Daybreak: Playing out Possitopian Futures
Last weekend I attended the Games Transformed conference to playtest the soon-to-be-released Daybreak, a cooperative game about stopping climate
change.
The designers — Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace — describe the game as “an unapologetically hopeful vision of the near future, where you and your friends get to build a sustainable future where all of us can not just survive, but thrive.” The game is designed to frame the climate crisis as a global problem and encourage players to explore collective action and systemic solutions.
Guiding Principles
As an unapologetically hopeful games enthusiast who harbours concerns about the potentially devastating effects of rising temperatures, this is right up my street.
I’m an Associate of Climate Museum UK, a distributed museum of art, objects, ideas, games and books which we use to active responses to the climate and ecological emergency. Our goal is to help people to play, make, think and talk about the Earth crisis and to open their imaginations to possible futures. The thinking behind Daybreak is very much aligned with one of the CMUK guiding principles of being ‘possitopian’. Drawn from the Voros Futures Cone (below), a possitopian approach to future thinking invites us to imagine “a viable path for humanity (or for communities) amidst the shifting and uncertain realm of the Possible”.
Another alignment between the guiding principles of CMUK and Daybreak is the recognition that the ecological emergency is about much more than carbon emissions. This is represented by CMUK founder Bridget McKenzie’s model of Earth crisis blinkers:
So, can a game of Daybreak help us to take off our Earth crisis blinkers?
Gameplay
The game begins and we play in pairs, each pair in charge of 4 world powers: Europe, China, the U.S. and the Majority World. I’m playing as the Majority World with Becs. We sift through a range of opportunities which affect the sources of our energy production. In the Majority World our main problems are that we’re producing loads of ‘dirty’ energy and we have low levels of infrastructural resilience. We consider a range of technologies, environmental projects and social policies offered to us on ‘opportunity’ cards. There’s a complex array of options at our disposal. The projects each require different resource investments and we try to weigh up the costs and benefits of each.
This raises questions:
Should we design high efficiency projects that will take longer to mature, or do as much early action as possible — even if it’s less efficient?
Should we focus on mitigation (reducing greenhouse gasses emissions) or adaptation (build resilience)? Both are needed; what’s the right balance?
Should we start a project which requires a lot of future investment that we may not be able to afford?
Sometimes we’re caught in decision paralysis, unable to make a call based on incomplete information. The gameplay highlights the competition between different priorities and the opportunity cost which each solution carries.
The Bigger Picture
As the game progresses we start to see the bigger picture. We listen to the challenges being faced by other parts of the world and learn how we can help each other. The U.S. is good at R&D and can share innovative solutions. China is able to export clean energy technology which help other players to meet their electricity demand. Europe can help build resilience and pull the other players’ communities out of crisis. The Majority World can forecast upcoming crises that often affect everyone.
As we play the thermometer creeps up by 0.1 degrees at a time, leading to the loss of arctic sea ice, melting permafrost, desertification and ocean acidification. Alongside this we are hit by a range of crises — meteorological, political, sociological — which affect some parts of the world more than others. If one part of the world suffers too greatly then everyone loses the game. We also lose if global temperatures increase by 2 degrees. This drives a need for global collaboration and to understand any problems as everyone’s problems. The only way to win the game is to hit net zero in global emissions.
Reflective Evaluation
There are many things to appreciate about the design of this game. It’s beautiful and haptically pleasing. It’s fun and sociable. There’s scope for banter despite the serious topic. There’s a cooperative dynamic between players and a competitive edge with the race to hit net zero. Most folk will come away having learned something but that’s not the focus. It’s very well-researched and based on real world data, distilling policy ideas and technological solutions into a couple of sentences. There’s even additional QR codes which link to webpages with more detailed explanations by experts in their fields. The game components are made responsibly, from pulp fibre and other FSC certified biodegradable materials and zero plastics. Most of all, the designers have managed to create a credible simulation of a hugely complex issue without oversimplifying. Equally important, it doesn’t take a lifetime to learn how to play (on the geek-o-meter — it’s higher than Monopoly but lower than Dungeons & Dragons). As we played out the exponential knock-on effects of our current ways of living I experienced a felt sense of urgency, of putting out fires on all sides, and a sense of ‘we’re all in it together’ regardless of nationality.
One of the great things about games is that they allow us to role play with the future. They all us to ask “How would it be if…?” Role play sometimes gets a bad press. as making people dress up like a viking, speak with a daft accent or move a inhabit the movement dynamics of a lizard. However, in it’s widest sense role play is about experimenting with different possibilities in life in a safely bounded space, without any of consequences that would happen in real life. I am reminded of a line from Adrian Jackson, director of Cardboard Citizens, who describes games as ‘the rehearsal of the possibility of change’. Games like Daybreak can help us collectively play around with possible futures and enhance our understanding of the ecological crisis. Since the medium is the message, perhaps games are inherently possitopian.
You can buy Daybreak on Backerkit.
