Center for Science and the Imagination | CSI Skill Tree: Waking Mars with Katherine Buse and Steve Desch @imagineASU | Uploaded July 2020 | Updated October 2024, 44 minutes ago.
CSI Skill Tree is a new 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 chat with speculative fiction and games scholar Katherine Buse and astrophysicist Steve Desch about Waking Mars, a game about space exploration, gardening, and ecosystems developed and published by Tiger Style in 2012.
About our speakers:
Katherine Buse is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis, where she researches the relationship between science and speculative media. Her current project, titled “Speculative Planetology: Science, Culture and the Building of Model Worlds,” is about how planetary epistemology co-evolved in the sciences and in science fiction literature, films, and video games. Learn more at https://www.katherinebuse.com.
Steve Desch is a professor of astrophysics in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU. He studies the formation of stars and planets from a theoretical perspective, especially using meteoritic data. He’s also leading a NASA-supported effort to devise strategies for searching for habitable conditions and life on exoplanets. Learn more at bit.ly/steve-desch-asu.
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 new 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 chat with speculative fiction and games scholar Katherine Buse and astrophysicist Steve Desch about Waking Mars, a game about space exploration, gardening, and ecosystems developed and published by Tiger Style in 2012.
About our speakers:
Katherine Buse is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis, where she researches the relationship between science and speculative media. Her current project, titled “Speculative Planetology: Science, Culture and the Building of Model Worlds,” is about how planetary epistemology co-evolved in the sciences and in science fiction literature, films, and video games. Learn more at https://www.katherinebuse.com.
Steve Desch is a professor of astrophysics in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU. He studies the formation of stars and planets from a theoretical perspective, especially using meteoritic data. He’s also leading a NASA-supported effort to devise strategies for searching for habitable conditions and life on exoplanets. Learn more at bit.ly/steve-desch-asu.
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.
