Playing at Solving the Climate Crisis while the World Burns

A few weeks back I had the pleasure of joining a day where board game designer Matteo Menapace talked with a group of gamers about his recent game, Daybreak. Matteo introduced the game as an effort to create a realistic but optimistic way to grapple with the climate emergency. He noted how games can reveal the brokenness of a system: like Monopoly (before it was Monopoly) was originally designed as a critique of capitalism, and could be played cooperatively, where players work together to help all succeed financially. Hence his choice to make his climate change game cooperative. It was cool to hear this, and even cooler to be sitting in the Yale School of Public Health, with a few public health and climate students and a former EPA employee to test out the game.¹

Now, I love cooperative games—Pandemic is one of my favorite all time games and in that context, it feels natural to imagine the world working together to stop a pandemic.² Some may argue the efforts to stop the COVID pandemic revealed otherwise, but while not necessarily a success, there were researchers, medics, scientists, operations experts and others (all roles in the game) doing their best to solve the crisis (and for those who have played Pandemic, not every game ends in a victory, and even those that do, there’s a lot of damage on the board!).

But climate change feels fundamentally different. It is not an eruption of a curable disease, but a symptom of a growth-oriented competitive consumer economic system in which eight billion humans are being manipulated to live ever more material and materialistic lifestyles (which, in other words, suggests winning will be difficult if possible at all).

Elegant Design

Before getting into a further critique though, I was impressed with the beauty of the game and its fundamental mechanic: each player produces a certain number of emissions each round. Players can take actions to reduce emissions and keep up with growing human energy demands (some of which stem from electrifying polluting industries and power plants) and at the end of the round players tally up their emissions, subtract what the forests and oceans can absorb and then raise the temperature—causing all sorts of crises and the decline of ecological systems (forests, ice cover, etc.), which occasionally triggers a climate tipping point. The other element of the game is growing your ecological, social, and infrastructure resilience, which helps prevent damage from the crises, and preventing “communities in crisis,” which if you have too many lead to defeat. Finding the right balance between mitigation and adaptation is the one of the most innovative (and challenging) aspects of this game.

That said, it is incredibly techno-optimistic. It conveys, strongly, that a combination of decarbonizing energy sources (and yes, that includes nuclear³), greening industry, planting trees and capturing carbon gets us to drawdown—that’s actually the goal of the game: when you pull emissions cubes from the thermometer rather than adding them (before six rounds pass or any player is overwhelmed by growing numbers of “communities in crisis” chits), you collectively win.

Of course, a game honestly dealing with climate change would have been unpalatable to most casual gamers: either focused on economic and population degrowth to truly address overshoot (which most people do not understand or have yet to come to terms with) or worse, perhaps one on ‘Starting a Pandemic’ or maybe a revolution, or actually, now that I think about it, the game Spirit Island!

That said, there is an economic degrowth card and an “Empower women and girls” card—though no card directly encouraging smaller family size or reproducing less. There were also cards encouraging shifts away from meat, and creating walkable cities, but again, the vast majority of actions were green tech focused, promoting a vision of green growth, and replacing dying ecological capacity with engineered carbon capture infrastructure. It is not the future I want to inhabit (even as we actively head there).

The other element that was hard to stomach in this moment of failing global cooperation is the idea that the four players: U.S., Europe, China, and the Rest of the World (!), happily cooperate, sharing cards, helping others’ populations rather than their own—which has to happen or winning is nearly impossible. But can you imagine an announcement that “The U.S. is going to give $100 billion to Africa to build solar panels instead of building them here?” Even under President Biden, I can’t. And now in a moment where U.S. AID was just dismantled, it seems like a bad joke.

That’s not to say some cooperation is far-fetched. Until the Trump Administration, there was a growing consensus around methane capture, around corporate sustainability reporting, around national emissions limits, and technology transfer for renewables. And to be fair, the game did come out during the Biden era. But now, the world is fundamentally and irrevocably changed. Adding in optional ‘variable win conditions’ could add to the fun and replayability. For example players could draw a secret card in the beginning that shapes their final score, so that at the end of the game, China gets extra points for having at least 50 green energy capacity, or everyone who still produces cattle lose points, so that each player gets a numerical score and while all win, someone wins a bit more!⁴

Final point: it is an excellent introduction to the many converging and fractaling topics around the climate, resilience, and sustainability. As a researcher who dives deep into the sustainability news every week, it kind of felt like I was working! But as an introduction to the complicated and daunting interplay of issues, it couldn’t be better. I recommend giving it a try and, if you want to but don’t think you can find folks to join you, there is an online version (still a board game) where you can play with others online or just play the solo-variant. Of course, in either case, you’ll still be spreading the global eco-capitalist vision of the future. If that doesn’t sound appealing, I definitely recommend Spirit Island!

Endnotes

1) Amazingly, only two folks at the School of Public Health found time for the game—yes, it was 11:30 on a Thursday morning, but well, I thought students have time for cool things. Fortunately there were also events at the Yale School for the Environment, the New Haven Library, and Back Again, a board game store in Middletown—none heavily populated but at least they added up to a slightly larger cohort.

2) FYI: the designer of Pandemic, Matt Leacock, co-designed Daybreak!

3) Speaking of nuclear energy, I just watched the disturbing HBO documentary about the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. As that reveals, we should take great caution building out our nuclear power capabilities. Between conflict, disasters, and human error, this is a high risk energy source. And while I don’t recommend shutting down those already in service, it seems unwise to build more, especially in the flippant way we’re starting to: two weeks ago the Trump Administration announced a nuclear company could draft its own Environmental Impact Assessment for the building of advanced nuclear reactors! WTF, I mean seriously, WTF?

4) It’s really hard to not mention my own attempt at a climate change game in this context, Catan: Oil Springs (hence I relegate this comment to the endnotes), as it offers a nice balance between cooperation and competition. Everyone had to cooperate (i.e. on using less oil and impeding those who resisted curbing their oil use) or everyone loses, but someone can still win (if all don’t lose), becoming the biggest civilization (like in traditional Settlers of Catan). And even in the case all lose, the most environmentally proactive can lose least, receiving international aid to be relocated to a new island (just don’t ask what happens to the other settlers of Catan!).