Climate System Games
I create systems games about climate, ranging from
decision making games about future scenarios,
to playful simulations to explore risk management & disaster response,
to storytelling and role playing games about community resilience and human connection.
I use the words climate systems to describe systems of all types
- scientific, human, emotional, technological, political, cultural -
because our crisis of climate and global change is not one crisis but an intersecting one across all these spheres. These games look at trade offs and tipping points, illuminating emergent system dynamics.
Playing with Uncertainty
We are living in a world of rapidly increasing climate chaos - from extreme weather, to extreme politics, with growing climate impacts - fires and floods, rising temperatures and rising sea levels, drought and soil degradation. There is no longer a stable model for us to make decisions from, or for: we have lost access to the status quo.
In the face of our new climate reality, I am developing new games to grapple with the deep uncertainty we are facing. These situations are not uncertain because some data is unknown, or because an actor will behave unpredictably. These situations are uncertain because we are constantly entering new paradigms. There is no time to stop and draw a map, because the landscape is constantly shifting.
These Uncertainty Games will use storytelling, trade-offs, play and discussion to invite people to find new ways of acting in scenarios that are deeply uncertain, cultivating approaches and building frameworks that we can use to face the reality we’re in, and the future we’re moving towards.