On March 21st, a group of eager game players joined Dr. Fiona P. MacDonald for an interactive game test of her ongoing project titled “Gaming the Anthropocene” during our seventh Tech Talk of the 2022/23 school year. This exciting and challenging tabletop game centres the players as diverse regions (small island; desert; urban centre; etc) and creates a context where the local choices directly affect the global. Together, the groups are working towards stopping runaway climate crisis, except in this version, very little could be done to stop the implications of globalization, industry, colonization, and more.
As the game went on, the glooming sense that we may never stop the runaway climate crisis took over the room. How to make ethical local choices without damaging the global simultaneously? In the end, the group discussed the ways that the game could grow to create even small senses of hope in the steps they took towards stopping runaway climate crisis, amongst the ever growing reality that this endeavour is a mountain we must locally and globally climb together. Thanks again to Dr. Fiona P. McDonald for her excellent, interactive Tech Talk.
