Play and the Environment: Games Imagining the Future

Play and the Environment is a current research project funded by the Libellud Foundation and Game in Lab.  

The project draws on Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre and the methodological innovations of the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, a research centre based in the university that specialises in co-production and participatory methodologies. Play and the Environment is led by Chloé Germaine and Paul Wake, with support from Benjamin Bowman and Nicola Branch and runs from September 2021 for twelve months.  

Young people are leading responses to the climate crisis across the globe, drawing attention to the transformations needed to tackle climate change. At the same time, board game designers are using board games to communicate the science of climate change and to start conversations about social responsibility. Play and the Environment uses participatory methods to investigate how such board games can support young people’s understandings of the crisis; to evaluate games as a tool through which young people can explore and share their ideas about the climate crisis; and to identify the ways in which games mobilise individual or collective action. While based on the assumption that board games can support young people in their action on the crisis, our project also contends that young people’s expertise can contribute to the better use, and design, of games as agents of social change in the climate crisis. 

The project poses the following research questions: 

• How can board games support young people’s understanding of the climate crisis? 

• How can board games support young people in communicating their ideas about the climate crisis? 

• How can young people’s ideas and expertise about climate change help improve board game design on these themes? 

Our game-hacking methodology has been presented at the Ecogames symposium at the University of Utrecht in October 2021 and will be published in the open access anthology Ecogames edited by Prof. dr. Joost Raessens, Laura op de Beke MA, Prof. dr. Gerald Farca, Dr. Stefan Werning (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). You can see a video of that paper here…