Playing with Consumption Habits

Making/Meat/Matter was a collaborative project between Ali Kenefick, Hanine El Mir, Melina Campos, and Kregg Hetherington. Combining sociology with design, the team developed a serious board game, “Making/Meat/Matter”, focused on the influences, effects, and externalities of industrial animal-agriculture over the 20th - 21st centuries.

Through a combination of role-playing, card drawing, and crafting, players move through the game as characters entangled in the industrial food complex, each beset with their own objectives to support or derail industry. As the game progresses, events such as the development of antibiotics, climate change, war, and financial crises complicate gameplay and force players to collaborate with each other to meet their objectives. This project was designed to facilitate space for players to consider the attachments to their daily consumption habits, and their effects on the environment, other species, and each other.