SAGANET lid Douwe Terluin was afgelopen november 2025 bij de GALA conferentie. Hij was aandachtig en actief aanwezig en heeft nog wat woorden op papier gezet om te delen wat hem opviel. Noot: de call for papers & games voor de 2026 editie staan open.
On 19, 20 and 21 November the Serious Game Society (SGS) organised GALA conf, the Games and Learning Alliance Conference, in Utrecht. It will be too hard to condense down all the awesome stuff that was shown and discussed there, so I will necessarily be brief in this report. If anything intrigues you, feel free to reach out for more information [d.terluin@pl.hanze.nl], or consult the Gala website for the conference papers.
What stood out is the great diversity of topics where Serious Games are being applied. Though most talks seemed to be connected to education (on how to organise collaboration in virtual chemistry labs, estimating the value of fractions, learning to interpret graphs), there were plenty of more exotic topics:
- Raphaela Montera presented on the benefits of death education, to discuss the impact of death and make a society more resilient by using serious games like The Painting.
- Eli Lazarus created DOZER, a single-player game where you control a bulldozer to repair natural dunes during coastal storms. As a professor in Geomorphology, he created this toy model to make fellow researchers more aware of the activities that happen during a storm, instead of only considering the before and after.
- In the essay “Decolonizing games” written by Thomas Widlok and presented by Silja Borchers, I learned about the game Relooted, where you play a team of superheroes stealing from western museums to return the artefacts to their country of origin. This and other examples opened our eyes to the historical bias we are subject to when designing games.
- Hanneke Scholten shared her research into developing narrative identity. There is a decline among Dutch youths in conversational skills, and Scholten is testing their tool Echobot. Strangers are paired for an anonymous conversation via voice messages, but are prompted and prepped to make their responses more considered.
- Based on the work done by Kenji Saito, Shinji Hatta, Yasuhiro Yoshimura and Toshiya Hanada, there was a talk on Satellite Debris removal, pitching it as the most high-stakes Tragedy of Commons. All the space agencies want to minimise the amount of space debris they generate (during launch, or when decommissioning an old satellite). But the incentives aren’t there to reward over-investing, which means debris is slowly building up. The researchers created a token based game to facilitate a market for ‘space clean up’.
- Greta Hoffmann presented her work on Ugh, a game about sexual abuse in youth- or sport groups. With a very daring design choice: you play as the perpetrator. A wolf donning a cute bunny mask is attempting to manipulate the youths they work with, to create opportunities for abuse. By having kids play this, the researchers hope they recognise these strategies when they are being applied on them.
- Lastly, I was able to meet and hang out with Geoff Engelstein, a board game designer and founder of the Ludology podcast. I’ve been a long time listener, so this was a special treat. Engelstein talked about quirks of human psychology like the endowment effect, and how you can use this in game design.
Finally, a big Thank You to the organisers for arranging a great location in the centre of Utrecht, and for bringing together so many interesting speakers and thinkers. Next year, Gala conference will be held 17-20 November in Aquila, Italy November.
-Douwe Terluin
