"How do we make a resource for designing games to facilitate player action on climate change?"
The IGDA's Climate Special Interest Group created the Environmental Game Design Playbook as a digestible resource of tactics for game developers at various levels of experience, and practicing different disciplines, to facilitate player climate action.
Competencies
- Proofread, provided suggestions, and edited large sections of the document.
- Provided outline text for at least one of the tactics listed- individual contribution wasn't tracked.
- Promoted the use of this document among independent developers and within the organization I was working for at the time, The Atlantic Council's Climate Resilience Center.
Findings
- I learned about an enormous amount of existing games that tackle the climate crisis directly and indirectly through working on the doc!
- Creating a guide of this sort with sectioned content as opposed to a linear 'narrative' that needs to be read in full makes it far more approachable and useful in practice.
- Not being tied to financial interests allowed the team to provide solutions that are effective, even if they are antagonistic to global imperialism, capitalist expansion, etc.
Context
The International Game Developer's Association (IGDA) contains a number of Special Interest Groups, the Climate SIG amongst them. I joined as I was trying to find a place to work in mitigating climate change. With many initiatives and connections to organizations like the Climate Resilience Center, I was a helpful ambassador between the two, and contributor to this paper.