"How can we fund indie games tackling climate resilience in new ways?"
Meet developers where they are, in terms of both climate knowledge and actual physical locations and (often obscure) online platforms. Recognize not just solid, existing climate content, but tangential topics and aesthetics to find the developers who want to join the fight, but still need some guidance.
Competencies
- Recorded contact information, data on more than 75 games and developers with climate-related games, or similar themes about improving communities. This was a deep-cutting search from multiple sources: Steam, Twitter, Reddit, and in-person at GDC '22.
- Created a form for interested studios to reach out to us with pertinent information about their games in a streamlined process.
- Created a short guide that summarized key information about designing games for climate change that could be tackled by developers at a variety of levels of design expertise to help them reach our expectations and make games that more effectively change players' minds about climate.
Findings
- I should've asked more about our existing connections, since other members of the team already had contacts lined up for these grants.
- I researched how publishers ask games to pitch and based our form off typical requirements as well as our unique needs.
- Having conversations with developers was key to learning about their visions when they were still early in working on their games. Often times the climate content wasn't yet integrated or central to the theme.
Context
The Climate Resilience Center Resilience Center has provided two $50k grants, one each to the games Eco and Garden Story, to include climate resilient gameplay, reaching hundreds of thousands of players of their 1 billion total goal. I was tasked with standardizing this process and scouting games that showed promise for further grants.