Editor’s Note: Robin FitzClemen, who was a game designer for this event, is a former news reporter for the Daily Emerald.
The University of Oregon’s Center for Science Communication Research hosted a game night in Allen Hall on Jan. 24 to offer attendees the opportunity to explore climate change through play.
Attendees could interact with climate issues in many ways, including video games, more than 10 board games and a virtual reality tour of the Southern Patagonia Ice Field created by brand responsibility master’s student Adam Spencer. Every game focused on getting players to interact with the complex forces affecting climate change.
Robin FitzClemen, a game designer and journalism Master’s student at the School of Journalism and Communication, said one common theme among many of the games was that players had to make tough decisions about the climate. For example, in the board game CO2, players compete to build clean power plants before the atmosphere becomes too saturated with greenhouse gasses. The Climate Trail is like Oregon Trail, set after climate collapse wherein players have to navigate weather disasters and famine as they travel from Atlanta, Georgia, to Canada.
SOJC Professor Maxwell Foxman, an affiliate of the SCR, said one of the benefits of the Climate Change Game Night is that people who are told a game has an educational value retain information better.
Further, games can take complex issues, like resource use, protests or immigration, abstracting them into manageable forms.
“It’s kind of a strange medium. The topic is very serious, but the medium is very engaging,” event attendee Jake Searcy said. “It’s kind of a mix of fun and education.”
FitzClemen had a prototype of a game of his own creation on display at the event. In the game, tentatively named “Wildfire,” players work collaboratively to manage wildfires in a changing environment. Over the course of play, conditions change to make the spread of the fire more chaotic; therefore, players must make tough choices about which preventative measures to take to limit the damage the fire causes, FitzClemen said in an interview after the event.
The goal in creating Wildfire was “to make climate science more accessible and interesting,” FitzClemen said. To do so, he gathered 30 years of climate data in Oregon and built a model of how weather over a single fire season can manipulate the spread of a fire. Wildfire players act according to real climate phenomena from Oregon. But not every region of the U.S. or world is most concerned with wildfires.
FitzClemen and Foxman are working on making Wildfire adaptable to different regions and environments across the globe. FitzClemen expressed interest in developing a similar game dealing with topics such as coral bleaching, glacial melt and rising sea levels.
Students, faculty and staff of UO who are interested in learning more about game design may go to the Experience Hub in Allen Hall on Wednesdays from 3-8 p.m. to learn about game design, building prototypes, VR and more.
