ClimateChampions Games
According Pew Research Center reports, more than 49% of adults and 80% of young Americans play video games. While games are entertaining, their power as a tool for gaining knowledge, learning and changing behavior is significantly growing. In a collaborative effort, involving Florida International University and EcoTech Vision, we challenge all interested parties to join and create scientifically informed entertaining games to educate citizens about the impact of their actions through the medium of game playing.
On April 2019, FIU students Sophia Cabral and Daniela Perez participated in the second annual Miami Hacks Climate Change hackathon, brought to you by EcoTech Visions and Florida International University’s College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts (CARTA) with the Institute of Water and Environment (InWE) and Sea Level Solution Center (SLSC).
Students Sophia Cabral and Daniela Perez proposed Oracle Z-48: An Epic Game to Save the World! to develop a Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game (MORPG) that simulates the practice of Interdisciplinary work by creating a gaming environment in which different specialists come together to solve complex and critical community problems as a team. Each player plays the game by selecting a Specialist and evaluating alternatives based on researching datasets used in the real world accessed through the game environment and develops solutions with their team of fellow players. The ultimate goal of playing the game is to complete as many missions as possible within 20 minutes to reestablish the vitals of the Planet, making the game a run against the clock to save the world!
The games will engage players in a series of scenario-driven events that introduce realistic ecologic, economic, and social challenges brought or exacerbated by climate change. Critical mission essentials including energy, food security, clean potable water, emergency management, disaster relief, and economy will determine whether the players’ community and region trends towards extreme vulnerability, resilience and sustainability, or some other dynamic state in-between. The mission driven game scenarios are introduced into the game’s time scape, probing participants’ response from a set of pre-determined game structure and rules.
The time scape, or the C2 game clock, along with a set of other indicators are constantly in view of the players, showing if they are in:
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- A livable state of climate equilibrium and social, ecological and technological resilience, well-being, and prosperity
- Significant losses, disasters and societal collapse
- Ongoing and unstoppable negative feedback and cascades leading to mass extinction
The game scenarios will be designed to express the challenges of any community that needs to change behavior quickly. The clock “rolls forward” at a faster speed when the game algorithms recognizes that the player, player’s associates, and the society in which they live are not learning what is required to stabilize the global temperatures. Setting the global average temperature goal of the planet is a decision made at the beginning of the games and it can be adjusted from time to time by agreement of players.
Playing well designed C2 Games will have an enduring impact on how gamers will behave in the real world. Once players are entrenched in the game, and become well-versed in climate science, ecological and social consequences of climate change, they are more likely to assume responsibility in their interactions with the environment. The games will educate and encourage players to become leaders and agents of change in the real world by exercising their right to free speech, assembly, and petitioning governments to redress grievances using travel and messaging tools provided as a real-world extension of game play.
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- Climate Change is a right now problem and the expected very serious adverse impacts need to be avoided through mitigation and adaptation. If we are to prosper and reduce this existential risk, we will need to make substantial changes in our behavior immediately as well as begin to use of new technology and strategies to become more sustainable and resilient.
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- Creating and using a genre of ClimateChampions (C2) games would be a means to encourage rapid changes in behavior and use of advanced technology to reduce what otherwise will soon become an unavoidable existential risk.
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- With the availability of C2 games, the next time Climate Change become the subject of a serious conversation and the discussion closes with: “But this problem is so big a problem! What can I do that would make a difference?”, you will have a ready and easy answer…
just play the game!
