of moving in the opposite direction trying to build something that is an experience that is built for like Solar Server. So tell us about the game for someone who hasn’t played it and some of those design decisions that you were making up front for it as well. 11:18 - Kara Stone: Sure. Known Mysteries is a narrative game, meaning you follow a young woman who has lost her parents and decides to like quit her job and move back to her small town, which is in this industry town. They call it a "launch town" because they are launching people into space to colonize Mars. And I wanted to make a mystery game—like a deduction where you go around to different places, you learn information, you have some questions that you want to solve. But it’s also kind of like a very character study as well, of like this person who has a mix of like apathy and concern about the climate crisis but doesn’t really feel like she knows what to do about it. And she knows all the issues but cannot see like a clear step to kind of overcoming this like oil-tech conglomerate that has taken over her city as well as her country. So it’s set in an Alberta town in a dystopian future. And in the game you like visit different characters and you learn more about the world and the people in it. And it is more about how she comes to find community about these things and then moves to a place like outside of apathy and more towards change. And so yeah, thinking about this title like Known Mysteries, thinking about it being a mystery game—like something to uncover and solve—but also like that we know what is going on and kind of know really also how to fix the climate crisis. It’s just that lots of people don’t want to actually do it, or at least, you know, our people who are in charge. And so some of the tactics in this game, like you can see from this trailer here, that it uses a mix of found footage and it’s really compressed. And you could see like a dithering aesthetic on it. So the files are meant to be like really small. We—in the rest of the game, you can also read text and like navigate a map, and a lot of it is designed to be as small as possible. The game’s also broken into three different chapters. So when you go on the website, you’ll start with Chapter 1 and it only downloads the Chapter 1 material. It’s kind of to break up how much demand there is on the server and also not be like downloading lots of information that maybe you’re not going to continue with. 14:14 - Jamin Warren: Yeah, finding that balance I think tonally was really interesting for me playing through the game. The sort of—just wrestling with the hopelessness or kind of like some kind of apathy or helplessness that people might feel with these like moment-to-moment interactions with different people that you have like in that individual town. It felt very real in that sense, like in that moment people are both negotiating these relationships they have with, you know, Sora, the main character, with her uncle, with her co-workers, and with the people sort of around her that are kind of dealing with the same sense of—the same sense of apocalypse. Yeah. Do you—did you find like is there something that maybe players wouldn’t know on the back end that you designed specifically with Known Mysteries, like if they were playing it and didn’t know about kind of the history of Solar Server? Is there anything that you can kind of point to and say like, "Oh, that’s something that players won’t see but is a really—for me, feels like a really novel way of like minimizing the impact on the planet"? 15:24 - Kara Stone: Yeah, good question. I mean, yeah, because they see the chapter division and you see the kind of aesthetics of it. I mean, it is like a lot smaller than it could be, certainly with all the like live-action video. I think actually what was a challenge was to have the game—it’s coming off of this small server, and you kind of might expect it to take longer because of that. But we’re used to the internet and downloads being like super fast now. So we had to do a lot of—we have some like finessing of like how the game downloads in. So when you first go to the website to play the game, there’s some time loading that, you know, hopefully is under a minute or two minutes. But as that opening video plays, the rest of the game is being downloaded in at the same time. So you’re not like waiting for the whole game to download all at once, even though it is quite small, it can take a while off by my little microcomputer. And so it comes in that way. And the other thing that we struggled with was that we built it on Unity, and most games aren’t designed to be really small anymore. Like that was, of course, a constraint like in the ‘80s and the ‘90s and even into the early 2000s, but now we’re used to like huge file sizes for games and it’s like not a concern. So there were some like preset and built-in things that like prevented us from making the game as small as we could. So for the next game, we’ve actually transitioned to not using Unity and using Godot, which you have a bit more control over. So yeah, that was kind of like by the time we really figured it out, you know, because this was a learning process, it was too late. We’re like, "We’re not rebuilding the game right now." So yeah, that was like a lesson for us next time. 17:29 - Jamin Warren: Yeah, 100%. I think along those lines, like the look and feel for the game really makes it like stand out. One of the things that we discussed, you described there being pressure to look more like other indie games—so pixel art, the cozy aesthetic. What did it like cost you to kind of resist that artistically? To not say like, "I’m not going to make a game that maybe conforms to some of the expectations around like other smaller independent work that’s out there"? 17:56 - Kara Stone: Yeah, I don’t know if it cost me anything, but it is like more—it can be challenging to take on, especially like a lot of people can see the aesthetic and just think like, "Well, this isn’t a game." Like it doesn’t compute as a game. And you know, that’s something that I have encountered tons throughout my career. And I have made some games with pixel art like when I was first getting into games, I think maybe two or three, but mostly nowadays I—at least since 2018—haven’t made anything that I think really translates strongly into how we normatively think of a game. Like I have been using a lot of handmade objects that we scan and digitally manipulate, or using a lot of live-action found footage and putting that into the pieces. But in terms of like the cost, I think it can be challenging when I’m already making experimental games that they often like just don’t register as games. But I also like—I love to experiment with the different kinds of visuals and different ways that we can have interactive art pieces and games and go beyond like how they could actually look. That’s not to say it’s bad to do pixel art or low-poly stuff and kind of fit in that world, but for me, it’s fun to experiment with other things. And maybe coming from film, I also really love to do live-action stuff, and that could just be something that I like working with and I like editing and putting together. 19:48 - Jamin Warren: Yeah, that’s a really good note. I mean, and so much of the early history of games is designed around these specific constraints and developing some new techniques. Prince of Persia, very famously, Jordan Mechner, they basically filmed everything and then he painted over all of the individual frames and then you loaded those—used those for sprites. And like, you know, the result was something that definitely had the feel of human movement in a way that was like—that constraint of wanting to capture something but do it in a way that feels natural, that constraint generated something that was really, really interesting. All right. All right, well, let’s move on to you, Joshua. You’re next. Cool, let me just pull up your slide here. Do you want to give a little bit of background on you as a designer and a filmmaker and as an architect? 20:38 - Joshua Dawson: Yeah, so I build future fictional worlds that play out the impact and the implications that climate change has on the built environment and the disproportionate impact that that in turn has on marginalized communities. And I do that through this intersection of film and speculative design. I started making films by way of architecture school because USC Film School was on the same campus as the architecture school. And I figured, you know, I could use my skills for model making, building sets, and use all of the resources that were available in the fabrication facilities at the architecture school to build sets and props for student films across campus, all in exchange for craft services and food on set. And while I was there, I started to learn the kind of techniques of filmmaking by observing other directors and watching how they work and watching how a set is run. And I started to realize that it’s not very different from designing a building; so much of the prep and the planning of actually conducting a film shoot is basically through spreadsheets, which is also very much how you execute a building. And I started to find those parallels to be synergistic in what I was trying to produce and do. Architecture always comes at the tail end of the technology spectrum, but being able to sort of use storytelling as a way to test, visualize, and prototype futures post a building actually being executed is something that I wanted to kind of explore more of through my practice. And yeah, and that’s what got me into filmmaking. 22:32 - Jamin Warren: Cool. Well, we’ve got a little clip of Lois’s Promise because we’ll talk about that in one second. Let me just pull this up here. (A brief clip of Lois’s Promise plays) 24:01 - Jamin Warren: All right. Well, can you tell me a little bit about Lois’s Promise, about this film and what inspired you to create it? And maybe some of the onsite work. I mean, the Atacama is a very unique setting. So yeah, tell me a bit about the production process behind this particular film.