Jim Thatcher tackles climate change board games
By Paul Lask
Spring/Summer 2024
Board games are not generally what come to mind when thinking of ways to fix climate change. While it can be difficult, if not overwhelming, to choose one’s climate cause, it might seem obvious that the last thing we should be doing in the face of looming catastrophe is play.
Yet CEOAS Assistant Professor and geographer Jim Thatcher sees play not as a distraction or hindrance, but as a doorway into understanding, coping and imagining.
When playing, you can step outside yourself, out of what is, “to ask what might be,” as Thatcher says.
Thatcher studies critical cartography, a branch of research that critiques maps. Maps are not neutral artifacts that represent the world, but objects “embedded with power, with inclusions and exclusions that are both intentional and not,” he explains. Maps are arguments. They argue about what is and what should be, which to Thatcher ties in nicely to his understanding of games.
Along with colleagues David Wrathall (CEOAS), Carolyn Fish (University of Oregon), David Retchless (Texas A&M Galveston) and Craig Dalton (Hofstra), Thatcher has begun putting some of this theory to work on a board game that focuses on solving climate change.
Researching game history, Thatcher discovered games from the 1970s that reflected the energy crisis. Oil Baron and Imperial 2030 and The Weather Game weren’t talking about climate change yet, but reflected a shared fear around climate and energy.
In the past decade, climate-related games have been notably dark, Thatcher says. In CO2, for example, you play a superpower tasked with dominating the energy sector and maximizing profits. The game was so dark that the makers came out with a toned-down version called Second Chance. Another gloomy one is The Cost, wherein players take on the role of a corporation running asbestos mines around the globe. The game’s name refers to the so-called negative externalities of resource extraction; in this case, the bodies of the miners themselves have to be factored in so as to not tip the regulatory scales that will trigger a ban on your mine.
These dark themes reflect a growing panic, often referred to as eco-anxiety, around the negative mental effects caused by climate change. Being regularly exposed to or reading about wildfire smoke-choked cities, the shattering of heat records, the melting of ice has taken its toll. The American Psychological Association argues climate change has “acute and chronic impacts” on individual well-being, while disaster movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Don’t Look Up” have likewise put climate issues front and center in our national consciousness. A recent Nature article shows climate-worry is especially dire among youth. Climate change “presents serious mental health risks — with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression and learning disorders being just some of the climate-related trauma effects documented in young people.”
Climate-focused games, meanwhile, have taken a turn in the past couple of years. They are starting to be set in the far future — as if we’ve passed the tipping point and only a science fiction reality is worth contemplating. Solarpunk Futures and Earthborne Rangers take place in utopic societies created by defeating climate change. A review of the latter describes the game as a vast wilderness transformed by “monumental feats of science and technology devised to save the Earth from destruction long ago.” Players go on adventures to imagine how that solving occurred.
Thatcher sees a wrinkle in these utopian visions: They’re too easy to win. It’s really obvious what to do or what factors prevent a player from taking the right action. Thatcher argues that a game that encourages its players to turn a grid electric, say, should perhaps take into account the congressperson “blocking their act from passing through some obscure 19th century law.” This would be a more accurate reflection of reality. And it’s a struggle for budding game makers.
How to keep difficulties in their game while leaving room for surmounting them is part of the work, Thatcher says. One doesn’t want to walk away thinking, wow, that was simple. It may be good for relieving climate anxiety, but does it spark people to go out and accomplish real life goals?
Along these lines, Thatcher is also hoping to avoid cartoonish villains, like an oil baron who is so “ideologically transparent” that players walk away having subconsciously just dug deeper into their political trenches. Like maps, games are made by people, are claims upon the world. Players should sense what is driving a person. Their beliefs, their conditioning, may serve as entry points into determining points of compromise.
A good climate game should help its player feel “agentive,” should help players with decision-making, a skill that can translate outside the game space.
The game Thatcher and colleagues are working on is as of now conceptual, but it will be either a card or board game with a narrative structure. One idea is mapping out pathways presented by the IPCC into rounds where players collaborate to discover what paths to follow. Imagine starting at “Current Conditions.” You could move along a greener path wherein global warming is limited via sustainable development. You could represent community, politics, science or economics. With an eye towards the next century, failure to collaborate would lower climate resiliency, essentially sending you back to the beginning to rethink your way forward.
The team is also kicking around the idea of a tabletop role-playing game along the lines of Dungeons and Dragons: It would be something collaborative, hard, but hopeful.
According to Thatcher, the board game space is currently crowded, with thousands of games coming out annually. He doesn’t intend on making a breakthrough game as a first-time designer. Rather, he hopes his group can, through their research and analytic skills, “build something that opens pathways to other considerations and solidarities…a piece of scholarship that can guide us towards other outcomes.”
Like life, games can be hard. Things go wrong — but with “planning, mitigation, clever resource allocation,” one can overcome.
This is a big reason Thatcher wants his game to not take place after climate change. Climate change and its effects are currently here.
Read more of freelance writer Paul Lask’s work.
