Climate culture game

Schools are a slice of humanity: Everyone brings both their wonderful innate goodness and their challenging globby muck to the classroom. Creating a safe and supportive school culture is one of the most difficult tasks principals face as fearless school leaders. When they succeed, it helps everyone—students, teachers, and themselves—bring out the goodness and reduce the muck.

Mindful Breathing. Thus, principals who start their staff meetings with a moment to breathe in and breathe out are communicating to teachers that their well-being is important. Many studies show that a few mindfully taken deep breaths can also help everyone let go of the anxiety, stress, and negative emotions that are so often pervasive in our schools.

Slowing down to breathe gives everyone permission to stop and connect with that part of themselves that makes them human—a good reminder given that schools are in the business of developing human beings! Active Listening. Tentatively slated for , Terra Nil is the latest title from South African indie studio Free Lives , which previously commented on war and masculinity—in its own unique way—with the hyperbolic Broforce and Genital Jousting.

One of the goals of lead designer Sam Alfred is to show that city builders can still be fun and engaging even if you strip away, well, the building. The map always remains the same size. The game requires you to balance the levels of various flora, and you cannot simply buy your way to having enough forest or wetland.

I think larger studios know this, but it is much easier as an indie to comment on themes like these. What, then, would a political city builder look like? How could the next SimCity or Skylines make players meaningfully engage with climate change? Studies by Rooney-Varga and others suggest that games can help participants grasp complex concepts, elicit emotional responses, and increase motivation to act.

Soon after his climate-change—game brainstorm, Lawler approached Dargan Frierson, an atmospheric scientist at UW.

Frierson was immediately intrigued. To form EarthGames, the pair teamed up with experts in computer science and game design. EarthGames gathered about 2 dozen people, mostly university students and faculty, to crank out games in 48 hours.

Participants formed their own teams and could use climate data or consult with climate and game experts. The games had to focus on climate adaptation, such as building seawalls or planting drought-tolerant crops, but developers otherwise had free rein. For each event, they had to dispatch one of four experts—an urban planner, ecologist, agricultural scientist, or climate scientist—with the right skills to solve the problem. Players earned high scores based on how many crises they successfully addressed during the allotted time.

The game was meant to show the many impacts of climate change and highlight concrete ways to prepare for them, Frierson says. In the case of a cooperative board game called AdaptNation , people played city leaders who had to manage resources such as water and food while preparing for drought, ocean acidification, and other climate-related challenges. If players made it through four rounds of play without running out of resources too many times, they won.

Visitors could play Climate Quest on computers and AdaptNation at a table with guidance from members of the development team. One undergraduate team and a professional software developer created Life of Pika , in which users help a pika—a small mountain mammal sensitive to rising temperatures—run and collect food without overheating. Other projects brought the idea of climate change closer to home. Players receive a plea for help from a character in a world beset by environmental catastrophes.

The team has presented them at museums and shared them with Washington schools, Frierson says. But EarthGames hopes to expand its reach by creating software modules that other game developers can use. One module in the works simulates and visualizes how changes in greenhouse gas emissions affect global climate and the probability of regional extreme weather events.

And since we humans are basically primed to seek pleasure and avoid pain, this means plenty of people just plug their ears and hum when faced with a lot this this downer information.

Sorry about that thing I said the other day; I was just hangry. But if we can better grasp the way things used to be, we can really get properly terrified at the scope and speed of the change occurring on the surface of the Earth now, and maybe fix it. The only newsroom focused on exploring solutions at the intersection of climate and justice. Our in-depth approach to solutions-based journalism takes time and proactive planning, which is why Grist depends on reader support.

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