Center for Science and the Imagination | CSI Skill Tree: Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri with Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Arkady Martine @imagineASU | Uploaded December 2020 | Updated October 2024, 32 minutes ago.
CSI Skill Tree is a series that examines and celebrates how video games envision possible futures, build rich and thought-provoking worlds, and engage people as active participants in unfolding and interpreting stories.
In this episode, we take a close look at the classic science fiction strategy game Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999) and discuss colonialism, technology trees, ideological diversity, roleplaying, relationships between human and nonhuman intelligences, and more.
About our special guests:
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor in Global Culture Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway. He is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project “CoFutures: Pathways to Possible Presents” and the Norwegian Research Council project “Science Fictionality.” He also runs The Holodeck, a games research lab at the University of Oslo. His research website is https://cofutures.org.
Arkady Martine is speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. She is currently a policy advisor for the New Mexico Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department, where she works on climate change mitigation, energy grid modernization, and resiliency planning. Her first novel, “A Memory Called Empire,” won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Find her online at https://arkadymartine.net.
About the Center for Science and the Imagination:
The Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University engages in research, outreach and radical collaborations to reinvent our relationship with the future. From writers, artists, and teachers to scientists, engineers, and technologists, we bring diverse intellectual practices together to create visions of the future that are inspiring, inclusive, and imaginative. Learn more at https://csi.asu.edu
CSI Skill Tree is a series that examines and celebrates how video games envision possible futures, build rich and thought-provoking worlds, and engage people as active participants in unfolding and interpreting stories.
In this episode, we take a close look at the classic science fiction strategy game Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999) and discuss colonialism, technology trees, ideological diversity, roleplaying, relationships between human and nonhuman intelligences, and more.
About our special guests:
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor in Global Culture Studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway. He is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project “CoFutures: Pathways to Possible Presents” and the Norwegian Research Council project “Science Fictionality.” He also runs The Holodeck, a games research lab at the University of Oslo. His research website is https://cofutures.org.
Arkady Martine is speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. She is currently a policy advisor for the New Mexico Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department, where she works on climate change mitigation, energy grid modernization, and resiliency planning. Her first novel, “A Memory Called Empire,” won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Find her online at https://arkadymartine.net.
About the Center for Science and the Imagination:
The Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University engages in research, outreach and radical collaborations to reinvent our relationship with the future. From writers, artists, and teachers to scientists, engineers, and technologists, we bring diverse intellectual practices together to create visions of the future that are inspiring, inclusive, and imaginative. Learn more at https://csi.asu.edu
