For this post, I would like to reflect on two aspects of the Evolution Climate board game. For one, the player activity was largely based through individual point collecting on a species board. This species board made the experience one of optimization under stress conditions that often felt impersonal. Secondly, the relationship between the game’s win conditions and learning outcomes were very telling both for our enjoyment (or lack of) of the game, and for the type of game (climate change versus nature) that it is.
One interesting component of Evolution Climate was the species board. The species board is not connected to any particular animal but rather a mixture of trait cards (with different creatures on them) and population versus body count cubes. Because of these mixtures, it sometimes felt as though the species board was like a test tube. This test tube board, on top of the seemingly arbitrary changes in climate depending on certain parts of the cards you played, made for a slightly impersonal experience. Having this board disconnected from any one real animal or prehistoric species was also likely why none of us felt particularly attached to our species beyond wanting them to survive so we could keep playing.
While playing Evolution Climate, we realized at the end of the rounds that to tally our points, we had to add up the food and condition of our current species. Every time you went extinct, you had to get rid of your species board and start again, attempting to add as many body and population sizes as you could. I assumed before reading the win conditions that you would likely have to count up your extinct species boards and whoever had the least extinctions would win. Yet, this was not the case. The game did not care about your ability to keep your species alive, but rather how well evolved your current species was. Reading the game’s description, I think that this win condition reflected how the learning outcome was ultimately about the scientific process of evolution to teach people about how evolution and climate relate to each other. It did not pretend to be about preservation of species amounts, but rather evolving what you have. My assumption about preservation of species was based in my assumptions of what a climate change game should be about. This leads me to one of our common class questions about the difference between a climate change game and a nature or “biology” game. In the case of Evolution Climate, it is pretty explicitly a biology or nature game, although the board design and different components make it an interesting jumping off point for climate change related modifications.
Climate Change in Media and Design 
This is an interesting reflection. In creating our board game we have had difficulties finding a viable win condition, not only within gameplay but within the messaging of our game. It is hard to create a win condition that is challenging but doable, competitive, and motivating, while still cohesive with the message of the game. With some imagination, though, I think any rule can be “read” right.
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Paola, thanks for this more in-depth analysis of Evolution Climate—I think your discussion of the game’s win conditions and parameters raises really interesting questions about learning objectives, player engagement, and—as you point out—climate change consciousness, or lack thereof.
Your original assumption about points being correlated with extinctions rather than evolutionary success is an interesting way into thinking about the narratives we prioritize as meaningful in a climate change context. As you say, you have assumptions about what a climate change game *should* be about, and this in-and-of-itself is relevant to how we engage with climate change concerns.
Ursula Heise, who presented at last Friday’s CI Climate Symposium and who has written extensively on endangered species, suggests that the stories we tell about extinction (and their resulting funding efforts) are directly correlated with our cultural values and practices—in short, why do we care about endangered species, which ones do we care about most, and how do these preferences reflect our own ideals? Beatrice, in reframing the game with a potential human subject at its center, cleverly gets at some similar considerations from a different angle—how does our own species bias come into play?
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I wonder if our interpretation of Evolution Climate as a strictly “nature or ‘biology’ game” would change if the species boards were used to represent human populations rather than prehistoric animals. Indeed, at no point in the game or 15 page game rule-book was it specified that our species could not be human. Rather, it appears that we have a degree of free will when it comes to envisioning our species. Perhaps this was one of the many reasons that the species boards were so abstract and- as you pointed out- “not connected to any particular animal”. While I doubt this was in fact the intent of the original creators, it does provoke an interesting thought exercise. If re-imagined with people as the species, the game’s description might look a little more like this:
‘Humans have to adapt to a continually changing ecosystem where food is scarce, predators lurk, and the climate can swing from scorching hot to icy.’
Sound familiar? Replace “predators” with warring countries or parasites and the new board game narrative begins to read more like an IFCC paper abstract than a ‘fun’ board game.
As suggested by the Climate Games group and the video shown in class, almost any action could be considered a ‘game’. By that same logic, could every game ultimately be considered as a ‘climate change game’? Perhaps all it takes is some imagination and a slight fudging of the rules.
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