This seminar marks the culmination of our Collaborative Foresight cycle on Futures of Games. We'll share what emerged: possible futures of how games are created, accessed and played; what they could mean for game development, gaming and society; and how imagining alternatives can help us make more conscious, long-term decisions, build resilience and open up new possibilities.

We'll also discuss the book 'Over the Riddle' that gathers the futures imagined in this cycle, stories from those futures written by Paul Graham Raven and practitioner and expert perspectives from Bobbi A Sand, David Polfeldt, Ahmet Khalifa and Julian Togelius, launched in September 2026.

Join us at Media Evolution in Malmö or via livestream.

Everyone attending in person will receive a copy of the book.

Speakers

Kseniia Ponomarenko is the founder and art director of Threshold Ritual, an emerging independent game studio. With a Master’s degree in Architecture, her work spans environment art, visual direction, gameplay direction, and creative production. She art-directed the award-winning Blessed Burden game and contributed to several other indie games as an artist.

Julian Togelius is a professor at New York University and co-founder of modl.ai, an AI-driven game testing company. His research focuses on the intersection of AI and games, and he has written several books and hundreds of papers on the subject. Julian will be exploring the long and complicated relationship between AI and games. Drawing on his chapter "A Short History of the Future of AI in Games", written with Ahmed Khalifa, he will look beyond today's generative AI debate: from the AI techniques already embedded in game design to why current models cannot simply be plugged into existing games. The technology may be here before the design - so how can human designers and creators use AI as a material without losing intention, control or the human conversation at the heart of games?

Kristofer Ling works with leadership, operations, art and creative direction and bring in 18+ years of experience in the games industry and 11+ leading cross-functional teams towards ambitious creative goals.

Context

This seminar is the closing event of the Collaborative Foresight cycle Futures of Games, hosted by Media Evolution in collaboration with Game Habitat and Minc, with additional funding from Region Skåne.

Illustration by Jakob Tuchten.