After and Against the End

25 - 29 January 2027, 10:30 - 17:30, C-Mine Genk
Facilitated by Carina Erdmann and Savva Dudin
LUCA School of Arts - Campus C-mine 10, 3600 Genk


Methods:  Role Play, Game Design, Prefigurative Play, Legal Fictions, Critical Theory


I am very worried that we may not be able to stop the end of this world in which we exist; I am worried about the demolition of democratic structures that, though limited and perverse, provided at least an anchor to claims for social and global justice … and could (at times) limit total violence; I am worried that insects and other species are becoming extinct, that rivers are drying up, that oceans are being suffocated by plastic, that fracking is destroying and threatening to contaminate large areas of underground water. This is a long list. However, I am invested – because I don’t see how we will be able to exist otherwise – in the end of the world as we know it. -  Denise Ferreira da Silva

This toolkit workshop approaches the end.

Odysseus' fall of Troy is just one of myriad world endings that permeate the contemporary media landscape. They might resonate because it seems indeed that “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”. The so-called end of history might require forms of play which prefigure that in fact, there are alternatives.

While games might offer a utopia of fair play, in reality the ending conditions are obviously stacked very unevenly. We are thus confronted with a paradox: on the one hand, fighting against the end at all costs while also entertaining the fantasy of its aftermath. The course will introduce techniques of worldmaking and game design to play both Against and After the End. Participants are invited to play with contradictions between both strategies.

To play Against the End we will introduce a framework for serious play that intervenes in the conditions that make certain futures possible while negating others. It will explore games as form, as allegory and as model for real world systems and different meanings of “the end” within that. When is the game over? What are the conditions for the end? Most games end when someone wins, and someone loses. We will ask What could be other ends?

Through Metabolism of Culture as a methodology, we will inquire into the meanings of play actions and objects that are being exchanged, transformed, accumulated, and reproduced within the temporary worlds of games. It will look at the mediations that make the end appear inevitable, and the emotional attachments that keep players invested in reaching it. How do common-sense objects, rules, symbols, and roles acquire meaning in a game and lose it after? How to design the bleed of in-game structures of feelings back to the ordinary world?

In parallel, we will understand the end as the limits of a game system. Thinking with Karen Ng’s notion of natural limits, we will ask: what does a world need to consume, reproduce, or sacrifice in order to continue? What happens when a system becomes limitless? Johan Huizinga warned that when games never end, a dangerous conflation of seriousness and play could corrupt society into totalitarianism. Can we thus see the design of games' limits as ways to resist the total gamification of political and economic worlds?

Finally, we will consider playing After the End. What does it mean to end the world as we know it and how would the new world be constructed from its ruins? This part will introduce the method of Prefigurative Play that considers games as laboratories in which players can rehearse alternative relations before they manifest outside the game. It will find playful strategies against this crisis of imagination that propose alternative endings.

Throughout the workshop participants will be engaged in discussions, test different methods and concepts, and develop their own Endgame as playable prototypes. The week ends with a collective playtest and debrief.


The toolkit is open to students of all disciplines. No prior experience in game design is needed.

Reader (Excerpts)

Karen Ng, Species-Being, Metabolism, and Natural Limits, 2025

Patricia Reed, The End of a World and its Pedagogies, 2021

Johan Huizinga, In the Shadow of Tomorrow: A Diagnosis of the Spiritual Ills of Our Time, 1935


Further Reading

Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, 2024

Gary Zhexi Zhang, Catastrophe Time!, 2023, MIT Press

Denise Ferreira da Silva, An End to "this" World, interviewed by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeier, Texte zu Kunst, 2019