Gamifying the climate crisis 🤔
Do you believe in games?
🎅 I do, as you would expect from a game designer.
But more specifically, do we believe games can help us tackle complex questions, like how do we tackle the climate crisis?
Well, I don’t know. Or rather, I’m looking for answers.
So on October 18th I took part in OMGCLIMATE LDN, an event that caught my attention because:
- It’s an unconference, which means everyone attending can pitch ideas for a 45 minutes session.
- It draws together a variety of people like tech folks, community energy organisers, behaviour change specialists, climate finance experts, campaigners, art curators, educators and many more.
- The main objective is organising collective responses to the climate crisis.
Joe McFadden, who is planning to build an app to help people tackle climate change together, proposed a session titled “Gamifying the climate crisis” and I felt morally obliged to attend.
What is gamification?
Here’s my own definition of ɡeɪmɪfɪˈkeɪʃ(ə)n: to sprinkle game metrics such as points, levels and leaderboards on chores.
As you may have guessed, I’m generally sceptical of gamification and its proponents. It smells of 🐂💩 as Ian Bogost explains. Yet games are fun, right? And what’s wrong with having fun while doing something useful, right? That’s why many well-meaning people are attracted by gamification, myself included.
The good, the bad and the ugly.
Throughout the session we used a very interesting discussion format called 1–2–4–All which, given a question or topic of debate, works like this:
- Spend 1 minute jotting down your own thoughts, in silence.
- Then find someone next to you and spend 2 minutes sharing your thoughts.
- Extend the conversation to another two people over 4 minutes.
- Summarise and share with everyone.
Our first 1–2–4–All challenge was finding good and bad examples of gamification.
I spoke to Natasha Gertler, and we focused on gamified speed cameras in Sweden. On top of the standard punitive policy of fining drivers for exceeding the limits, those cameras would also snap the number plates of cars driving below the speed limits and enter them into a lottery. The cash prizes would come from the fines paid by the speeders. An interesting experiment, but one that ran for only a few days. And it was funded by Vokswagen, a company that has some experience in gaming rules and regulations to flog diesel cars.
What about bad examples? There are many. It all boils down to injecting any task with extrinsic motivations. In other words, giving people money, points, badges or any other sort of external reward for completing a task they would not feel intrinsically motivated to complete.
Extrinsic motivations may work in the short term. People may endure a task, as long as they get paid for it. But remove the extrinsic reward, and they will stop doing it. Extrinsic motivations can also damage tasks that people find intrinsically motivating, such as giving blood: when you put a price on it, people give less.
Perhaps the most pertinent bad examples of gamification are emission trading schemes. Polluters can offset their own emissions by buying carbon credits from projects that claim to be “keeping carbon out of the atmosphere, whether by planting trees that sequester carbon, or by producing low-carbon energy, or by upgrading a dirty factory to lower emissions” (Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, pp. 218). Unsurprisingly, there is “overwhelming evidence that manufacturers are gaming the system and undermining carbon markets by producing more potent greenhouse gases just so they can get paid to destroy them.”
Is there an app for that then?
Broadly speaking, games are the quantified version of free play. Kicking a ball around with your friends is free play. When you set goals and start measuring them you turn that expression of free play into a game of football.
The promise of gamification is that you can quantify and measure behavioural change. You can measure the calories burned by playing an exercise game, or you can measure the scores in standardised tests before and after playing a maths game. This obsession with quantification pervades our data-driven capitalist society.
The problem is that measuring individual behaviours and behavioural change in the short term is much easier than observing systemic and long-term change. Gamification tends to narrow the questions we are asking, because it’s easier to quantify “how can I eat more healthy food” or “how can I learn a new language” than “how do we provide healthy food to as many people as possible” or “how do we make education free/affordable”.
During the session we all agreed that the climate crisis calls for long-term thinking and systemic change. Flying less, eating less meat are all important changes you can make to your life. But individual consumer choices are worthless if we don’t also act as citizens and push for systemic change. Of course we can vote with our wallets and should continue to do so. But it won’t be enough.
If we want to bring down emissions fast, we will need to overcome free-market mantras: take railways and utilities and energy grids back into public control; regulate corporations to phase out fossil fuels; and raise taxes to pay for massive investment in climate-ready infrastructure and renewable energy — so that solar panels can go on everyone’s rooftop, not just on those who can afford it.
Martin Lukacs, Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals
This begs the question: is it even possible to gamify systemic change and long-term thinking? And if so, what kind of games or game-like activities can we conceive?
Help people make their own games!
I have a hunch that the answer lies in the practice of making games, rather than just playing them. You get people to think about the rules of a system, and then design&test their own rules.
I argue that next step of games for impact lies in helping people to engage with the practice of game design.
By designing games you acquire the tools to demystify all games. To play critically.
By democratising game design you don’t have to look for big funders.
By facilitating the creation of games you don’t incur into typical fallacies of the white saviour industrial complex, like the mis-representation and objectification of others.
Paolo Pedercini, Making Games in a Fucked Up World
I’m a massive fan of cooperative games, those in which you win or lose all together.
While making games and teaching game-making, I learned that cooperative ones encourage players to verbalise their thoughts, as they work together towards a common goal (say, cutting emissions) and/or against a common threat (say, fossil fuel extraction and pollution).
Coop games offer a more fertile ground for structured conversations, in which everyone has a chance to be heard.
If you want to design coop games, check out Meeples Together 📖👌🏻
And please talk to me :)
