ASSIGNMENT PROMPT
In groups of 4-5, you will write the rules for a board game that your peers will subsequently play in class. The game (think of this as an interactive formal system) should be playable in roughly 10-25 minutes. Moreover, the written instructions should be clear and concise for players to understand without additional explanation. In addition to a set of rules, you should include a name for the game, its objectives, its estimated time (which means you should play-test it in advance), and any games that may have served as inspirations for your design. Since we will actually play these games in class, you should also include the necessary game board and pieces, which need not be artistically elaborate and may include pieces taken from already-existing board games. Your game should engage with themes and problems related to climate change. As you design your game, think about the medium-specific dimensions of games, including rules, mechanics, and objectives. How can you use the qualities of games to create a resonant experience about climate change? As you design your game, be precise about your learning objectives. Are you trying to raise consciousness, change behavior, inspire creativity, or something else? You have either the option to modify a simple, already-existing game (which we can provide you with) or to create your own.
XAllies
Artists’ Statement:
Discourse on climate change — and the changing environments that people and nature are already facing — remind us daily that Earth has only so many resources. These must be preserved or used, and if used, then distributed among individuals and communities. Often an awareness of these challenges leads to the assumption that what’s good for you must harm someone else, or that the ‘green’ choice that’s good for all must require a personal sacrifice.
The notion of ecosystems as interconnected networks challenges such an assumption. In an interconnected system — a rainforest, a city, a world — what’s good for many (like habitat protection) can also be good for each individual in the long run, and vice versa. However, for most of us, our actions and responses to the changing world are not yet calibrated to this holistic view of an interconnected biosphere.
XAllies creates for players an experience of navigating the tension between decisions that offer ‘individual’ benefit and those that offer ‘collective’ wellbeing. At each turn, players must choose between moves that may confer individual points and moves that work towards potential partnership points. As with many instances related to climate change, the individual benefits are more easily achieved and appear guaranteed (even though their actual point-value benefit, 0 or 1, will only be determined at the end of the game) — while the collective benefits take multiple moves to attain — requiring some planning, partnership, and willingness to pursue an action that could be interrupted. (This mirrors, for example, a willingness to invest in research on green technology, say solar panel function, even when many research projects are only helpful as part of a larger research effort.)
The game situates players between individualistic choices and collective ones, but it discourages attempts to calculate such decisions as if the benefits were ascertainable. In climate science and in environmental economics, benefits are difficult to determine to a precise degree — and predictions of the future rely on the choices we currently make and will continue to make. Because each choice in XAllies’ gameplay affects the distribution of pieces on the board, creating a multitude of indirect effects, the ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ or alliance benefits of each turn cannot be calculated or directly weighed. Instead, the experience of the game draws attention to the emotions and logics that arise from opting for an ‘individual’ choice or a ‘collective choice,’ while encouraging players to find moves that do both. Such optimal moves challenge the idea that what’s good for another player cannot be good for you.
The experience of gameplay echoes present challenges that individuals face when choosing, for example, whether to take a Lyft or public transit. The individual-collective tension and false dichotomy also arise in governmental decisions: at federal, state, and local levels, governments, and sometimes voters, often must choose whether to fund projects of environmental resilience or projects of sustainability or conservation. Resilience protects a locality from future environmental shocks, and such projects could include the construction of seawalls or the funding of forest management to prevent widespread fires in Australia. These actions are integral for the regions’ wellbeing but have little effect in preventing environmental harm to the wider global community; the funds could alternatively be spent on wind turbines or solar energy, options that would help limit carbon output for all. Nonetheless, humans, animals, and plants must be protected from future environmental shocks, so the considerations of local resilience and collective sustainability must both be taken into account. And often, they are not at odds.
Tending to local environmental issues can elevate concern for wider ones, fostering a sense of global solidarity. Seawalls in Bangladesh may help alleviate global challenges of climate refugees; however, seawalls and other modes of resilience are often bandaid solutions, and an acknowledgement of such helps renew a commitment to sustainability and to reductions in emissions and consumption, through individual/regional action on a global scale.
The navigation of individual and collective benefits so integral to climate change finds a helpful experience in XAllies. We purposefully avoided making the game too obviously about climate change, opting to reference the global environment more subtly through the names of seas and the logo, an X formed as a sailor’s knot. The inner circle of the board shows the ancient Greek names of the seven seas, while the outer circle shows their present names. This suggests a sense of deep time, or at least a sense of time that extends beyond our daily frame of reference, suggesting to players that they are embedded in interconnected systems not just spatially but also temporally. Again, this suggestion is subtle; a method of obfuscation helped us frame the game in a way that would captivate wider audiences and preclude hasty assumptions. Players can then more freely experience the modes of logic and emotion that XAllies asks us to explore. In this way, the game provides a soft framework for navigating responses to climate change, encouraging us to dismantle the dichotomy between ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ and to seek modes of action that entwine local resilience with global sustainability.
Universal Protest
Artists’ Statement:
Universal Protest is a mod of the game Bloc by Bloc that balances cooperative and competitive play in a battle to liberate the last independent research university from corporate control. We chose this speculative frame narrative for two main reasons: to raise the plot-level stakes in-game, making gameplay feel more urgent and exciting, and to more clearly highlight the themes of our game, raising questions about the role of research in a capitalist, corporate-driven world.
Altafuel is a corporation that patented synthetic oil. It has bought every other major institution of higher education in the country. Our game is set on the campus of the last remaining non-corporate research university. The administration is poised to hire a member of Altafuel to be its new president. Four factions protest this decision in an attempt to keep the university free from corporate control.
The main mechanics that we altered in our version of this game were the set-up of the four factions. We made them more asymmetrical, each with their own special abilities, flaws, and rules for bloc placement. These solo win conditions require advanced actions, which trigger reaction rolls from Altafuel. In our modification, the reaction rolls are more likely to provoke a reaction from the opposition than in the base game (1 in 2 chance instead of 1 in 3). This would make it more risky to pursue solo win conditions than in the base game.
We added solo win conditions to each faction to create tension between competitiveness and cooperation. We wanted competition to exist in the game as a viable short-term strategy, but one that would become increasingly difficult to pursue the longer the game continues. The most viable long-term strategy for success is cooperation. Individual survival goals might be more pressing in the short term, but the whole group requires larger, systemic change. Our game encourages cooperation as an optimistic interpretation of reactions to climate change, while still allowing players to pursue their own agendas chaotically if they choose.
The other mechanical change to the base game was to give the factions defined strengths and weaknesses and change the movement of the opposition, Altafuel Security. Players will have to use different strategies and acknowledge their limitations. Unique victory conditions complement faction mechanics and ensure all factions have a chance to seize victory for themselves despite having wildly different playstyles, whether that’s alone or together.
Apart from alterations to mechanics, our game also involved extensive reskins of the other elements of the Bloc by Bloc base game. The factions of Students, Workers, Neighbors, and Prisoners were reskinned as Undergrads, Staff, Faculty, and Grad Students. The original games’ occupations and loot appeared to be predicated on the makeshift nature of insurgent organizing and violent protest, while Universal Protest’s actions are themed around more peaceful protest. One particular inspiration was the ongoing 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests, whose peaceful factions used umbrellas to protect themselves from hose-downs and water bottles to rinse their eyes from tear gas. Another key reskinned element is the graffiti. Toy pinwheels are a symbol of the eco-conscious movement in the game’s world and are symbolic of windmills. Looters leave their mark on the shopping centers by sticking toy pinwheels into the lawns. (Refer to Reskin List document for a full list of reskinned game elements.)
Mission Emission
Artists’ Statement:
Our game, Mission Emission, asks players to make decisions based on action card prompts as they advance through the board. A lot of decisions. Players decide not only their Occupation, but whether they play each term as an individual “citizen” or as corporate entity “organization(s).” During each turn, our game asks players to draw a lot of random cards with seemingly random directions. The Impact Cards are drawn randomly, and the chip impact assignments for each Action Card are designed to feel random. By combining high amounts of decision-making power with a degree of randomness, our game is designed to create a sensation of frustration, bordering on futility.
We selected a randomized racing game (like the CandyLand genre) with some player choice (like the Life game), and added a chip-collecting component. This game type allowed us to give players the impression of forward movement while subjecting them to random action choices; it also allowed us to give players the impression that typically “good” or eco-friendly actions would allow them to collect chips and win, but we added cards and conditions that either randomly or intentionally counter this assumption. We were inspired in part by the way that Little Inferno has its players flirt with pointlessness by simply burning things and waiting. In other words, the experience of playing a game in which the players are “narratively failing” was the reason behind designing a game that could be experienced as frustrating or futile. At the same time, we chose to use recognizable game conventions, like the simple CandyLand-esque board and the choices in occupation that are reminiscent of the game of Life, to give the player some hope that they will experience the game normatively and positively.
Our embedded critique of normative eco-friendly action mirrors this game experience. All of the actions on the Action Cards are inspired by public opinion on how to best fight climate change on an individual level. The game makes players obsessively count one’s personal and organizational impact through the atomizing action of chip counting, just like well-meaning people today obsess over recycling or biking. Players calculate chips and try to pick good actions in an effort to be a good citizen or organization; they will do this so much that they fail to realize the randomness of certain Action Cards, chip assignments, and the much higher impact their organizations or companies have compared to their individual power. Furthermore, the options on Action Cards border on the satirical. An organization has the option to start a “Walk in Wildlife” initiative where their company members participate in a 5K in a nearby forest, after which the card reads: “Proceeds go to ???” A citizen has the option to “do laundry less frequently.” We wanted to achieve a sense of pessimistic satire to critique “green” actions that are ultimately ways to make people feel individualized guilt, and distract people from organizing against corporations and institutions like Exxon Mobile or the Pentagon . Along these lines, our learning outcomes are to estrange people from their present, since these eco-friendly actions are everywhere in popular culture. We also were not necessarily interested in spurring people to better or different actions, but rather in getting people to reflect on how most of what they do to mitigate climate change on an individual level is futile.
In essence then, our principal aim has been to problematize, both aesthetically and procedurally the roles that we anticipate players falling into as they actualize their expectations of individual agency and a “just” ending. Notions of ritualism and practice are enjoined by the mechanic of chip-gathering, which when taken in concert with the specter of a structurally enforced sense of futility, we intend as a gesture of complication toward not just quotidian actions, but one which sharpens into higher resolution the psychic burden of gathering and indexing those daily practices in the context of global catastrophe.
The gathering of acts and effects of repetition, of smallness and grinding pointlessness, is a practical motif we sought to adapt from other media we have encountered– First Reformed for example, which likewise brings into productively frictive contact the routines and movements of the individual with a larger and more harrowing reality. The use of the Candyland conceit thus is positioned to ring as almost eschatalogical–mindlessly and randomly brushing the player along in a manner that contrasts quite directly with the individual vicissitudes of what is essentially glorified bean-counting.
The overall purpose of the game is thus in many ways an open question of how to respond to futility, with futility being operationalized in quite a specific sense; we made the decision to not completely play straight the notion of failure–this is not designed to be an anti-game. Rather, it acts to uncomfortably split the difference, forcing the players to balance between senses of cascading design failure, (“the game doesn’t work”), authorial malevolence, (“the game was rigged”), and individual agency and stakes (“we lost the game”). In creating this cocktail of anger, disengagement, loss, and interest, we hope to spur a consideration of how the personal negotiation of those very emotions maps back onto the relationship of the individual to climate change writ large.
Displacement
Artists’ Statement:
Climate change does not affect all regions of the world equally, and not all regions of the world are equally equipped to deal with the effects of climate change. As certain peoples are forced to seek less hostile living conditions, migration has become a major implication of climate change and one of its biggest strategic challenges. A 2015 report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre found that “since 2008, an average of 26.4 million people per year have been displaced from their homes by disasters brought on by natural hazards. This is equivalent to one person being displaced every second.”Natural hazards will only become more frequent as climate change progresses, and this sobering rate is likely to increase.
We created a game in which the player assumes the role of a world leader, balancing internal housing issues with external migration and unavoidable crises. The game is designed to simulate the organizational challenges countries face as they confront natural hazards and resulting migration. The basic factors at play are randomized events which affect regions differently depending on their geography, housing or displacement of citizens, and money, which is earned by countries with housed citizens and lost by countries with homeless populations. The idea is that each country’s geographic makeup and role card create individualized play experiences, where all countries compete with the same factors at play, but towards different ends. The game presents the uncomfortable situation of having to weigh personal finances against community survival in light of crises with different degrees of avoidability. The idea is that players will think about the real systems that mitigate disaster relief, and interrogate the incentives that exist within those systems and the goals that different countries work towards. Although the game is an extremely simplified simulation of an almost impossibly complex issue, Displacement attempts to communicate that the relationships between crises, nations, and their populations are constantly being re-negotiated.
Cut It Down
Artists’ Statement:
CUT IT DOWN engages players in a world of resource management. Individuals are required to remove trees from the forest to build their houses, enacting both the literal motion of cutting living trees down and processing them into lumber. It is referential of the broader translations between natural resources and objects of human consumption. These acts of translation and destruction are not without consequence; in CUT IT DOWN, we aim to visualize the consequences of widespread human consumption, and to highlight the tension inherent in the consumptive choices we make on a daily basis.
The aim of CUT IT DOWN is to have the largest house (meaning the most logs in one’s house) by the end of game play. The win condition can be achieved via a few different strategies. Our hope is that both first-time players and repeat players will engage with a variety of building methods. The most obvious strategy of gameplay is to capitalize on every LIFE EVENT card to acquire as many logs as possible. We expect first-time players to utilize this strategy the most heavily. As players are not yet familiar with the consequences of resource consumption, it is assumed that to build the largest house, one should cut down the most trees and turn them into logs. However, we designed the game such that destroying large numbers of trees results in consequences: for every ten tallies (every ten trees one takes from the forest to build their house with), one must pull a CONSEQUENCE card. These cards project individual impact: individuals that consume more trees will have to pull more CONSEQUENCE cards and be faced with the reverberations of their actions. These cards reference both random adverse life events (e.g. getting in a fight with one’s roommate and them moving out), and impacts of climate change (e.g. more volatile weather). More resource consumption means greater impact, and that manifests in this game via a setback from the winning condition: consequences remove logs from one’s house. The destroyed house logs get put in the lumberyard, which functions as a graveyard of sorts.
Another strategy of gameplay is one of reduced resource consumption. When presented with choices in LIFE EVENT cards, instead of choosing the option to immediately build and consume more, one can choose to build a small house. This concept comes through in varying levels of opacity. Some are more obvious (e.g. the card “You got your dream job but it’s going to require a commute to get there.” requires a choice of either “Buy a car and build a garage with 4 trees.” or “Take public transportation/bike;”) it is clear what the more traditionally “sustainable” option is. Other cards use a bit more embedded design: “Rent is cheaper with a roommate but you’ll need to build an extra bedroom.” offers the options: “Actually, I don’t want a roommate.” or “Build another bedroom with 2 trees and 2 logs from the lumberyard.” Someone moving into a currently existing home uses fewer resources than building a new property, and that is conveyed via card choices. Choosing the more sustainable option benefits the player: their house size will increase by four logs, but their ledger only increases by two tallies. Logs taken from the lumberyard do not confer increased tallies, and thus do not make the player at risk for more CONSEQUENCE cards. Varying levels of resource consumption are put into tension with personal lifestyle choices: when building one’s dream home on a plot of land, players simply may not want a roommate. They may want a dog, or a large kitchen, or a better AC system. These material and comfort desires come at a cost to the player later on.
To avoid getting hit by CONSEQUENCE cards, one can reduce their consumption. However, simply existing on this planet requires resources. Certain life events require taking trees from the forest, such that all players must build up at one point or another. Homes need sewage systems, bathrooms, water pipes, kitchens: all of these require action. Some cards allow one to build a small bathroom, but a bathroom still requires some amount of resources, and thus a player is forced to cut down some amount of trees. Even if players choose to play with a strategy of minimalism, they too will have to build a house of some size throughout the game. Additionally, cards are shuffled before each game, and different LIFE EVENTS and CONSEQUENCE cards have varying scalar levels. While strategy is part of the game play, much of a player’s success is also up to chance.
To take a brief segue into visual game design before returning to discussion of the win condition, we decided to go with hand painted objects. Rather than clean and concise graphically designed pieces, all board game pieces are made from MDF and are painted to fit the style of the specific piece. The forest is rather abstract and painterly: it resembles some sort of loose natural space, filled in with organic forms. It is the only circular and non-rectilinear form in the game. Conversely, the land plots have a far more clear human presence: everything is sharply linear and harsh. Although the materials on the land plots are still natural materials, they have been subjected to human intervention and living: the soil plot is clearly maintained and separated from the grass on the front yard and driveway. The lumberyard occupies a similar realm: the grey space that will eventually be filled with discarded resources, consumed and then destroyed, begins with tire treads crossing the space, evoking an industrial wasteland. The lottery board was included both for increased fun in gameplay and to invoke ideas of money and luck. The lotto board is a gold bar, shining and again filled with rectilinear forms. During the game, one player will pull the lottery card, after which other players can choose to enter: one “pays” by entering three logs from their house. The lottery winner takes the entire pot, thus increasing their house size without increasing their tallies. This introduces direct competition and interaction between players for one round, bridging the gap between the rather disparate houses and plots.
Another aspect of player choice is with the act of building itself: we wanted to keep the movement rather freeform. Inspired by mindless building up of small pieces, an act most of us do while fiddling during games, the houses can take whatever form players desire. A player can build a one-room three-story house, or a large floor-plan like structure. Rooms can be various sizes and shapes; players get the freedom to design their own home, which we hope will increase the sense of choice and fun in the game. This freedom may also (productively) distract from their destruction of resources. Keeping in line with the distinct styles of “human-impacted” versus “natural” spaces, the building pieces look like trees when standing across the central circular board. At the beginning of the game, the forest looks rather impressive and indomitable: the whole forest is filled with a vast landscape of trees of various heights. The pieces’ wood grain can be seen, and the forest board looks rather endless. Once players remove the trees to build their houses—and even more so when they are discarded in the lumberyard—the trees start looking more and more like processed lumber. As players expand their houses upwards and outwards, the distinct grains and natural feel of the blocks diminishes and is replaced by more rectilinear forms: squares and rectangles, tall buildings and spread out mansions.
The game can end in a few different ways: either players deplete the forest of all trees, or one player pulls a game-ending DISASTER card. Natural disasters are almost always events that are seen as occurrences beyond our control. However, we wanted to subtly destabilize this notion. DISASTER cards exist to elucidate the communal impact of resource consumption, while still retaining a certain sense of their inevitability. While we wanted to implicate the individual and give a sense of individual responsibility through CONSEQUENCE cards, individuals’ actions also affect the whole. Thus, disaster cards occur every three rounds, regardless of trees cut down and hit everyone. However, they inflict damage proportionally. This is one instance where we notably diverge from a real world context (though the rest of the game is not necessarily an attempt to replicate our world): disaster cards affect those with smaller houses less than those with larger houses. The more logs on a player’s plot, the worse a disaster is. Outside of a game context, (geographical location aside,) those with more resources are typically less affected by climate change disasters: they will have the means to rebuild, whereas those who consume less out of necessity are often hit harder. For our game, though, another incentive to build smaller is a decreased response to a DISASTER card. Players who choose to follow a more minimalist building strategy will find themselves less affected by communal disasters, however, no player is entirely exempt.
CUT IT DOWN is a game of strategy, luck, and design. Different players will embark on different routes, and during gameplay, begin to witness a direct correlation between consumption and destruction. DISASTER and CONSEQUENCE cards, mostly large-scale weather events exacerbated by climate change, lower one’s chance of winning. LIFE EVENTS provide the opportunity to dream and build a comfortable home and life. These tensions are revealed differentially throughout the game, all while maintaining the thread that to build a life for one’s self, one must consume resources. CUT IT DOWN aims to provoke players’ thoughts about long-term, widespread resource consumption: its necessities, its drawbacks, its consequences.
Between a rocket and a hard place
Artists’ Statement:
The premise of the game is to build a rocket to escape from Earth to a “Planet B.” In choosing this theme, we wanted to delve into the cultural obsession with space exploration, manifested in the media focus on research going on at aerospace firms like SpaceX, as well as the popularization of the NASA logo on clothing and other material goods. We wanted to design a game that juxtaposed the obsession with some shiny new “Planet B” with the actual toll that conspicuous aerospace consumption, particularly by figures like Elon Musk, takes on the Earth. To juxtapose these two ideas, we taxed advances in research with pollution points that players had to physically add to the game’s “Earth Atmosphere.” We hope that our game will spark reflection on the player’s relationship with escapism as it relates to the fetishization of space exploration. Additionally, we also wanted our game to serve as a critique of the “California Mentality” that all problems can be innovated away without acknowledgment of this process’ toll on the natural world. We hope that players will recognize that the desire for escapism may only benefit very few and leave everyone else on earth in a great climate disaster than before.
We designed the end states of the game such that it is very difficult to win unless players sacrifice some of their turns by drawing B-Corp cards rather than Growth cards. We wanted to teach players that pollution-producing actions have a collective effect, and the most effective way to combat them is through not exclusively prioritizing growth in business; corporations need to think about their carbon footprints, not just the value of their company’s stock. As there is a chance that no players will be able to reach Planet B, players may soon recognize that they could collaborate with others to lower carbon emissions to increase their chances of reaching Planet B. Our hope is that the social disgust which will be generated by players who exploit other players’ willingness to sacrifice growth for B-Corp cards will encourage players to engage with philosophical concepts like the tragedy of the commons with respect to pollution and resource management, as well as the idea that climate change inhibits children’s Constitutionally-protected right to life, liberty, and property.
Even though the game does involve some strategy–choosing between B-Corp cards and Growth cards in order to minimize pollution and thus avoid losing the game–this card-drawing game is primarily a game of chance. When picking the cards, there is an element of chance in which players do not know how many pollution points they will need to add to the atmosphere. To progress, players must take this risk and could possibly end their chances of reaching Planet B if the atmosphere collapses. This risk will cause players to take more time to consider the choice they want to make between a selfish act and a selfless act as the game progresses. This decision may encourage players to also apply this in real life and think more about their contributions to climate change. Keeping this element of chance in mind, we strove to make the tone of the Growth cards humorous and casual to demonstrate that Ghosh’s idea of the “Great Derangement”: the catalysts of and accountability for climate change is widespread, it is not a phenomenon spearheaded exclusively by a small group of malicious actors.
We recognize that our choice to represent the costs of research through “emission blocks” reduces the complexity of the environmental impact of the aerospace industry. However, in our game, our primary objective was to encourage players to reckon with what is so seductive about space colonization-based escapism, rather than to teach players about the mechanics of the aerospace industry’s environmental impact.
Climate Change in Media and Design 
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