The international response to humanitarian emergencies is often severely contrained by the issue of access. This can be physical, of course, with roads, bridges, ports, and airports inoperable due to a natural disaster. However, it can also be due to politics and conflict.
The recent devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria is an example of this: the Syrian regime would very much like to limit access to (opposition-controlled) northern Syria, or at least control all aid flowing there. There are, however, a limited number of border crossings from Turkey available to international aid organizations by virtue of UN Security Council Resolutions 2165 (2014) and 2672 (2023). Western countries have no desire to strengthen the brutal Asad regime by directly aiding the Syrian government. Aid efforts in the north are sometimes constrained by insecurity in these areas. Outside military forces (that is, those that would be represented by the “HADR Task Force” player in AFTERSHOCK) are unable to provide direct assistance in either of these areas because of a range of diplomatic, political, and security reasons—most especially, the opposition of the Syrian government.
There are other examples, however. In 1991, the US and other Western allies provided direct humanitarian aid to the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq against the wishes of the Iraqi government as part of Operation Provide Comfort, under the auspices of UNSCR 688 (1991). Throughout the civil war and in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the government of Sri Lanka deliberately limited the access of aid agencies to Tamil-majority areas in the west of the country. Providing aid to the population of Yemen is severely complicated not only by the local security situation but also by the fact that most countries do not recognize the Houthi movement that controls the northern and western parts of the country, including the capital of Sana’a and most of Yemen’s government apparatus. There are many other examples.
First, lay out the game mats as shown below to reflect government and rebel control over the different districts.
Districts 1, 2, and 4 are government-controlled areas, and supplies can be transferred there via the Port or Airport.
Districts 3 and 5 are rebel-controlled areas, and supplies can be transferred there directly via the Frontier. (Normally in AFTERSHOCK, supplies at the Frontier must first be transferred to the Port or Airport. This no longer applies.) No government (Carana) teams may ever be deployed in rebel-controlled areas at any point. The government does not ever gain or lose OP for anything that happens in these areas.
Second, decide on the political limitations on the HADR-TF player. Three variants are suggested below, but many others are possible.
Variant 1 (loosely based on the current situation in Syria, with many parallels in Yemen too):
HADR-TF may not deploy teams anywhere other than Cluster Coordination. On Days 1-2 and 3-4 HADR-TF receives one team (instead of the usual two). Each turn in which HADR-TF transfers any supplies to the (government-controlled) Port or Airport they lose 1 OP.
Neither the UN nor HADR-TF may conduct security operations. The UN loses 1 OP each time it upgrades the Port or Airport.
Add one additional Logistics marker to the Port and Airport at the start of the game (for a total of two at each location). Carana starts with one less supply and receives one less supply each turn, to reflect the effects of the civil war and international sanctions.
Variant 2 (loosely based on the situation in Iraq after the 1990-91 Gulf War):
HADR-TF may only deploy teams to Cluster Coordination and (rebel-controlled) Districts 3 and 5. Each turn in which HADR-TF transfers any supplies to the (government-controlled) Port or Airport they lose 1 OP.
Neither the UN nor HADR-TF may conduct security operations in government-controlled areas. The UN loses 1 OP each time it upgrades the Port of Airport.
Carana starts with one less supply and receives one less supply each turn, to reflect the effects of the war and international sanctions.
Variant 3 (loosely based on the current situation in Somalia):
HADR-TF may only deploy teams to Cluster Coordination and (government-controlled) Districts 1, 2 and 4. Each turn in which HADR-TF transfers any supplies to the (rebel-controlled) Frontier they lose 1 OP.
Neither the UN nor HADR-TF may conduct security operations in rebel-controlled areas.
Carana starts with two less supplies and receives one less supply each turn, to reflect the effects of conflict, fiscal constraints, and widespread poverty.
Third, use the various blank cards included in AFTERSHOCK to create new event cards, coordination cards, and at-risk cards. (If you create additional At-Risk Cards you will need to increase the number of cards at the start of the game in some districts.) Some suggestions are listed below, but many more are possible.
Security Incident (At-Risk Card). Place a Social Unrest Card in this District. If there are now two or more Unrest Cards in this district, the current player permanently loses a team from this district if they have any present. Then remove this card and flip another. (You may wish to create several of these.)
Security Alert (Event Card). Rising tensions and growing risks spark withdrawal of aid workers. Remove all teams from either District 3 (if Days 1-7) or District 5 (if Weeks 2-12) and place these on the calendar. They will become available again to players in their Human Resource Phase during the next game turn.
Playing Favourites? (Event Card). International aid efforts may be seen as a signal of whether the government enjoys international support. If there are more UN+NGO teams in government areas than in rebel areas, the government (Carana) player gains 1 RP and a Social Unrest card is placed in District 3. Otherwise, they lose 1 RP and a Social Unrest card is placed in District 2.
International Legitimacy (Event Card). Aid coordination meetings may be used by the government to bolster its legitimacy.
If Carana, gain 1 OP if attending two or more Cluster meetings with other players.
If not Carana, gain (Variant 3) or lose (Variants 1-2) 1 OP for each Cluster Meeting you are attending with the government (Carana).
Human Rights Abuses (Event Card). Human rights abuses are common during the conflict—and aid workers may be accused of complicity. The current player loses 1 OP is they have any teams in the same District as a government (Carana) team assigned to security.
Persona Non Grata (Event Card). Regimes may withhold or withdraw visas to influence aid operations. If Carana or the UN drew this card, Carana may remove one UN or NGO team from a District. The owning player regains the team during their next Supply Phase.
Security Coordination (Coordination Card). Retain this card. You may play it at any time to cancel the effects of a Security Incident or Security Alert that would affect you.
Temporary Humanitarian Ceasefire (Coordination Card). You may immediately move 2 supplies from any warehouse to any District where you have a team.
Finally, decide on any other modifications to OP, RP, and winning conditions besides those noted above.
Variants 1, 2 (international community generally opposes government):
The government gains 1 OP each time a rebel-controlled area is resolved without needs being met. This reflects the use of the disaster as a conflict strategy to weaken opposition-controlled areas.
HADR-TF loses 3 OP at the end of the game if the government (Carana) has a OP score of 2 or higher at the end of the game. This represents a situation (as in Syria today and Iraq in 1991) where the international community has no interest in strengthening the incumbent regime.
Variant 3 (international community generally supports government):
Use the regular scoring rules.
I haven’t yet playtested any of this, so questions and feedback are appreciated. Also, many thanks to Tracy Johnson for encouraging me to develop a “humanitarian access mod” to the game.
The following article is written by Betsy Joslyn, a Research Associate for the Joint Advanced Warfighting Division for the Institute for Defense Analysis. Her game research and design has largely focused on great power competition, mis/disinformation, and risk literacy. She received a Master of Science in Terrorism and Homeland Security Policy at American University’s School of Public Affairs. In addition, Betsy served in the Peace Corps in Zambia working as an aquaculture specialist.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, published in 2014, identified that international cooperation was essential to the discussion on global threats posed by climate change. In April 2022, the IPCC finalized the third part of the Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. This report reiterated that international competition and cooperation is a critical enabler for achieving ambitious climate change mitigation goals. “Accelerated international financial cooperation is a critical enabler of low-GHG and just transitions, and can address inequities in access to finance and the costs of, and vulnerability to, the impacts of climate change.”[i] Despite the emphasis on international cooperation, IPCC notes that more international cooperation is required, sooner rather than later, to meet climate objectives by 2050.
When looking at what is needed to establish international cooperation for climate change, government bodies take a few things in mind: popular support for climate treaties and the costs of participating in such treaties. This game is meant to emulate international cooperation in climate change action while balancing popular opinion and costs.
Turning Tides is a microgame designed to demonstrate competing interests between powers to reduce global greenhouse gases (GHGs) at a geopolitical level. This is a highly accessible game that is easy to learn and can be played in under 1 hour.
Design Approach
My approach to designing the game was centered on both the theme and the central mechanic of negotiation. I’ve always loved the combination of cooperative and competitive style games like Lord of the Rings designed by Reiner Knizia and Dead of the Winter designed by Jonathan Gilmour and Isaac Vega. In these games, players are faced with a common foe that can only be defeated together, however, each player must weigh group survival with individual objectives that at some point in the game may compete with the interests of the group.
As a wargame designer, many of my games focus on great power competition at a strategic level where different teams are forced to work together to combat some threats while also ensuring that their countries come out on top at the end of the day.
When given the chance to design a microgame that professionals could use, I knew that this “cooperative and competitive” style mechanic would be the central piece to gameplay.
In terms of the theme of the game, I wanted to design a microgame that would bring value to the field. Something we are discussing in the national security apparatus, but are also struggling to translate into relatable terms.
The purpose of this microgame is to understand the dynamic of competing interests between powers to reduce GHGs at a geopolitical level. Gameplay is meant to highlight the necessity for international cooperation, while also showcasing how difficult international cooperation actually is. As players are weighing the importance of negotiation, they must also balance economic pressures for growth – which often produce greenhouse gases – as well as achieving and maintaining popular support from the people. Each player has been given different climate and popular opinion objectives. While some elements of objectives may overlap, the lack of universal strategic goals creates significant external tensions between the players.
As a microgame, this design demanded simplicity. However, the features used in this game are meant to be viewed as commodities that can be leveraged by the players to exercise diplomacy. Though no model is 100% accurate, this game is meant to provide a useful model that surfaces the ability of players to discuss, negotiate, and strategize actions that will result in the survival of all, and the targeted benefit of one.
Design Challenges and Compromises
One of the biggest challenges I faced when designing this game was aligning the internal validity of the game to the external validity of the theme. As it stands, the game mechanics are balanced to surface the challenges each player must face when leveraging group survival with “winning.” However, the winning conditions that I have set for each player, as it pertains to climate goals, are not based on a specific report or country specific objectives. In addition, my reduction of greenhouse gases from 100% to 0% by 2050 net growth is not quite realistic; “tech” is a blanket term that refers to green technological advancements in renewable energy, batteries, and carbon storage; and, all countries start with the same amount of funding that has equal status. Each of these game features have core internal validity to the balance of the game and the ability to negotiate.
Team PRC: From left to right: Nolan Noble, Sarah Williamson, and Web Ewell grin manically as they prioritize tech investments over global negotiations
However, there are many other elements to climate-related international cooperation that are not represented here. One of the original design mechanics I stripped was an international summit that took place at the beginning of every turn. The U.S. and the E.U. were required to attend the summit, but the PRC was not. The U.S. and the E.U. would have to find incentives to offer the PRC in order to attend. If PRC chose not to attend, they were forced to work unilaterally until the next summit while those who attended the summit would receive increased impacts for a successful reduction roll. In the current version of the game, players have noted that there is little incentive for the PRC to negotiate with other players. Though this is realistic feature of the game, an important lesson of the game is to emphasize the necessity to negotiate, not just the fact that negotiation is hard. To address this challenge, I gave the PRC an Active Player Bonus that only works when negotiating with another government to reduce GHGs. At least 3 times in the game, the PRC may gain an additional popular opinion point (POP) when working with another government to reduce GHGs. Though PRC may not “care” about GHG reduction, they do care about global influence, especially if it means having more than the U.S. In this way, PRC could be convinced to work more with other governments if they’re getting a bonus out of it.
Team EU: From left to right: Peter Perla and Doug Jackson deliberate on a potential negotiation to offer the US on lowering GHGs
In addition to edits made to Active Player Bonuses, the role that technology and popular support has played in the game has gone through many iterations. During a few feedback sessions, I was encouraged to bolster the external validity of the game by adding more detail to what the tech icons represented, and the different abilities that tech could host as the game progressed. I became too focused on this detail and I realized 3 things: the additional detail made the game even more susceptible to external validity criticism, the detail distracted from the original lesson of the game, and the detail was consuming far too much of my limited white space. I ended up removing the augmentation and returned to the original, simpler, depiction of tech.
Team US: From left to right: Gino Saad and Andrew Olsen weigh the consequences of lowering a GHG outside their objectives while gaining global credit for the effort.
POPs became a focal point of contention for many players. Originally, I wanted popular opinion to be domestic element for each government. In this capacity, the U.S. and the E.U. were given victory conditions to gain certain popular opinion metrics, while the PRC was not. However, the game also features an “attack” ability where players could construct information campaigns to harm other government’s popular opinion. This element suggested that popular opinion represented global influence rather than domestic ones. If that was the case, the PRC would care about popular opinion as a victory condition. I decided to redefine popular opinion as international influence and provide PRC with their own popular opinion victory conditions. Rather than having each player obtain a certain number of POPs, I took a page from the game Hedgemony: A Game of Strategic Choices designed by Michael Linick, John Yurchak, Michael Spirtas, Stephen Dalzell, Yuna Huh Wong, and Yvonne Crane, and set the popular opinion victory conditions to world order conditions. The U.S. is trying to have more popular opinion than anyone else, the E.U. is trying to have equal or greater popular opinion than the U.S., and the PRC just wants to make sure that the U.S. does not have the most popular opinion.
Despite the need for simplification, I did find that the probabilities of reduction rolls needed to be more complex. Feedback I received suggested that it was just too easy to reduce GHGs. Originally, increased funds dedicated to GHG reduction dramatically increased the probability of a successful role. To make it slightly harder to reduce GHGs, I created the table below so that increased funds still increased probability of success, but not a dramatic as before (see split probabilities when paying $4-$6).
I have witnessed an array of gameplay strategies for Turning Tides, which is something I love about it. After at least 10 playtest sessions, I have seen only 1 session where all players lost. I have witnessed each of the governments chosen in the game win multiple times, which leads me to believe that the game is not weighed towards one player. In addition, I’ve also seen the game end anywhere between 45 minutes to 2.5 hours. Since the core mechanic of the game is cooperation and competition, this game relies heavily on table talk. This is not a problem if you’re interested in the topic, or enjoy competitive style games. However, this game might not be appealing to players on a time crunch or who want more strategic complexity with less bargaining breaks. The final edit made to the game addressed the pace of gameplay. By observing gameplay, I noticed that the game pace tended to slow down between turns 3-7 as the structure of the game became easier to comprehend and the pressure to negotiate seemed far off. Incentive to work together is largely influenced by one winning constraint: By Turn 10, if there are least 2 GHGs in the red zone, all players lose. To spark additional incentive to negotiate quicker, I introduced a punishment marker at Turn 5: If all 4 GHGs are still in the red zone by Turn 5, all players lose 2 POPs (which will affect probability rolls).
Despite the challenge of aligning the internal validity of the game with the external validity of the theme, I feel that this game, designed under the parameters required of a microgame structure, have accomplished a useful and balanced model.
The lesson I want this game to teach changed over the period of game design, which resulted in about 17 design redos over 2 months. I feel confident that the current game mechanics, simplified as they are, target the complexities and sacrifices required for international cooperation to take climate action despite the external validity gaps that remain in the design.
Moving forward, I would say that the audience for this game is very broad. Turning Tides could be used as an educational tool to increase climate change literacy and awareness, a professional ice breaker, or even a hobby game between friends who have no interest in the topic. Although the game is simple, players looking for more of a challenge are encouraged to design their own objectives cards that represent different countries and governments.
I designed this game with no prompt or guidance from a sponsor. I never realized how hard it is to design a game when you don’t have a client who is looking for a specific lesson to be highlighted. This process reinforced for me that game designers MUST start with a question before they can jump head first into design.
A special shoutout to GUWS faculty advisor, Sebastian Bae. His feedback, suggestions, and ineffable ability to put me out of my comfort zone have been a necessary driving force of this game design process. In addition, I would like to thank the individuals below who took time out of their busy schedules to playtest my game and share key feedback:
Peter Perla
Web Ewell
Sarah Williamson
Andrew Olson
Doug Jackson
Gino Saad
Nolan Noble
Volko Ruhnke
Peter Joslyn
James Sterrett
Jonathen Turner
Tom Vielott
John Miller
Julia McQuaid
Sophia Chang
Evan D’Alessandro
Joe Schmidt
Emerson and Sue Joslyn
Ethan Queen
Tom Plant
Matthew Heidel
Will Trimble
I hope that whoever plays Turning Tides will enjoy the simplicity of the overall game design and appreciate the complexities that such a game is meant to surface.
The mysterious Tim Price set on this little “micro-committee game” on nuclear weapons use, to share via PAXsims. We can’t imagine what possessed him to write it.
The package contains an overview of the current situation regarding Taiwan and the East China Sea, some basic information on playing a matrix game, briefing documents maps, basic event cards, and counters. The game is configured for six players (or team): China and the People’s Liberation Army, Taiwan, the United States, Japan, and Australia.
One needs nothing more than a computer, printer, imagination, and an understanding of matrix games to design matrix game scenarios like this. If you’re looking for additional resources and guidance, however, there is always the Matrix Game Construction Kit (MaGCK).
Tim Price has updated his High North (Arctic crisis) matrix game to include some potential ramifications of the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. You’ll find the latest version below.
PAXsims Research Associate Drew Marriott prepared this report. If you know of other wargames that address a future conflict in Taiwan, let us know in the comments and we will add them in a future update.
Current geopolitical unrest between China and Taiwan increases by the day. While commentators speculate about a future invasion of Taiwan, diplomats attempt to avoid one. And as militaries around the world arm themselves for the worst, hobbyists and professional wargamers have been analyzing the situation through simulations. Check out their work in this collection of reports and tabletop games.
Premise: The U.S. national security apparatus has long focused on preparing for a possible invasion of mainland Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army. In The Poison Frog Strategy, CNAS explores an adjacent possibility: a Chinese invasion of islands within Taiwan’s maritime jurisdiction. The report focuses on scenarios that involve a specific island, but its conclusions are applicable to other Taiwanese territory in the South China Sea.
Content: This scenario begins with a surprise seizure by the People’s Liberation Army of Taiwanese controlled Dongsha Island, followed by an increase in military exercises in the South China Sea. The report suggests that the only plausible strategy for the U.S. —while prioritizing the avoidance of war— would be to unite the world in isolating China diplomatically and economically.
Conclusion: The wargame found that China’s first-mover advantage might prove tenable. The soft-power approach that the U.S. and its allies could adopt to avoid the onus of escalation would, at best, be slow to compel a PLA retreat. At worst, the strategy could be thwarted by advanced economic preparation in China. The report suggests that Taiwan’s best option is to pursue deterrence through multilateral preparation; if China were to succeed in invading the border islands, the report warned, there would be few feasible options to force a retreat.
Premise: This report presents a comprehensive timeline of how China’s current “gray-zone” strategy —a slow but vigilant series of military efforts to wear out Taiwan— might escalate into all out war. Reuters consulted military strategists and officers from Taiwan, the U.S., Australia, and Japan to form the basis of T-Day, and looked to articles produced by Chinese and American sources for additional insight.
Content: The report is composed of chronological scenarios, mapping the potential battle to all out war in East Asia. The escalation of the conflict happens in four phases. First China stages a blockade of Taiwan’s Matsu Islands and then they invade Kinmen Island. When Taipei refuses to negotiate with the PRC over reunification terms, the PLA blockades mainland Taiwan, leading to a full-scale, amphibious invasion of the island.
Conclusion: Reuters ultimately speculates that Taiwan’s military capabilities would crumble at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army, and international efforts from the U.S. and its allies —including military and economic tools for retaliation— may not be enough to stop China.
Premise: This report is the product of a Körber Policy Game staged in May of 2021 alongside Chatham house. It examines the possibility of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait from a European perspective, offering answers to some key questions: how might a Chinese invasion in the Taiwan Strait impact Europe? how should the continent’s leaders position themselves in such a scenario? and what European interests would be at stake?
Content: Crisis participants were given a scenario where China enacts a blockade of the Taiwan Strait and invades Kinmen Island, proceeding to take control of Taiwan’s air and sea borders after military resistance from Taipei. The simulation teams responded by discussing commensurate policy recommendations. They agreed that Europe would be reluctant to engage kinetically, favoring an economic response. Teams highlighted the trade ramifications that the scenario would produce, suggesting that Europe strengthen its resilience to possible economic fallout and diversify its supply chains to mitigate the crisis of inaccessible Chinese goods.
Conclusion: The report emphasizes the importance of determining a united posture towards China within the EU, and supports establishing strong Indo-Pacific connections to deter Chinese aggression in the first place. Europe’s economic dependence on China and ambiguous ties to Taiwan foreshadow a concerning sentiment for democracy: the continent may prioritize continued access to the Chinese market over defending the U.S.-Lead world order.
Hobby commercial games
Pondering the Past
Understanding the geopolitical history of Taiwan is critical to examining the possibility of a future invasion; even more applicable, however, is developing an understanding of the decisions which built this history. The following hobby games familiarize players with Taiwan’s military past:
The aforementioned crisis reports dissect the possibility of an invasion of Taiwan, and describe possible scenarios that could effectively prevent or result from such a conflict. These hobby games enable players to be strategic decision makers, considering for themselves Taiwan’s uncertain future:
When Tim Price isn’t dragging his better half around castles, he designs matrix games. His latest, KMAC-YOYO, looks at the future of Central Asian geopolitics in the wake of the Taliban take-over in Afghanistan.
The game is designed for 6 players: the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and Iran. The package comes with a scenario description, briefing sheets, asset and capability markers, and maps. It also comes with basic instructions on how to play a matrix game, with references to additional online resources.
For those of you interested in designing and running matrix games, check out PAXsim’s Matrix Game Construction Kit and MaGCK User Guide.
In September 2020, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, with the support of the US Department of Energy, published a Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercise Guide.
Public utility commissions (PUCs) are responsible for ensuring adequate, safe, and reliable utility services at reasonable rates. As such, they need to know that jurisdictional utilities’ cybersecurity risk management plans and practices—put in place to mitigate cybersecurity vulnerabilities, counter malicious cyber threats, and rapidly respond and recover from successful attacks—are comprehensive and effective. Exercises are useful for this purpose.
Exercises provide opportunities for participants to demonstrate and assess capabilities in specific areas of interest, including cybersecurity risk management. They also facilitate coordination and help clarify organizational roles and responsibilities.
This Tabletop Exercise (TTX) Guide steps PUCs through the process of creating and executing an exercise specifically designed to examine capacities and capabilities to plan for, respond to, and recover from a cybersecurity incident involving critical energy infrastructure. It complements other resources in NARUC’s Cybersecurity Manual, particularly Understanding Cybersecurity Preparedness: Questions for Utilities, and the Cybersecurity Preparedness Evaluation Tool.1 Coupled with the TTX Guide, these tools comprise a structured, process-driven approach to identifying, assessing, and testing the efficacy of utilities’ cyber risk management plans and practices. This knowledge helps commissions identify cybersecurity gaps, spur utilities’ adoption of additional mitigation and response strategies, and encourage improvements.
Part I details the steps to plan and execute a TTX. Part II reviews the steps required to conduct a seminar-based exercise.2 TTXs are discussion based, typically led by a facilitator who guides participants through one or more scenarios for the purpose of testing the thoroughness and efficacy of relevant plans, processes, and procedures. This format is well suited for commissions’ objective assessment of utilities’ cybersecurity preparedness as well as their own cyber incident response capabilities. Seminars, which are also discussion-based exercises, typically examine a single procedure within a larger plan or a single step in a multistep process.
The exercise guide can be found at the link above. The fuller cybersecurity manual can be found here.
RAND has published the full ruleset, player’s guide, and game aids for the Information Warfighter Exercise wargame, a matrix-style game intended to give players “an opportunity to employ operations in the information environment (OIE) theories, tactics, doctrine, and techniques in a fast-moving, competitive, notional scenario.”
The Marine Corps Information Operations Center (MCIOC) conducts an Information Warfighter Exercise (IWX) — an event designed to provide training on operations in the information environment (IOE) — one to two times per year. MCIOC asked RAND to help develop a structured wargame for IWX with a formal adjudication process. This document contains the ruleset developed, playtested, and implemented during the 2020 IWX cycle.
The IWX wargame is an opposed event in which two teams of players compete in and through the information environment to better support their respective sides in a notional scenario. Teams represent an Information Operations Working Group (IOWG) or information-related Operational Planning Team (OPT), or its adversary force equivalent, as dictated by the scenario. During the game, each team generates a plan for OIE, and players are then called on to add details to their plan, amend that plan dynamically in response to in-game events, prepare discrete game actions as part of plan execution, and make cogent arguments in favor of their team’s actions and against the actions of the opposed team. A panel of expert judges uses a structured process and a random element (dice) to adjudicate the success or failure of actions drawn from the players’ plans.
This document presents the full ruleset for the IWX wargame, including a host of optional rules to allow tailoring the game to specific preferences, needs of the training audience, or scenarios. Handouts and aids for playing the game, as well a brief Player’s Guide, are also available for download.
Tim Price—reclusive starship designer, small-holder, zombie survivalist, and lock-pick—has put together an online version of his recent Bandera Russo-Ukranian conflict matrix game for PAXsims readers, using Google slides. The link to access these is below, but first you need to read these instructions verrrrry carefully.
Go to the Google slides at the link below.
Do not move, alter or edit anything on this slide deck in any way!
Instead, pull down the File menu and make a copy of the presentation for your own use (see below).
Close the original set of slides.
Do whatever you want with the copy!
Using Google slides, any number of users can view the deck, move tokens, and so forth. It’s also easy to clone tokens if you need more, or make up new ones.
Permission is hereby granted to print copies of the game, counters and maps, for educational, professional, or recreational purposes, without restriction (provided you aren’t using them to plan an attack against a neighbouring country or annex part of its sovereign territory.)
The following series of articles was written for PAXsims by Ola Leifler, Magnus Persson, and Ola Uhrqvist.You can read Parts 1 and 2 hereand here.
Concluding thoughts
One of the first impressions was that we were rather overwhelmed by the experience, which is one of the reasons this blog post, long overdue and way too long, did not materialize until at least one academic period had transpired after the main CCM event. However, now that we have gathered our thoughts a bit, we realized that we have probably learned a great number of things so far. For instance:
1. Reasons for creating a megagame on climate change and social transformation
There are many types of games that relate to climate change and negotiations, but few that we feel concern the types of negotiations, dilemmas and interactions that may be common for professionals in companies and citizens in local regions facing the prospect of societal change. One of us, Ola Uhrqvist, had previous experience developing a game about city planning to take both climate adaptation into account— but there, few negotiations were conducted as the game was primarily a single-player web application.
In the literature on learning for a sustainable development, engagement and various pedagogical forms is stressed as key to ensure that learners experience first-hand the dilemmas and difficulties they need to overcome. Furthermore, we noticed that when we pitched the idea of a “Climate Change Megagame”, it immediately piqued people’s interest in a way that acted as an icebreaker and helped us to engage rather diverse groups in conversations. Even though there were practical issues with every single version of the game we have tried, the concept itself has been intriguing enough to make people joining as players or contribute as control team and even contributing to game development. However, to understand exactly which difficulties to subject players, and what type of realistic situations to simulate, has proved to be almost as elusive as real societal transformation.
2. The eternal challenge of playable realism
Serious games always needs to balance between relevance and playability. The activities players engage in, and the type of experience they have, must be of relevance whether it is “realistic” or not. We learned that some types of realism, such as players getting bogged down by managing their daily lives, may not be helpful in ensuring that the resulting experience is relevant to the end goal of understanding dilemmas and options for societal transformation. We wanted the game to offer interesting challenges without directing players too much with respect to what they would want to do. As designers, we can include mechanisms that reflect aspects of reality such as economic capital being vital for investments in infrastructure, say, without going so far as to say that without a growing economy, people would starve to death. We wanted to provide enough context and feedback mechanisms to stimulate discussions and make different visions apparent, without constricting players in such a way that their room for creative discussions and maneuvering would be artificially restricted.
A golden rule for how to ensure players understand the rules well enough to be comfortable about breaking them and understanding just how much freedom they have to negotiate freely probably don’t exist but we understand much better now than before what would count as interesting and relevant challenges compared to “realistic” ones. In our experience minimalism of game mechanics is desirable in order to let participants focus on the content.
3. Recruiting and maintaining a committed and diverse design team
Including more people from the early playtests in game design and discussions made it apparent that it was difficult to ensure equal commitment among all when the game concept changed quite a lot, partly as a result of feedback. Also, we wanted to be open to suggestions about how different groups could contribute to the project, which placed high demands on participants to express clearly what they wanted to contribute to and what they expected. Some of the early contributors who provided invaluable feedback on the game and made it much better in the end still did not feel comfortable joining at the end as the game changed quite a lot between playtests. Though it was necessary to make the changes, it became difficult for all members of the design team to keep up with the ideas for changes that the core group brought forward, especially as we became limited to digital meetings during the pandemic. The take home lesson is the value of a clear aim, participants roles and modes of decision making and communication is increasingly important in a dynamic, explorative project.
4. Going digital
Going digital opened up new opportunities for players from around the world to join and it greatly simplified our ability to collect data on how the game progressed, but also introduced a whole host of new issues. We spent quite some time even after the core game mechanics and graphical elements had been decided to ensure that the digital platform (Miro) could handle all graphical components and the 50 players with decent latency. Therefore, some graphical optimizations were required before the main event took place. For instance, components were merged into bitmaps instead of hundreds of separate graphics components. The communications channel (Discord) was set up very professionally by our Megagame colleague Darren Green from Crisis Games in the UK and that enabled players to have both private and public spaces for communications. Even with such a setup though, some players felt lost between all the channels and the Miro board. Having a technical setup and preparation before the main event, just focusing on the technical aspects of the game would probably have helped some participants who were struggling.
The main event was hosted at a venue where we broadcast everything live from a studio over Vimeo. This worked rather well as a compromise between having only an internal event and only having a studio with professional talking heads but having dual roles as hosts for both the game and the “show” was hard to manage. It would have been better to have studio hosts who could have focused on being hosts. Then again, a digital event that plays out through discussions on Discord and board changes on Miro might not offer enough continuous action for a continuous live show.
5. The importance of good debriefing
The main event was intended to let people experience and reason about the needs for mitigation and adaptation, as in the needs for making changes to our societies that will reduce emissions versus the needs to adapt to climate change we cannot avoid. The primary aim of the debriefing was to capture the perceptions of these potentially conflicting needs, but it became apparent that the participants were mostly preoccupied with thoughts about the game mechanics, graphical elements and direct experiences. A debriefing is very important for a proper learning experience, and for us, the fact that people became preoccupied with the mechanics and graphical elements indicated that these were in fact the objects they thought mostly in terms of directly afterwards. Maybe the game was too heavy on mechanics since it became hard to talk about abstract things such as mitigation and adaptation in direct connection to having played. It would probably have been easier to first address game-specific issues and then later broaden the horizon to comprise the real world.
6. Future development
The project had until this point been run exclusively on a small amount of seed money for a pedagogical project and a lot of personal commitment. We realized that continued work with this require us to leverage our initial experiences and gain access to proper funding for work that could significantly expand on what we have been doing. The game itself is not a goal, it is not even a product that may be finished but at best a way to help us think better, as designers and players, about what a sustainable society may be like. With some luck, we may have a chance to build on all we have learned and enable others to learn as we have about how to move constructively towards a societal transformation to sustainability.
Ola Leifler is a senior lecturer in software engineering at Linköping University who, over the last ten years and upon learning more about the state of the world and the effects of how we educate, has formed a strong interest in learning for a sustainable development. With a special interest in boardgames, role-playing games and simulations, he now explores how they can be harnessed to promote more constructive thinking about global challenges.
Magnus Persson is a translator and academic proofreader with an interest in board game development who has been serious about games for as long as he can remember and only in recent years came into contact with the megagame genre and the concept of serious games.
Ola Uhrqvist is a teacher and researcher in the field of Environmental and Sustainability Education with a special interest in using serious games as a tool to enhance engagement in and understanding of complex issues, such as environmental and social change.
The following series of articles was written for PAXsims by Ola Leifler, Magnus Persson, and Ola Uhrqvist.You can read Part 1 hereand Part 3 here.
Playtesting
Play-test 1: Card-driven anarcho-communism
The first iteration of the game was card-driven and centered around meeting different needs such as housing, food and transportation needs, while also being about changing the way you fulfill those needs (from more carbon-intensive variants to less carbon-intensive ones). Much of the game centered on meeting needs and negotiating with local politicians as well as companies on how to do that in a low-carbon manner. We had 15 players, three different municipalities in our region along with some companies and regional politicians. Everything was definitively NOT ready, but we understood enough of what we wanted to do so that we could start playing the game. After a few rounds of learning how to fulfill needs in general, people started getting creative about the use of different transportation methods so that we ended up having an electric garbage truck from one of the municipalities helping the population with food deliveries. Not quite sure about whether that would have conformed to sanitary guidelines, but we were rather happy about the level of creative thinking the group had going.
On the whole, the initial playtest left a bewildering mix of impressions. On the one hand, everyone present very much loved the format and engaged in lengthy discussions about how to develop the game further. On the other hand, we had succeeded in reducing carbon footprints in a way that may not have revealed very interesting tensions. As one commented, as players we seemed to behave as an “anarcho-communist collective”. Maybe not what we’d expect to see. We were not sure about how to interpret the outcome either. The companies were rather willing to forego profits and instead help the population get goods and services to meet their needs at cost. The local politicians had few restraints on their willingness to spend or meet needs or expectations from the local population. The emissions were not important in providing guidance to the players, and were not even noticed as part of playing. We succeeded without having very difficult conversations. In all, our collective success and limited sources of friction gave us much to consider for our next iteration of the game. Was the game too easy? Were we just too few to create interesting social dynamics? Did we need to pitch business owners or politicians as antagonists to the overall goal of achieving a transformation to reduce emissions, or did we simply need stronger incentives or opportunities for people to act in their own interests?
However, one design decision that was made at this stage was critical, and influenced the final game version: the general population of our region, Östergötland, would be represented in the game by players who would be able to take actions and make decisions, not as abstract values and mechanics such as tracks manipulated by decision-makers such as politicians, corporations, etc. This decision caused quite a few problems in the later stages of the design process, but in the end contributed to add a layer of interaction to the game that would otherwise have been missing and possibly sets the CCM apart from other megagames. In a megagame about, for example, the Napoleonic Wars, there are players playing generals and the officers they command, but there are no players playing the actual troops fighting the battle – whether they march where the general orders them to or refuse to move is most often decided by a morale roll, it is not the decision of a player. In this respect, the CCM was designed to bring to the table the debate taking place in society and the sometimes – from a societal planning point of view – irrational refusal by the entire or parts of the population to follow regulations and use available options to create a sustainable future.
Play-test 2: Overwhelming complexity
From the first to second iterations, we made several changes to explore designs hinted at by these questions. For one thing, we introduced quality of life, as a general mechanism that would see players optimizing well-being for the populations in their respective municipality, where reduced well-being of a population would trigger different sorts of social unrest.
Two main game mechanics were introduced in this version: the Quality of Life (QoL) tracker and Climate Impact tokens. The idea for the former began as a perceived need to track the progress of individual players in a clearer and more comparable way – an attempt to introduce the neighbour effect, i.e. ‘if my neighbour has it, I want it too’. This functioned as a form of victory points for the population players, which was affected by the overall goals in an indirect way, as extreme weather events could impact a player’s QoL, but would not necessarily do so depending on the type of event and what community it impacted.
Here, each population player played a social stratum of the population: the population player’s needs were affected by the generations in their part of the population – each player began with 2 or 3 generations, each of which aged between turns and ran a risk (represented by a die roll) of ‘dying’ of old age and ill health. The latter was represented by a tracker, and players had to keep track of their generations so that they got proper health care, either from the local authorities or by purchasing it from private companies. This was introduced to give players a sense of relationship to a part of the population in one of the towns or municipalities.
There were quite a few things to keep track of in this version of the game. All the needs cards in this version of the game had been replaced by boards and trackers, and players had to run back and forth to get the right resources to cover the needs boxes on their player boards. Some thought had been given to this being an obstacle in a game of a hundred players in the same room, and so some of the aspects, such as housing, had been placed on the board beforehand and did not change much during the game. Overall, however, the complexity of scaling up the original version of the game became a major problem: over 4000 cards and 50 player boards was needed for a game intended to be played by an estimated 30 players for the playtest – a climate impact issue in itself, as was noted by the control team when spending two hours cutting cards and boards. Also, if all 30 playtesters had turned up, we came to realize that there would have been chaos in the bargaining to get the resources they needed.
The Climate Impact (CI) tokens was tied to the overall sustainability goal, which had been rather vaguely formulated in the first version of the game. The idea was that each action would carry with it its own ‘shame pile’, as one of the team members called it, in the form of a pile of CI tokens that accumulated over the lifetime of the resource. As an example, a good produced in Asia, with a certain amount of CI token already on it as decided by its production method and mode of transportation to Europe, would be purchased from the world market by a corporate player and then sold to a population player. As part of the negotiation to sell the good, the corporate player could offer to sell it at a lower price to if the population player would also take with them all CI tokens – or else offer to take all or some if the CI tokens in exchange for a higher price. The idea of the ‘shame pile’ was for each player to stand at their player board at the end of each turn and take in the sight of the climate impact they had given rise to during the turn. This was intended to provide incentive to opt for products and production methods that would lead to fewer CI tokens for the player, while giving them tangible feedback on their progress towards a sustainable society.
The complexity issue became apparent even with fewer playtesters than anticipated, and we figured out that we needed a better way of managing the small communities in the region, so we thought that having groups of players collaborating in smaller teams explicitly for the purpose of a small community might be a way forward. Also, we wanted to understand if the game design could work with a wider group of players and decided to recruit playtesters from a broader group for the next playtest.
Playtest 3: Decreasing complexity and the breakdown of the market system
Thanks to broader marketing and better advance planning, the third playtest featured a much more varied group of players, with roughly 25 playtesters of varying ages and backgrounds that attended the session. This was the first time we encountered accessibility issues relating to e.g. English as the only language for rules and components to cater the the minority of English-only participants, the height of tables in relation to wheelchairs and other aspects which had not been considered before with our smaller group.
This version of the game was a streamlined version of the one used in Playtest 2, and thought had been given to decreasing the complexity of the game and focus on the sustainability goals while not giving up the idea of simulating the problems faced by the population players in meeting their needs of the various generations of the population strata they represented. Generations were made a more central game aspect as they provided population players with actions and income, and the population players were also given more distinct roles with role-specific actions, e.g. the ability to steal from other population players or increase the resources gained from certain standard actions. The number of players per population had also been increased from one to two or three to decrease the complexity and workload of each player, and as it was beginning to dawn upon the game design team that megagames are played by groups of players, which had been noted in Playtest 1, when individual players banded together to discuss things and make sense of situations.
The political system, which had been absent in Playtest 2 due to a lack of players, was incorporated into the game through the population player’s vote cards, which allowed them to give one of three political parties their vote. The parties, which were represented by one or two players, between them decided on regional policy. Such policies included taxes and restrictions – the power each party wielded was decided by how many vote cards they had and their ability to make voters stay with their party. The population players could change their vote at any time. This system proved to be rather static, as almost all vote cards were placed with one of the parties and few players gave their vote any thought during the game, leaving the players of two parties to try to get people to change their votes, which was in vain due to them being fully occupied with trying to sort out all of their needs and actions. This may have been rather realistic, as some of the players noted, but not great in terms of game experience.
Two other roles were completely overwhelmed: the local authority player and the corporate players. These were more or less assaulted by a horde of population players demanding all kinds of goods and solutions to their problems, and getting access to market and local authority players became so difficult that the game rounds ended before all players had had a chance to get to the front of the line that formed in front of the market table. Thus, this version of the game showed that it would be impossible to hold on to the idea of simulating the complexity of the economic system of supply and demand – even in simplified form – by moving cards and tiles from one place to another. This also proved to be the fall of the ‘shame pile’ system as it had been imagined up to this point, as it proved far too problematic to transport the CI tokens in the room.
Research also made a small appearance with the introduction of research players, which tried to get funding to carry out research projects that would improve production processes and other aspects of the game. As this had not been given proper thought, the main role of the researchers, who represented universities as well as private research institutions, became to distribute university education and discuss matters connected to the Swedish government, which was not represented by a player in this game, but rather appeared on screens with different kinds of national policy, which the politicians were to deal with.
After the playtest, further playtests and the main game event was postponed due to restrictions following the pandemic, which left ample time for reflections and rebuilding the game. In May 2020, the game design team met to discuss a heavily revised version of the game, which relied on the ‘steady-state system’ to deal with the choke points presented by the reliance of population players on the market and local authority players to get hold of the resources they needed to play the game. The object of this was to place more focus on the issue of discussing the overall goal of the game—a societal transformation towards a sustainable society, which had been more or less completely ignored by players during Playtest 3 – again, rather realistic, but not ideal for a game such as the CCM.
Even though we wanted to illustrate that as citizens we have to spend our time managing our own lives instead of considering changing lifestyles and promoting a societal transformation, this was an unwanted piece of “realism” in CCM. Both game designers and playtesters wanted an immersion in the decisions and dilemmas inherent in societal transformation. To simply implement mechanisms that deflect from those decisions because those mechanisms are in place in real life would not stimulate the kinds of discussions we wanted. In that way, we did not want a “realistic” game experience but an engaging, immersive and relevant experience. We realized the difference between the two at about this point.
Playtest 4: The making of a megagame
The fourth and final playtest was held in October and was partly digital – some players sat by their computers in the same room as the control team (the only restriction at that time involved groups over 50 people) and others participated from their homes over Discord. This was in preparation of the main event, which in the end were to be entirely digital, a fact that was suspected at this point in time. Just under 20 players and control team members participated, and the playing was done using a Miro board.
During Summer 2020, the game had been reinvented based on the lessons learned during Playtests 1-3 and the lead game designer’s improved understanding of megagames after studying them more closely over the past year. Population players were assigned roles tied to age group (young, working-age, old) rather than social stratum and, together with a local authority player, placed in groups based on which community in Östergötland they represented. This made it easier for players to act as a group against other groups, but also gave each player an individual income and a special ability, which both made them useful to the group and put them in a position to negotiate with the group members to reach their individual goals. The same was done for the corporate players, the researchers, and the politicians, who were all placed in groups (the business community, the research community, and three different political parties) with both common and individual goals. A map of the region divided into hexagons and some rules connected to it made the impact of extreme weather events and actions such as farming and harvesting forest clearer.
The most notable change was the disappearance of the market system and the cards or tiles for various needs as this proved to be a major detraction from the discussions we wanted to promote through the game. The constant negotiations to fulfil needs were replaced by an abstract ‘steady-state’ system in which only changes were recorded, and the needs of each community were reduced to four areas (food, goods, transportation, and housing). Each area was represented by a track with six boxes: three orange (technological solutions) and three blue (changes to lifestyle). By investing economic capital (earned primarily by working-age population players and local authority players), social capital (earned primarily by young population players), and cultural capital (old population players) the communities could either buy technological solutions or make changes to their lifestyle to decrease their community’s CI, which was displayed on the game board in relation to the goal of a CO2-free society in 2050.
Most of the lifestyle changes were available from the start of the game as they involved reducing consumption, often at the assumed social costs (which resulted in negative effect cards being drawn to affect the community occurring at the end of turn). The technological solutions, however, were mostly unavailable at the start of the game and had to be unlocked by the business community, which in turn relied on the research community to make the necessary technological advancements. Thus, economic capital flowed from the corporate players to the researchers, who worked hard to research the technologies that would allow the business players to unlock the technological solutions on the communities’ boards, allowing them to be purchased by the communities. However, even with technological solutions unlocked, community players could choose not to buy it and instead opt to implement lifestyle changes to reduce their climate impact.
In this version of the game, the business community was made up of corporate players without specific roles, which made them act more like anonymous risk capitalists than local businesses.
Also, in this version the communities’ choices of technology and lifestyle did not affect the income of the corporate players which we realized was a missed opportunity for conflicting interests.
Regarding research, a single player handled research using a deck of cards in which they put research objectives that came into effect as soon as they were drawn from the deck (this could be sped up using economic and cultural capital to draw additional cards, increasing the chances of success), which made the impact of research very low, which may be a realistic interpretation, but made the research sub-game less rewarding.
As for the politics, no politicians were included in this playtest and instead one of the control team took on the role of discussing with anyone who wanted to contact the regional/national government, regarding, for example, increased research grants. No vote cards were used as this aspect of the game design was at this time in doubt whether they would actually contribute to the game experience. In the end it was concluded that they would, as they were reinstated in a slightly different form in the final version.
The game lasted for two rounds out of the planned three, and the general feeling among the players afterwards was that the game would be very interesting to play, which resulted in several of the playtesters joining the control team for the main event. The game design team felt that the game inspired the intended kind of negotiations, even though feedback from the debriefing session mainly related to the game experience rather than to its connection to the real world. At this stage, we felt we were approaching what we imagined a proper Megagame experience should be like, and we were feeling increasingly confident that we could pull this off for a larger audience.
Some of the major lessons from the fourth playtest were that we needed some tighter connections between different groups of players. For instance, all corporations (each being run by one or two players) were given specific abilities and goals that were directly related to either local production (farmers, private forest owners, local factory owners, etc.) or import businesses (food store chains, import goods businesses, import car dealers, etc.), reflecting the conflict between local supply and global trade. The final version of the game was to feature two main contentions as we had uncovered from literature on differences between sustainability visions: technological change and intact/growing economy versus behavioural changes to reduce the economy, and global solutions versus local self-sufficiency.
Also, the community players’ decisions to make behavioural changes was made to affect the income of business owners in the final version of the game and research became directly connected to the business community’s ability to make technological solutions available to the communities.
The main event: Playtest 5
The main event was held November 21, 2020 and attended (digitally) by some 40 players from different countries. From our earlier playtests, we now had a well-functioning control team and managed to host the game from a studio at the local concert hall in Linköping which had been retrofitted into a studio for digital events during the pandemic. Two of us, Ola Leifler and Ola Uhrqvist, acted as both hosts and play leaders. As we ended up with roughly half the players required for a full game, it was decided that half the communites on the map (four out of eight) were not to be played. The work leading up to the event included a control team briefing session held via Discord and session a few days before the event, and a few days before that the sending out of 4-page role and rules documents to players.
The changes that had been made to the version used in Playtest 4 involved the completion of the business and research communities as outlined above, and the addition of the regional council (politicians) and vote cards. Further reductions in complexity of game mechanics had been made, which resulted in cultural capital being removed and social capital being changed to social change tokens, which represented the snowball effect of change begetting change in that the more social change tokens were used, the more the young population players received the turn after. The old population players were also given a single social change token, as well as the power to make populations (now tokens on the game board) into generalists that could survive without the support of modern society to bring this option to the table as well.
Final version of the game board: overview.
The politicians were divided into three distinct parties and given the option to grant economic capital to aid the communities and the business and research communities in their efforts achieve specific boxes on their development tracks, which provided them with both incentive for negotiations with other players and collaboration between the parties.
The individual goal of the politicians was to collect as many vote cards as possible, which all players (not just the populations) had been given and were free to give to any politician at any point up to the penultimate turn. Players could not take back their vote once cast, so it was important not to make the wrong choice or sell out too cheap in negotiations with politicians; most players waited to the very last minute to give someone their vote. The vote was used in an election held at the end of the penultimate turn, which decided which party/-ies would control power in the last turn. As the votes spread quite evenly the party with the most votes still had to make deals with at least one party made deals in the last round, so this did not change matters very much.
The outcome of the game was that the four communities very nearly made it to a carbon-free society in 2050. As expected, most communities did not opt for only technological solutions or only behavioural changes but went with both, which left the business community rather poor at the end of the game due to heavy investments in research paired with loss of income from the reduction of consumption following lifestyle changes. The differences between communities was mostly during the first round, when some communities (primarily the large ones) opted to wait for the technological solutions to turn up (or even actively invested in research to make that happen), whereas others engaged all they could in lifestyle changes (the small and medium ones, who had little economic capital). During the second and third turns, the former made many lifestyle changes too, likely because they had the capital to do so and did not want to take any chances, and the latter gained handsome deals from the business community, which was trying to expand business to make up for lost income.
Final version of the game board: close-up.
After the final round and looking at the results, debriefings were held and afterwards analysed (see a separate report. From a game design point of view, it was concluded that the game may have been a bit too easy to ‘win’, as in there may have been too much economic capital in relation to the price of unlocking the development boxes. On the other hand, all parts of the game functioned as intended and there was a great deal of negotiation going on, and the general tendency was for players to become more and more comfortable in their roles with each turn, which suggested that the game is possible to understand and make sense of. This was also suggested by the player debriefings, and the initial confusion reported by some appears to be mostly related to the megagame experience being difficult to envision beforehand, as well as the all-digital format which made it challenging to see how you could engage in conversations with other players when not in the same physical location.
Ola Leifler is a senior lecturer in software engineering at Linköping University who, over the last ten years and upon learning more about the state of the world and the effects of how we educate, has formed a strong interest in learning for a sustainable development. With a special interest in boardgames, role-playing games and simulations, he now explores how they can be harnessed to promote more constructive thinking about global challenges.
Magnus Persson is a translator and academic proofreader with an interest in board game development who has been serious about games for as long as he can remember and only in recent years came into contact with the megagame genre and the concept of serious games.
Ola Uhrqvist is a teacher and researcher in the field of Environmental and Sustainability Education with a special interest in using serious games as a tool to enhance engagement in and understanding of complex issues, such as environmental and social change.
The following series of articles was written for PAXsims by Ola Leifler, Magnus Persson, and Ola Uhrqvist.You will find Parts 2 and 3 here and here.
Part 1: Building a game about regional transformation towards a sustainable society
We have made major breakthrough in understanding cultural change and human behaviour”!
“VOTE for the Market Prophets if you believe in emission free transport, eco-building, repair shops and advanced food technologies such as synthetic meat”!
How do you convince people, a lot of people, to engage in meaningful conversations, or wild speculations such as those above, about societal transformations towards a sustainable future? How can you bring different perspectives to life through roleplaying in a way that not only roleplaying nerds can handle? How can you bring over 50 people from all over the world to sit in front of computers for 8 hours, starting from 3am or ending in the middle of the night? As it turns out, a Megagame on societal transformation, the Climate Change Megagame (CCM), was just what the doctor ordered. That it came to fruition as a digital event in the middle of a pandemic came as a surprise to those of us involved, but we speculate that it may have been a result from sending invitations for participation, and with people demonstrating and interest in participating, we settled on a date, panicked upon realizing that we had to create an all-digital version of the whole thing, and somehow forgot our panic and got to work. This is our story, as they say.
In early 2019, two of us (Ola Leifler & Ola Uhrqvist), who had met a number of times before but not really worked together, came to realize that we are both engaged in ensuring that learning becomes a platform for working towards a sustainable development, and we are both interested in creative approaches to learning as well including the use of boardgames and role-playing. One of us had heard about Megagames from a boardgame review site (Shut Up & Sit Down) but we had never played one ourselves. However, the concept sounded interesting enough and we also happened to have some seed money from a pedagogical project involving how to make use of climate simulation data in education, so we enlisted our third core member Magnus Persson as lead game designer and started our journey.
At the start, we wanted to illustrate how a societal transformation towards a long-term sustainable society would induce tensions between regional actors and interests such as conservation groups, business interests, the general public and politicians in a Swedish region of 500 000 inhabitants. Also, we wanted to make it clear that even as climate change effects will not be felt exactly the same by our region as others, and effects will be cumulative and delayed, there will be disruptions to food production and serious extreme weather events in the coming decades. The exact nature of tensions and future visions were not very clear initially though, even as we read through reports from different researchprojects as well as national transformation initiatives. It became clear that visions for a transformed society could look rather different. There was also a whole lot of research on synergies and trade-offs between the different sustainable development goals which seemed to indicate that there are many layers of interactions between the different goals, both on regional but also national and international levels. An initial source of tension that we found to be interesting to explore through a Megagame concerned whether to make changes to our current way of life as we anticipate that it is not long-term sustainable, or focus on achieving short-term goals for ourselves such as going on vacation, building a house, buying groceries or finding a decent pair of shoes.
So, was our challenge just to create a simulation of a region in a complex global industrial society? That would have been far too easy. We soon realised that this was just the point of departure on top of which we also had so simulate different futures depending on the paths the participants would embark upon and the transformation to get there. Oh, yes, we almost forgot, the game had to be comprehensible enough to be grasped in less than 20 minutes.
Ola Leifler is a senior lecturer in software engineering at Linköping University who, over the last ten years and upon learning more about the state of the world and the effects of how we educate, has formed a strong interest in learning for a sustainable development. With a special interest in boardgames, role-playing games and simulations, he now explores how they can be harnessed to promote more constructive thinking about global challenges.
Magnus Persson is a translator and academic proofreader with an interest in board game development who has been serious about games for as long as he can remember and only in recent years came into contact with the megagame genre and the concept of serious games.
Ola Uhrqvist is a teacher and researcher in the field of Environmental and Sustainability Education with a special interest in using serious games as a tool to enhance engagement in and understanding of complex issues, such as environmental and social change.
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