May 2, 2018

Rising Waters: Climate Change Games, presented by Lewis Center for the Arts’ Princeton Atelier

An end-of-semester showing of interactive games created in a spring Princeton Atelier course

Photo caption: Images from two of the video games created in the recent Princeton Atelier course, “Rising Waters: Climate Change Games,” a view of Manhattan partially underwater from the game Solastalgia (left) and a screenshot from the game The RetreatPhoto credit: Students from the course and faculty member/guest artist Matt Parker

What/Who: Join award-winning new media artist and game designer Matt Parker and students from the spring Atelier course “Rising Waters: Climate Change Games” to learn about and try out five exciting early-stage interactive video games based on investigations into climate change.When: May 9 at 5:00-7:00 p.m.; refreshments will be served starting at 5 p.m.Where: CoLab at Lewis Arts complex on the Princeton campus Free and open to the public

(Princeton, NJ) The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Princeton Atelier will present Rising Waters: Cli-

mate Change Games, an end-of-semester exhibition of early-stage interactive video games in-

spired by investigations into climate change created by students in a spring Atelier course taught

by award-winning new media artist and game designer Matt Parker. The event will take place on

Wednesday, May 9 from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. in the CoLab at the Lewis Arts complex on the

Princeton campus. This culminating presentation will take the form of an open interactive exhibi-

tion where visitors can try out five new games.

The course “Rising Waters: A Climate Change Game” focused on the development of a commer-

cial game about climate change, giving students the opportunity to contribute to a piece with

broad social impact. The 21 students, who worked together in groups, will present five different

games they have developed.

Fireline allows players to command fire crews and deploy Silicon Valley’s weirdest inventions

as directors of Cal Fire. The game created by Robert Liu, Alexandra Palocz, Jose M. Rico, and

Ioana Teodorescu focuses on how wildfires burn year-round and the need to find creative solu-

tions.

NOAH, created by Adam Berman, Caleb Gum, David Luo, and Yunzi Shi, addresses the issue of

Earth in the midst of its next mass extinction event. Players must venture from the safety of their

underground colony to collect animal and plant specimens for preservation, if there’s even any-

thing left.

From their vantage point in the sky, players speak with the people left below as they cope with a

world broken by climate change in From the Sky, created by Helen Park, Ivy Xue, Brendan

Weng, Kevin Bradicich, and Kraig McFadden.

Solastalgia, created by Sophia Marusic, Yash Patel, Wendy Ho, and Priscilla Bushko casts the

player as a gondolier in a future New York City, experiencing people's lives vicariously as play-

ers drive them through the city.

The Retreat was created by Luke Petruzzi, Austin Mejia, Josh Murray, and Jessica Ji. This game

addresses how droughts and rising sea levels make large portions of the United States increas-

ingly uninhabitable while massive population displacement has forced millions of people into

migrant camps across the country known as RETREATs. The game’s main character, Lorena

Zamora, is the first-ever journalist to be granted access to the notoriously secretive northwestern

Colorado RETREAT. The player’s job is to guide her in her quest to discover the camp's secrets

in only a week.

Parker’s work has been displayed at the American Museum of Natural History, Brooklyn Acad-

emy of Music, SIGGRAPH Asia, the New York Hall of Science, Museum of the Moving Image,

FILE Games Rio, Sony Wonder Technology Lab, and many other venues.  His game Lucid was

a finalist in Android’s Developer Challenge 2 and his project Lumarca won the “Create the Fu-

ture” prize at the World Maker Faire. An installation of Lumarca was on display at the Lewis

Arts complex at Princeton in the fall. He created the game Recurse for the inaugural No Quarter

exhibition at the New York University Game Center.  Recurse was a finalist for Indiecade 2010

and won the “Play This Now!” award at Come Out and Play 2012. He joined the full-time fac-

ulty at the New York University Game Center in 2013.

The Princeton Atelier is directed by Paul Muldoon, Princeton’s Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor

in the Humanities, Professor of Creative Writing, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. The Atelier

was initiated 1994 in by Princeton Professor Emerita Toni Morrison. This academic program

brings together professional artists from different disciplines to create new work in the context of

a semester-long course. Every course is unique and happens only once. A painter might team

with a composer, a choreographer might join with an electrical engineer, a company of theater

artists might engage with environmental scientists, or a poet might connect with a videographer.

Princeton students have an unrivaled opportunity to be directly involved in these collaborations.

Refreshments will be served starting at 5:00 p.m.

For more information on this event, the Princeton Atelier, and the more than 100 other perfor-

mances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts and lectures offered each year by the Lewis

Center for the Arts, most of them free, visit arts.princeton.edu.

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