Daybreak, winter solstice 2021
Unprecedented “natural” disasters, the farce of COP26, and utopian game design
Daybreak is a cooperative board game about stopping climate change. If you haven’t already, check out this quick overview of how the game works.
Today the sun is out the longest in the Southern Hemisphere, while the Northern Hemisphere is at its darkest. In London, the sun has been covered by thick grey clouds for weeks, and my mood seems to mirror the current weather. Time to reflect on the year that is about to end.
A summer of nonlinear climate shocks
From deadly heat to wild fires and unprecedented floods, the summer of 2021 left even climate scientists in shock.
We scientists in recent years have been surprised by some events that occurred earlier and were more frequent and more intense than expected. We need to better model nonlinear events.
Linear refers to a steady and predictable trend, for instance: if at X temperature in the past you observed Y precipitation, then at 2X you would expect roughly 2Y. Nonlinear instead means that change happens in a bumpy and rather unpredictable way.
Daybreak is designed for players to viscerally experience nonlinear events.
Each round, players roll the planetary effects die 🎲. Each roll moves the associated effect up by one. When it reaches a red (!) it triggers a catastrophic effect on a planetary scale.
At a lower degree of warming players are very unlikely to trigger the worst effects. For instance, at 1.3ºC you roll the die once, so only a 1 and a 2 would trigger planetary effects. But at 1.4ºC you roll twice, at 1.5ºC you roll three times, and so on.
And what causes global temperatures to rise, and therefore extreme weather events to become more likely? It’s two centuries of greenhouse gas emissions accumulating in the atmosphere.
The German floods were made up to 9 times more likely by cumulative human-caused emissions, the heatwave in North America 150 times, the wildfires in Siberia 600 times.
Yet the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, the primary source of greenhouse gas emissions, continues. It’s actually growing, while it should be sharply falling.
The gap between climate breakdown and responses from the Global North
After a summer like that, you’d expect a growing consensus that the rational, sensible, cost-effective course of action is cutting emissions. Not in 2050, now. The yearly opportunity to negotiate such a plan was the UN 26th conference on climate change, COP26.
But like in most previous COPs, proposals were sunk by the usual suspects: Global North governments, boasting about their non-binding pledges, while blocking any meaningful progress on climate finance, and not accepting responsibility for their historical emissions. Which amount to 92% of all human-caused emissions, a brutal and continued colonisation of the atmosphere.
In Daybreak, we want the players taking on the role of the US and Europe to have the tools to address their historical responsibilities, in line with their technological, political and financial power.
So the US players starts with a Climate Debt Reparations card, which allows them to pass cards to other players. Paired with their Clean Energy R&D card, it makes for a powerful combination. Europe can use its Early Warning Systems card to share information about upcoming threats, and then support other players by recovering communities from a state of crisis (any player with 12 communities in crisis would trigger a game loss for everyone) or building up their resilience (which can help players protect their communities from falling into a state of crisis).
The futility of going alone
Global North countries should lead the way in decarbonising every aspect of their economies, and use their financial and technological powers to support a just transition across the world.
Instead, what’s emerging is muscular adaptationism: boasting plans to upgrade infrastructure and beef up disaster response, while ignoring the root cause, which is (worth repeating) cumulative carbon emissions.
This is the logic of muscular adaptationism: since the causes are never treated, the multiplying symptoms must be stamped down with greater force, accompanied by an escalating rhetoric of military and national power that can uphold a semblance of safe normality […] A self-perpetuating absurdity, muscular adaptationism harbours the illusion that these [extreme weather] events can be managed if only the nation gets its act together and reinforces its disaster response in a proper patriotic fashion.
In Daybreak, disasters can quickly spiral out of control. Unless you’ve built resilience, you won’t be able to withstand them. Most players identify that problem after losing a game.
So resilience, aka adaptation, aka protecting people is key to avoid losing the game. But building a fortress around your own communities won’t be of much help, if you fail to support more vulnerable players: if anyone gets 12 communities in crisis, everyone loses the game.
In an interconnected world, we’re only as strong as the weakest (player).
It’s always sunny above the clouds
Sometimes I wonder if Daybreak is too utopian, almost delusional. What is the point of a game rooted in climate science, but where the geopolitical layer seems to be pure fiction?
Well, in these gloomy days, reminding myself that the sun is still out there, even if I can’t see it, can help prevent my mood from spiralling further into darkness.
So perhaps the point of this playful blend of climate science, tech, policy and internationalism, is to remind ourselves that all this is possible. If we can imagine it, we can make it happen.
What next?
If the Daybreak project inspires you, check out how you could get involved in making it the most impactful it can be!
