Climate Justice and Gaming
Hello new “Dishing the DERT” readers! Welcome to our semi-regular blog run by DERT staff. “Dishing the DERT” is for DERT staff, board members, and community members to submit op-eds and academically driven pieces based on current events in the wider world of environmental justice and local educational events that you might have missed.
On Wednesday January 21st, I had the pleasure of attending Evergreen’s Center Climate Action and Sustainability’s Climate Lecture Series, “Gaming for Change: The Role and Power of Games in Education and Climate Justice.” There are plenty of people that hear gaming and their minds go to the stereotype of the day, whether it be first-person shooters or the ever-popular Fortnite. Growing up in the tech boom that brought us from 8-bit games to 4k hyper-realism, the most common association was “waste of time.”
Simply put, gaming in the modern sense has not uncommonly been seen as a poor use of time and the realm of basement dwelling nerds who can’t tear themselves away from the seductive glow of an LED screen. This is a view that perhaps lacks imagination for the usefulness of the craft.
Departing from my soapbox, this lecture “feature[ed] Evergreen faculty Sam Saltiel and leading game designers, including…local alumni business owner of Heart of the Deernicorn. As well as indigenous game designer Andrew Gross, creator of the Solarpunk TTRPG Fully Automated.” Unfortunately, the designers of the indigenous futurist RPG Coyote and Crow were unable to join the panel.
Sarah “Sam” Saltiel[1] is a summer adjunct at Evergreen teaching tabletop roleplaying game design. They introduced us to the “magic circle,” the space in which a game is played – in essence, a mental playground that contains its own rules separate from the ordinary world and dedicated to the game. We can imagine gathering around a game of Monopoly, where cutthroat deals are commonplace and friendships are readily put on the line, or, even grander, a D&D table – a place to wholly transform into another person or being with perhaps vastly different moralities, religions, or histories than yourselves and a world alien to our own.
Now how does this connect to climate justice? When we are continually bashed over the head with the impossibly high stakes of climate change and nigh-endless obstacles, burnout is all too prevalent (“target fixation” comes up with our next speaker). It can be difficult to see the forest for the trees. But the magic circle offers a unique, low-stakes environment for learning new concepts and exploring creative solutions. When we can be a few steps removed from a real situation into one that is fantastical but parallel, it becomes easier to confront these hard-hitting issues.
Another issue that we face when thinking of climate change is that much of our frame of reference for it is “invisible.” We have statistics of temperature change, projections of the ocean’s temperature, and goals for reducing our carbon emissions. But little of this is tangible beyond spreadsheets and graphs on a page. We have begun to see the more extreme consequences of inaction, but the rest isn’t readily visible in our day-to-day life.
Games, and other forms of media, allow us to step entirely into alternate frameworks of knowledge so we can explore familiar challenges in different situations. Simulation games are very useful for this purpose. For instance, the game Democracy 3 sees the player as the President of the United States. You build your cabinet and have a certain amount of political capital to spend on bills you want passed. The game simulates the social, political, and environmental consequences of what you choose to enact. I have personally failed to be re-elected or was entirely ousted from office more than once for taking extreme corrective action too quickly. In this game the effects of your actions are immediately visible to you. There are also more dystopian games like Frostpunk that explore post-climate disaster worlds where humanity must survive. While not exactly a problem-solving space for our current challenges, these can at least serve as “fun” cautionary tales.
While I have a tendency towards the dystopian story or cautionary tale, Andrew Gross, developer of “Fully Automated,” a solar-punk TTRPG, came to us with an alternative – the protopia.
““Protopia” is another recent term, coined by futurist Kevin Kelly and it is defined as the opposite of a “Dystopia”. In Dystopia, people are stuck in some kind of recurring pattern of suffering (like George Orwell’s “foot trampling a human face - forever”, as in 1984). A Protopian society, then, is one where people are free from such gridlocks and can thus work actively to improve life. It’s a more carefully stated form of a dream of societal transformation: It doesn’t say that “everything will be good for everyone”; it focuses not on the state-of-things-at-a-given-moment, but on the possibility - the shared capacity - to move in mutually desirable directions. Simply stated, one could say that a Protopian society is one that has the capacity to become incrementally better as a result of the freedom of its members.”[2]
A protopia is a more realistic view of an ideal future than a traditional utopia that is free of want, conflict, or traffic jams. Interpersonal conflict is part of the human condition, whether we like it or not. We all have different ideas (and mine is better than yours!) on the solutions to all our problems (and if you would just listen to me, we wouldn’t be in this mess).
I also mentioned target fixation before and here we return with Andrew – “An attentional phenomenon in which the focus a person places on an object they wish to avoid instead draws them inexorably towards it.” Rushing down a hill and telling yourself to not hit that tree, only to have stared at it so hard you’re right on target.
And look at the box office, there has been a resurgence of horror and dystopian films. Popular television shows like Black Mirror and The Handmaid’s Tale offer grim pictures of the future. As a society, we are hyper fixated on futures where the world is ending or inexorably changed for the worse, with hope present but not in abundance. The solution: look for the absence of a hazard.
So, what’s the use of a protopia and what does it have to do with target fixation? When we enter a more ideal future, we can simulate the results of ideas we have for our current issues. What would the world look like if we were able to convert to 100% renewable energy? And what were the steps the governments and people of that world took to achieve that? And most importantly, what new issues did we manage to create along the way? When we start from a place of assuming we fixed a major issue, we can more clearly envision the potential downsides and bring the creative solutions to those newfound complications back into the real world. We have created our own an absence of a hazard.
Lastly, we were joined by Ross Cowman, President of the Tabletop Game Alliance of Washington State. He told us about the gaming industry in Washington, which happens to be the tabletop capitol of the work (valued at $184 billion), and provided resources for people who want to break into the industry. TGA’s goal is to support the game industry at all levels.
I’ll leave you with my two cents – gaming is not only a fantastic way to escape the real world for a few hours and recharge, but also a tool for imaging a better one. They create opportunities to bring people from drastically different walks of life together at one table to creatively problem solve. This is not only essential for community building, but also for breaking out of the doom and gloom that is easy to fall into during this long slog we call the fight for climate justice.
Thank you to Evergreen’s Center Climate Action and Sustainability for putting on this lecture series and welcoming us to attend! We hope to see you at the next one.
[1] M.F.A., Literary Arts, Brown University, 2024; B.A., Creative Writing, Visual Arts, English and Literature, University of Chicago, 2019
[2] “What’s The Difference between Utopia, Eutopia and Protopia?” – Hanzi Freinacht
