5. Rewilding and time travel: Hands-on tools to manage social-ecological systems
This is part 5 of a series of 6 essays looking at how games and interactive models can be used to grapple with some of the challenges facing different sectors.
This series is particularly intended for practitioners in these sectors interested in new tools to address complex problems and to bring together people for rich conversations.
It’s also for any artists or game designers interested in applying their skills to real-world scenarios.
You can read the other essays here.
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What is a social-ecological system?
One way to understand the difference between fields of science is that each science looks at the world at a different scale. Chemists view the world at the scale of the molecule. For geneticists, it’s the cellular level. For biologists, it’s the scale of the organism, and so on.
Resilience scientists look at the world at the scale of the ecosystem: a river valley, a forest, a region of farmland, a coastal fishery or an urban metropolis. These ‘social-ecological systems’ provide us with the food, water, materials and clean air we need to survive. If they are damaged or over-exploited, we all suffer.
At the ecosystem scale, biophysical systems (water, soil, weather, plants and animals) interact with human systems (communities, economies and governments) in unpredictable ways. Scientists studying these regions grapple with concepts such as adaptive cycles, nutrient flows, tipping points and alternative stability domains.
We will never have a complete understanding of the behaviour of these systems. Instead, scientists create systems models to help us understand the consequences of taking certain actions.
Systems games
A model is a simplified representation of a real world systems that we use to help us understand that system.
There are many different kinds of models, from complex computer simulations through to simple diagrams drawn on a whiteboard.
Games are a kind of model, designed for people to interact and engage with. A game based on a system contains an underlying simulation of how that system works, with space for players to make decisions and affect how that simulation develops.
The kind of game I create are often based on scientific models. Though informed by data, they are qualitative rather than quantitative, and rarely rely on software. They are intended to illuminate aspects of a system, to help people think through complex problems, and to provide a space for conversation and reflection.
Since 2012, Boho has created numerous ‘systems games’ based on different social-ecological systems. Games like Best Festival Ever or Democratic Nature are designed to help players think through questions of land management, unpack tensions between stakeholders, and explore potential solutions to crises.
These games are typically built around some kind of resource management question — a trade-off where players must decide how to allocate a resource. The underlying models for these games resemble flow charts, where outputs from one sub-system become inputs for the next.
But in the last two years, I’ve been exploring several new game formats that look at social-ecological systems in new ways.
Green Gold
I’m an associate of Coney, a UK company that creates interactive work of all kinds — sometimes in theatres, sometimes on the street, and sometimes online.
One of my favourite Coney projects is one I had nothing to do with. The Green Gold Conspiracy, created by Will Drew and Tassos Stevens, is a game about palm oil production in south-east Asia. Players take on the role of palm oil producers, companies and governments, struggling to remain financially solvent while also conserving healthy forests.
It’s a classic ‘systems game’ of resource management and trade-offs, with an underlying model simulating the complex dynamics of the palm oil systems.
In 2020, Chester Zoo commissioned Coney (represented by Tassos Stevens and myself) to develop a new work on the same subject. Once again, the focus was on the system of palm oil production. This time, though, the target audience was high school students, and the game had to be playable on screens in classrooms.
In this format, a classic resource management ‘systems game’ wouldn’t work. Instead, Tassos came up with a proposal which I couldn’t resist: a game in which you play a high school student with the power to travel in time.
The game begins with a letter from your Indonesian penpal with news that the rainforest near their home is facing imminent destruction by palm oil producers.
If your high school will commit to adopting a policy of using only sustainable palm oil by the end of the day, you can forestall the destruction of that forest (just go with it).
So you have 24 hours to persuade your school to switch to sustainable palm oil. At the end of each day, you can jump back in time to restart the day, change your tactics as you go along.
Players must convince their classmates, teachers and high school power-brokers to support the shift to sustainable palm oil, using flattery, bribery, persuasion (or outright blackmail).
It’s a systems game that differs from others because it’s not set in the system it’s about.
The game explores rainforest ecology, the economics of palm oil production, the emerging sustainable palm oil market and the politics of conservation. But instead of seeing the rainforest directly, this content is unpacked through conversations with your fellow students, teachers and school figures.
As well as exploring palm oil production, the game is a reflection on the systems of power and influence in a system like a high school. Like a lot of Tassos Stevens’ work, the game asks players to imagine how to effectively create change in the communities and organisations they’re embedded in.
For me, this game was exciting in that it opened up a whole new approach to games about land management. The high school frame doesn’t take away from the content about rainforest conservation — instead, it provides a new lens to examine it through which reveals different things.
It’s a device I’m excited to use again in the future. In the meantime, you can play High School Time Traveller on the Chester Zoo website.
Adaptable and Contested
Rewilding is a word we’ve all heard a lot in the last few years.
The term first appeared in the 1980s to refer to a set of tools for ecological restoration, to help wilderness areas recover from the damage done to them.
In the 1990s, rewilding advocates focused on creating large core protected areas, ecological connectivity and keystone species. This was the ‘3Cs’ model of rewilding: cores, corridors and carnivores.
Today, rewilding has come to mean many different things to different people:
- Some people use it to mean focusing on long-term and large-scale management, thinking beyond funding cycles or nature reserves.
- Some people use it to mean bold and optimistic plans — looking towards the future of nature rather than trying to conserve the past.
- Some people use it to mean letting go of control — helping natural processes rather than worrying about the end result.
- And for some people, it’s a buzzword that helps them sell product.
Like the wilderness, the idea of rewilding is adaptable and contested.
It’s adaptable because the meaning keeps changing. It’s contested because no-one agrees on a single definition.
That’s a really exciting moment for an idea. Rewilding has entered the public consciousness, people are discussing it, but we haven’t yet pinned down what it means. So it’s a great time to be having a conversation about it.
Overgrown
I’ve been fascinated by the rewilding conversation for some years now. In the UK particularly, the energy around the concept is really exciting. (In Australia the energy is about cultural burning — a conversation for another time.)
In 2021, I developed a new game for Coney exploring this subject.
Overgrown is designed for an audience playing live in a room or remotely via video chat. Players come together in teams to imagine the future of their local area over the coming decades.
The interesting challenge for this work was that it had to be grounded in the player’s specific location — their local region that they were rewilding. At the same time, it had to be open enough that it could be played by people anywhere in the world.
Once again, the classic systems game format would not work here. If I made a resource management-style game looking at the specific dynamics of (say) urban London, it wouldn’t work for players in rural America or suburban Tasmania.
As a result, Overgrown took the form of a collaborative storytelling game.
In each location, a group of players come together in a team to manage their area. Responding to a series of prompts, they create a joint narrative and tell a collective story.
Prompts include things such:
· 2028: A major climate impact hits your area. It could be a drought, heatwave, fire or flood. The consequences change the area forever. What is this impact and where is it most visible?
· 2031: A local group introduces a new species to help them with a problem. What is the problem and how does this new animal help?
· 2034: This new species has helped to solve the problem, but there’s been an unexpected side effect which is making life difficult for some (human) groups. What is this side effect and where is it most visible?
These prompts gradually move the story forward through years and decades to the 2060s. The region is gradually transformed as climate shocks impact the area and new groups and species come and go.
It’s not a playful fantasy, though humour is at the core of it. Many of the prompts invite reflection on the power and influence of different stakeholder groups, both human and non-human.
Unlike more tightly structured systems games, players can take the Overgrown narrative in a fantastical direction — leopards on the railway tracks, vultures nesting in old skyscrapers, and so on.
But fantastical doesn’t mean it’s not serious. The game draws some inspiration from Applespiel’s classic Sexy Urban Design project. In this interactive installation, Applespiel created a model of a local city street, which local people could suggest changes to. Applespiel would carry out those changes to the model over the duration of a festival.
Applespiel’s experience was that although people often proposed playful interventions, those interventions often contained a deeper social meaning. When someone proposed a zipline running across the street, it was a joke — but it was also a comment about the lack of accessible walkways.
The futures conjured up by Overgrown players combine realistic predictions alongside surreal flights of fancy. Those fantasies provide space to imagine different possibilities, and to consider the hard realities of the area from different angles.
Overgrown launched in June 2022 as part of the Festival of Nature. Over 2023 it will be happening both live and online — get in touch with Coney for details.
Handing power to players
When it comes to looking at social-ecological systems, there are limitations to the format of High School Time Traveller and Overgrown. Neither game explicitly captures the interconnected behaviour of the systems they’re about. Both games avoid directly grappling with the trade-offs we must make when interacting with these systems.
But that lack of granular detail is also their strength. By sacrificing some of the complexity of more traditional systems games in favour of a more ambiguous and descriptive style of play, these games hand the power over to the players to tell their own. The looseness of the underlying game mechanics creates space for imagining new possibilities and alternative futures .
That mindset of openness and experimentation is a vital part of the toolkit we need to create better futures for the ecosystems we live within. This style of game doesn’t replace the more traditional systems game, but it can be a valuable complementary activity.
In the future, I’m looking forward to further exploring these new formats and the new conversations about ecosystems they make possible.
