Carbon and Cardboard - Episode 1 Transcript

welcome everybody to our first episode of carbon and cardboard ⁓

explore the thesis that board games can be a way to communicate ideas that are useful to understanding the climate crisis. We're going to talk about that general thesis and and then delve a little bit more deeply into specific topics later on. But I thought we would start with short introductions from everybody just so we know who each other are.

I'm Joshua. I mostly go by Josh. I grew up in New York, but now I live in Southern California in Pasadena, LA area. I do tech things, software engineering for a long time, product management.

been really avidly interested in climate for the past five years. I've loved games, specifically board games for a while ⁓ and

generally, like the more nerdy, the more complex the board game is what I like.

Hi, I'm Audrey and I am a recent graduate from Emory University studying history and environmental science and for the past year or so I've been an environmental educator, so I'm interested in kind of how we can teach climate in a chewable way to younger people and then also I enjoy board games.

I'm Laura. I'm in San Jose, California. Like Joshua, I've worked in tech. I've worked for a few different startups in product management operations, data analytics, a wide variety of roles. A few years ago, I left tech to pivot my own career towards social impact. I started off in education.

And then I got into the education world and quickly left the education world because it's very clear that it's not going to make a social impact the way the education system is structured. So that's what I changed to climate. And like Audrey, I'm hoping to combine education and climate together. I love games in general. And I think there's just a natural ⁓

link between playing and learning. it's a thing using a simulated environment, whether that's in board games or video games, it gives people the freedom to be playful, to learn possibly scary concepts and to generate their own solutions.

Neat.

Hi there. Yeah, I'm Nathaniel. I'm based in Brooklyn, New York. I also have a background that started out in tech ⁓ in a program management kind of role. I spent the bulk of my career at Microsoft, although the majority of that time I actually transitioned into working in education. We were running a program that helped high schools to build and grow computer science programs.

So yeah, mean, my background with board games is just as an avid sort of puzzle doer and board game player from a very young age. In particular, after college, I was living in a house in Seattle with some...

college buddies and we you know, the gateway drug was Settlers of Catan and from there on to a whole

And yeah, I agree. think ⁓ games are a very natural thing that humans have done for a super long time. And there's a reason they're fun, but also they provide sort of a different way of sharing information, communicating and learning. And I think that ties in with what everyone's been talking about so far.

I'm Scott Kennedy. I'm in Northern California, My background is also, in tech. Applied math actually was my degree and what I've worked on in tech has largely been around data science, simulation.

I have played games of all varieties my whole life. It's been a deep part of my friends' interactions. I have role-playing game campaigns that have lasted 30 years.

love the idea of Settlers of Catan as a gateway drug. We did that at a snowboarding cabin. ⁓ actually had a table thrown, flipped, I should say, and my wife will still not play a particular game with a close friend of mine. a big part of our world.

I had had this idea going back to feeling like even before it was environmental, I felt like the world would be a better place if more people understood exponential growth And that really sort of triggered in thinking about climate and environmental stuff.

I wanted to do was was was gathered together to talk about whether some of those ideas that I feel like get in the way of talking about climate or environmentalism or whatever that might be for you

⁓ I think just identifying those ideas themselves is of real interest and then using those as a lens into talking about game design and game play and whether that's a good way to communicate those ideas was really interesting ⁓ and so that's, I guess, why we're here.

So I think maybe that's the place to start, is it even true? Do we think that board games are a good way to communicate anything? Right? assume since we're here, we probably

the answer is affirmative, but a it's always good to examine those assumptions and b there's probably a lot of people out there that might not, right? games that that I don't want to get into but let's let's maybe start with that. Are games a good way to communicate any kinds of ideas?

Yeah, so I

mean in the education world, and Audrey you might have more insight into this, but there's this whole notion of universal design for learning and that's that different people learn in different ways. So you will probably, yes, have some people out there that will be like, I don't get anything from board games, but then you'll have another group of people that'll be like, yeah, they absolutely work.

And then the other thing I wanna mention is that with learning in general, least this is true during childhood development, Like kids learn through play, that's how they form connections, that's how they make, that's how they.

gather new information and then they rest and that's when all the information settles. If you're playing with the game and if it's like a joyful state and I think your emotional state actually does contribute to learning, then yes, you will learn. But once again, you'll probably have some people like Joshua mentioned those games with all those rules and like I would not learn from that. I would like just sit through two minutes of rules and then get up and walk away. I learned from free exploration. So I think that if you have...

a game that can appeal to more people or different varieties of games that are going to appeal to different learners, then you can probably reach and bother our audience that way as well. That's my thoughts.

⁓ I think, I think games are, are a great venue for, for learning, ⁓ board games, especially, ⁓ because they are inherently social. Like you're, are, I mean, most of the time you're physically in the same proximity with people and you're, you're around the, you're around the table. and then.

conversation can happen that way. ⁓ But yeah, think often when you're playing a game, your focus is on how do I win the game? And less on the extracurriculars that come along with the game,

I think yeah, you learn a lot of basic skills, you have to learn how to properly strategize or how to negotiate, kind of learn basic human skills and marketable skills, I think.

Kind of on that side is just you learn how to communicate. And then I guess on the education side, had a lot of games or role play games, especially when I was learning specifically about Egypt. So we would do a role play game or, you know, some people healers, some were warriors and then you had to.

interact with each other as if you were those characters and try to survive and that compared to playing a board game like the game Senate which was kind of an ancient game so you learn about the culture you see that in ancient history yeah they had games

So one topic that's really coming to mind as we talk about this takes me back to working in education. And there was a topic that came up all the time called transfer. Basically, this is the implicit idea. think a lot of us just sort of implicitly assume that if I learn how to do a particular thing in a particular context, that means I'm also learning how to do that thing in other contexts.

But one of the very strong results that has been seen across education literature is that transfer is hard. For most students most of the time, transfer doesn't happen at all.

They learn something in one context and they are completely unable to apply it to a new context unless you show them how. So transfer requires sort of explicit learning about how to transfer that skill. It's not an automatic thing. But over time when you see the same thing across many ⁓ contexts then it can become something that does transfer more easily for you. So once you've seen a particular skill or concept across

multiple contexts, now you're starting to form a clearer idea of that thing, and then you'll be able to transfer that thing more easily to new contexts. So there is sort of a meta skill that can evolve, ⁓ also the skill of transferring skills is a thing that the more you do it, the better you get at it. All of this is like a really abstract way for me to answer the question, which is I think that when you play a game, like the thing you're learning is how to play that game.

And so if the game is set up in an extremely authentic way, right, I remember a game, a game we played growing up that my dad had from his childhood called stocks and bonds. And it was really just trading stocks and bonds. That's all it is what it was, but it was a game. So he could get me and my brother to play it with him because it was a game. And we had to do math and we had to make bets and there was randomness in it. And so what did we learn playing that game is we learned how to play that game. But since that game was a very authentic model,

of what it's like to buy and sell individual stocks and bonds, it did build some skills in those particular areas because the game was a very authentic model of a particular thing.

I wanted to touch on one thing before we leave this entirely that I hadn't thought of before, and I just thought of it listening to Laura,

I know that the notion of auditory learners versus visual learners versus experiential learners is really outdated.

it did make me wonder if there's...

Is there something here which is like a simulation learner that is, know, without falling into the trap of that very simplistic breakdown of different types of learners. I do feel like for me, I, in my brain, try and turn things into games, whatever it is I'm learning.

I just wanted to throw out that idea. Compared to that outmoded model of types of learners, is this a new type of learner?

So maybe by way of context, so in education there's an old meme, it goes back to some research in the 70s, that there are four learning styles and roughly they are auditory, visual, ⁓ kinesthetic,

reading and writing, And ⁓ the folk wisdom around this idea is that each student is one or two of these, and so you should always tailor all of your lessons towards that modality for that student. ⁓ And that, turns out, never actually had any scientific underpinning. There's never been a study that shows that students actually do better when you cater to their so-called learning style.

what did people do because of learning styles is they started investing in multimodal learning, teaching things not just one way but multiple ways. That turns out to have a research base that yes, actually multimodal teaching and learning does help, but not because each student has one learning style and so each student will glom onto their learning style, but because for all of us, seeing and experiencing things through multiple modes

up.

I feel like we could talk forever about game design in general. I do want to shift us in the direction of environment and ideas about climate and environment.

I loved Joshua's earlier question about specific examples when I was just sort of spouting off randomly. Let's maybe each give a concrete example in our own experience where we felt like some idea was well conveyed in a game. There was transfer, because I think that's a great term,

so one that I think is a wonderful game that I, that came to mind is Chicago Express, which is a auctioning game.

or that's its core mechanic. ⁓ so, I mean, you learn about auctioning, which is cool, kind of like a core aspect of money and economics and business.

I think it teaches you a little bit about like

you know, like modern business and I don't know more, more about, think just like competition and cooperation really. And like, um, with like a kind of economic flair.

Yeah, so guess the one that comes to mind is Wingspan, which I know has started to kind of grow in popularity. I was interested in that game, well, because I started out kind of becoming a beginner birder.

if you have a bow that you see a lot, like a Northern Cardinal, then you can see, what's their nesting habits? What's their, what is their like feeding behavior? Cause that wingspan I think does that well.

And so that was just something that I enjoyed and also since I like birds I try to pick the birds that I like which ended up not helping my strategy per se

Yeah, I find that I often don't play games as well as I should because I just really enjoy some particular weird aspect of it

many games don't work if you're not trying hard to win and that drives some of the mechanics and I think there's something interesting there about cooperation and competition, cooperative games, think especially when we're talking about ecological games, there's a lot there of

how to make a game fun and drive the engine of the mechanics, sometimes without having competition at all, sometimes with a mix.

So when I think about this, I think ⁓ a framework that's coming through in my head is that you sort of have, which I got like, what can you learn from a game? There's thematic ideas, which is like ideas related to the theme that the game is about. And then there's sort of strategic or meta strategy ideas, things about playing games in general. ⁓ And so for example, thematic ideas, I Wingspan is a great example I was thinking about that. ⁓

There's a game, I bet no one's heard of it, it's called New Bedford. And it is a game that is about ⁓ whaling in the 19th century. And ⁓ through playing this game, you learn about how it all worked ⁓ and what were some of the economic considerations and ⁓ it actually has a mechanism in it through which the supply of whales gets scarce as you play the game, right? And so there's sort of an ecological, and these are all like thematic. These are just things about

There was a time and place called New Bedford in the 19th century where whaling was key economic activity. Here are some of the other economic activities that were necessary components of it and how they all fit together. It's just facts, content you're learning that is aligned with real history. And I think I love a thematic game, a game that gets across real information about something historical or some topic. On the flip side, there's just sort of meta game problem solving and strategy ideas.

that some games really embody well. One that I've thought a lot about over the years ⁓ is the meta strategy of create a heuristic. So a lot of games are very complicated and then on any given term you need to decide what to do. And that's a very complicated question. But if you can come up with some way of putting ⁓ monetary value on the possible actions you might take.

that can help you make decisions. And so some games it turns out that you can create some very, very, very good heuristics. A heuristic is sort of a... ⁓ doing that. It's a quantitative measurement of something that isn't correct 100%, but it's a good sort of shortcut. It's a way that you can cut out lot of the complexity. So for example, if anyone's ever played the game Sushi Go, so this is a card game where on every round you're gonna like pass...

these cards around And so the question is, each time, is, well, which of these cards should I take? And that's a hard question, because you don't know what other cards you're going to be able to take, what other people will take. ⁓ But you can develop a heuristic, where you say, well, if I take this card, what is the expected value of this card to me?

So some games I find really teach that particular skill. And then the more that you latch onto that as a thing that you can do, you start applying it to new games.

I just like to call it guts vs strategy. I'm more of a gut player, but also I'm not really driven by winning. I'm driven by the art and kinda having fun, so...

Right, yeah.

I think one of the things about this whole project and conversation that I ended up being really interested

was exactly that balance of when we talk about conveying climate ideas with games. ⁓

In my mind, the first set of things that I was thinking about were not thematic at all, right? There were things like exponential growth, carrying capacity. Nathaniel, I think some of what you're just talking about is very much ⁓ on my list of things that I feel like people would understand climate stuff better if they understood. And that's just the notion of expected value. Like most people go through lives never really understanding that probabilities by themselves and outcomes by themselves are nowhere near as powerful as when you combine them.

and probability times cost is actually this huge idea.

It's at that idea of thematics versus mechanics. think some of the games I've imagined as being helpful in this.

project or context or whatever aren't about the environment or climate at all. They have mechanics that capture some of these core ideas that I think are useful for that conversation. I really love Go.

you guys have played Go, it's sort of like the Japanese Chinese equivalent of chess, it's been around for thousands of years, it's a it's just a really neat game. I have used ideas from Go in lots of different contexts ⁓ in talking about engineering or different projects. I have sometimes talked about chess complexity versus Go complexity, chess has a bunch of explicit rules. This piece moves this way, this other one moves that way, you cast

this way, they're explicit. Go has like four rules, right? Three rules. It's basically got these very, very simple rules. And then most of what you think of as rules in other games are just these emergent implications. Like you can't recreate board position. So that means all this other stuff.

But chest complexity versus go complexity. Isn't quite my example. I, I wanted examples where we felt like we saw that transfer happening. And I distinctly remember being in one of those engineering meetings, everybody's kind of got their different ideas about where this project should go. And, you know, there's some good creative tension about what that should mean. And I'm, arguing with somebody. there's this concept in go called thickness.

right, which is basically the structural notion. Certain arrangements of pieces have this strength to them that comes out of their geometry and their shape. And if you want to extend into other territory, you can sort of do it in this way where the structure of how you're placing pieces is...

is stable, is harder to attack if you were. And I realized I was very consciously extending and thinking about thickness as I laid out my position for why we should, you know, do a go-to-market like this instead of a go-to-market like that or whatever. And it was such an interesting shock to me to realize I'm thinking about thickness, this very concrete go term and this very geometric game mechanic as I negotiate this, you know,

totally unrelated thing. So it wasn't a thematic relationship at all, but there was this very deep structural idea and since then I've, hey, I mean it worked in that particular context and I have found that idea from Go applying a lot of other places. So that's sort of an example for me of this mechanic or structural idea and transfer rather than a thematic one.

in the interest of time, let's maybe talk a little bit about what are these ideas we keep saying could be conveyed well, like what are these ideas that we think would help climate and environmental conversations?

I'll just start saying, ⁓ I said exponential growth. So I feel like I could sort of cheat and throw that one in there. said, ⁓ I feel like, exponential growth and compounded growth are so core to a lot of environmental problems that we see people don't really get

And I feel like if they did some notions in pollution, in capacity, in environmentalism make a lot more sense.

And I'd love to hear others that you think are important for that conversation.

Yeah, so you alluded earlier, some of us had played a couple rounds of this game Daybreak, which is a game explicitly themed about the world trying to work to solve climate change and global warming. ⁓ So there's a lot in there that's very directly relevant, think. But I think one of the things that I found Daybreak did really well relates to what you just brought up, which is I found after just playing it once or twice that I was really thinking a lot. So in Daybreak,

⁓ every round you're getting a bunch of cards that represent projects that you could invest in or whose resources you could put towards something else. And so on every single turn, many times you are choosing which of these projects should I put into action, which of them should I fund, which of them should I not use and just use as a resource to make something happen. ⁓ And so constantly having to assess which of these is going to be most useful right now and in the future.

And that was what was interesting because in Daybreak there just aren't that many rounds. You have to make progress very quickly. And so I found myself really having to think about which of these cards have the most value. If I play them now, they'll lead to the most net value across the game, which relates to that compounded growth idea. Another way I would put it is the value of time. ⁓ That certain cards in that game, no matter when you use them, you'll get the same benefit.

Other cards, if you start them earlier, you'll get to use them more times, and perhaps they'll even increase in power over the course of the game. And I thought that Daybreak did a really good job of making you think about that, because you're so constrained on how many actions you're going to take in total. ⁓ One other concept I want to bring up ⁓ takes me into the realm of video games, which I don't want to go too deep into, but there's a game called Factorio, and it's a simulation game where you are

crash landed on an alien planet and you need to basically build up ⁓ a mechanized world from just a few basic components. You need to build a factory that makes this and build a factory that makes that and then retool your factory to take those new components and make new things. It's fun, it's interesting, but one of the really nifty things, it's not a game about environmentalism, but in Factorio there is an enemy. You're on an alien planet and these little alien creatures will come along and just start attacking your stuff.

And you can't die in the game. They can destroy all of the stuff you're building. And it turns out as you play, you discover that the aliens feed on pollution from your stuff. And so the dirtier your stuff, the more stuff you're making, the more pollution you're releasing, that pollution is drifting off other parts of this map where there are aliens and they are, their populations are growing and scaling in direct proportion to how much pollution you're releasing. And it's not...

that's cool.

I mean, it's not the core element of the game at all, and it's not even a thing they really tell you. have to sort of notice it. And so as the game goes on, there are some technologies you can choose to invest in that can give you some of the benefits with less pollution creation. ⁓ But the cool thing, I think the thing I walk away with from it, there's just a really intuitive understanding in that world at least, is that everything has an environmental cost.

⁓ every single thing you do in that game does, and at end of the day, they're just always going to be fighting these aliens because they're always getting generated by pollution and you're always going be generating pollution. ⁓ And so just the idea that you need to just really think about it as part of a system that like, I have to deal with this pollution either here now or later in the form of these aliens that are going to destroy my stuff.

Yeah, I think that's really cool. It's reminding me, love the implicit like caring about pollution because of this very clear impact thing rather than saying this is a game about pollution. It's like, well, I care about pollution because it makes this other thing happen.

I'm seeing your

The really good city builder games, just, you if you pollute a bunch of neighborhoods, if you make a ton of noise there, if you fill it with stuff, the property value goes down. so independent of any, you know, moral or environmental context, it just really makes you sort of think about the fact that having big heavy polluting factories right next to your river sucks.

But sorry, I interrupted. think we're next with Audra.

I think the negotiations and kind of games that help you have to collaborate or...

negotiate to with another person, I think that that negotiation part is kind of important because then when we think about that as a skill for, I don't know, it's like just global and then also just within individuals and organizations

I was thinking about the CO2 markets, you how you have monopoly and how you have kind of the... the... what's it called? Bets. I'm not very financial.

focus but...

And you know, when you buy stocks, stocks and bonds, kind of like, you know, when you learn about stocks and bonds in a way you could learn about kind of the effects of carbon markets and things like that. So learning kind of the logistics, being able to adapt that from one to the other. But those were kind of my

if I take this action now, is this going to reduce carbon over the next 20 years versus one year? What's worth investing? I think that's a great example.

why don't we catch you up, Laura?

I mean, I think the classic example is always capitalism with monopoly and sort of how corrupt and bankrupt the system is. Yeah, let's see. I'm trying

trying to think. ⁓ mean, Catan has some really, really good examples. Resource management type examples, ⁓ know, costs, what's opportunity costs. I feel like that's ⁓ shown in a lot of games. When it comes specifically to climate, think my thinking was tied up in systems thinking and how affecting different areas of the environment.

can wildly drastically change other areas you might not think about and just understanding how these different spheres are connected to each other and the interplay between them. So I think that could elegantly explored in games.

I've thought of all this through the lens of a video game, which obviously there's a lot more freedom of exploration, So my dream would be to give people access

to the tools necessary to be as creative as these scientists with coming up with these new forms of energy or these new solutions to batteries or whatever it is. So if we can empower people with, they don't have to understand the core basic science to. ⁓

as the same as scientists, but there is a certain talent when it comes to solving problems and looking at problems and finding solutions.

I love your comment on systems thinking. It's one of my personal ⁓ obsessions, I guess, as well. And that sort of notion of coupled systems where you're pushing on one part of a system and it has all these other consequences. I love that you brought that up.

Laurie, you said that you could think of some examples of that in the video game world, and I don't wanna force too tight of a focus here. What are some examples in video games where you feel like do that ⁓ systems, sort of

I

I feel like there's always a little bit of it. Like even in Zelda, I can't think of a specific example, but it's like you healed this fairy and then this world or lots of, feel like,

Maybe you'll see it in like open world. my idea was to do it through an RPG. So you make these choices in these decision and here's the ripple effects and how it goes out. So I feel like the RPG is a really good example and in the Witcher it's like you do this and here's the long term consequences and how it plays out in life and how these different areas are interconnected and because you made this choice in this specific scenario.

Yeah.

I really love that point. feel like throughout the climate based stuff, there's just been a lot of that like, hey, we can't just reduce this to a single number. We talk about co-benefits a lot. We talk about how you sort of need to work on all these different parts of a system. can't just fix one part of it and ignore the others.

⁓ I was discussing the game Solutions, which I don't think is a very widely known game, but it deals directly with climate solutions. And these are a bunch of solutions that are ⁓ drawn from Project Drawdown. ⁓ So it is...

course.

a explicitly an education game and ⁓ it's a game to incite debate ⁓ and incite conversation ⁓ and it's cooperative. I think cooperation seems to be

a mechanic that feels like it's a powerful one to lean into for the world of climate. I can see one of you guys here wrote feedback loops and that seems like a powerful lesson that can be portrayed in games, like any deep Euro game where you're trying to build out.

an engine and you build it up and then you start to see the consequences of it take on a life of its own after several turns. Harkening back to what Nathaniel said about time, how you do something at the beginning and it has much broader consequences later on.

Yeah, think there's the several of you have mentioned the balance of cooperation and competition. And I think that's really interesting. I think it's hard to make. I know people that just hate cooperative games. I know people that love them. It's hard to make a cooperative game that has the engagement.

Daybreak seems to do really well just in that it seems like it's really hard to do if you don't cooperate with each other. Like there's just, it's a hard game. Every time I played that game, I've lost and it's depressing. it reminds me of the very first cooperative game I played was early on. It was called Age of Camelot. And several times I got together with friends and we spent a whole weekend afternoon playing this game where you're sort of fighting against the fall of the dark ages and we'd lose and it was depressing.

and more dread takes over and it's the end of civilization for a couple centuries. Good job. And Daybreak runs that risk as well, but I feel like it drives this,

you get that dynamic and that tension that you sometimes get from competition just because the game is so damn hard ⁓ that it requires it. The other thing I wanted to throw out there is there are a couple of games...

that sort of do both. These are not remotely environmental games, but there's a wonderful game called Dead of Winter, which is, I'm like super over all zombie stuff, but it's a zombie survival game, and it actually has this incredibly well done mechanic where there's sort of this overall cooperative goal. It actually, when I think about this, it really lends itself to the environmental model. There's this overall goal which, if the group of players cannot achieve, you all lose. Basically, the zombies take over

and it's the end of the world. Obviously that could map directly onto climate collapse. So there's this requirement that you cooperate to make that happen. And it's hard. But beyond that, each person has these different little specific sort of micro goals where you sort of win in the end. If we survive, I win more than you because this got done. it's really neat because it does.

It does foster that cooperation as a team, but the individual goals really sort of drive this. You get a fun narrative out of the game. It really does a bunch of stuff. And that reminded me of one other thing I wanted to touch on that before we move on, which is, has anybody played a game called Root?

It's a really neat game. I highly recommend it. It is incredibly difficult to learn because it is totally asymmetric in that every player in that game is got different goals and different game mechanics and is essentially playing a different game. Like you're using the board in different ways. Your whole notion of topology is different. It's really weird. And I've seen other games try that, but it's the first game I've played that I felt like really nailed it.

Yeah, I love root.

Yeah, you're all on the same board.

that was one of the climate ideas I wanted to throw in was this notion of asymmetry. one of the things I think happens with climate conversations is that you have these negotiations, conversations, whatever they are, between people with wildly different goals. Maybe it's a capitalist who just wants to make money. Maybe it's somebody who's concerned about the environment. Maybe it's somebody that wants some specific thing for their

local community, whatever it is, you have these very different goals sometimes and very different rule sets, if you will. Like their moves are different.

And so the notion of a game that would help understand these asymmetric conversations, I think is really interesting to me. Root was the example that popped into my mind, but there's more and more out there that are like that.

You know, it doesn't have ⁓ that really interesting mechanic that you mentioned in that zombie game where like everyone could lose if certain scenario like occurs, if certain situation occurs, which I think is a really

interesting thing to in there.

The idea of having a common goal, like let's not destroy the environment that we live in, but within that, a capitalist and a environmental activist and a school teacher are going to have very different sets of rules and sort of micro goals, but have to come

with some way to cooperate it's really that that same model that's interesting. ⁓

Yeah, I mean, it

requires capitalistic innovation. It requires policy. It requires education. And yeah, maybe those are all different avenues of gameplay. And Root's clearly not the only game out there that does asymmetry. It's certainly the most glaring example of asymmetry that I know of.

Yeah, what are what are some

others? What are some others? Because I find that fascinating.

Again, I'm not an expert, a couple weeks ago, I played this game called Terra Mystica with some it's not at all ⁓ played like that, but there's asymmetry Each faction has its own capabilities.

It's not like you're playing with a different set of rules and the map more or less the same way, but you have the guys that are, you know, there's different terrains, which is interesting. Like I'm the desert, but, beyond that, each one does a particular thing differently and better. can build faster or I can, yeah, that's a, that's a great example. Interesting.

So some of what you're getting here started to touch on another question I know that you were interested in, if the thesis is that, there are skills and ideas relevant to the climate crisis and climate solutions that we can learn from playing board games, are there ways of playing that make it more likely for these outcomes to materialize? I'm going to come back to the education angle that one of, ⁓ part of my job,

one of the working at this program was to go to schools and witness our volunteers and the teachers they were supporting teaching in the classroom and then give them feedback. And one of the most common things I would see, was that people would get into a situation that I would call the game, guess what's on the teacher's mind.

teachers love to ask questions. Questions are a fantastic pedagogical tool. So a teacher would always rather ask a question to elucidate the next piece of information rather than just saying that information. And often that can be a great strategy. But sometimes it devolves into a guessing game where the teacher has a particular answer in mind and they're just going to stand there and make the students guess it for 12 minutes. Even though the students might be saying perfectly valid ideas or things that are worth following up on.

but that lot of the time, most people most of the time are not gonna stumble onto those understandings. So if you want someone to experience and deeply integrate whatever that idea is, you need to tell them the idea and give them some examples and then they'll start playing with it.

goal is to get a lot of people to learn, then to make it accessible, you have to be willing to just directly say, hey, one of the things I want you to think about in this game is the time cost or the opportunity cost, and here's what that means, and here's an example of it. And then they'll be able to integrate it into their gameplay, maybe.

I can relate to that. I normally play games with a friend of mine who's got stacks and stacks, bookshelves of games, and he's just a brilliant game teacher. And my enjoyment of game play often increased after he would teach the rules, and then he would give us little hint of, here's some strategy, here's a little bit of like...

ways to think about playing the game. ⁓ And then you're armed with just a much better idea of how to play the game and start the game. And it makes it more enjoyable.

this is reminding me a lot of something from role playing games,

A thing that has been growing in the role playing world, I think it comes from the interesting overlap with the improv world, is this notion of... ⁓

post-game conversations. In the software world, we talk about postmortems or whatever, but a lot of people will go through, they'll play the game session, do all this, they'll have this story they make up, and then they'll have this meta conversation at the end where they talk about what they thought worked really well, what they thought didn't work well, and sort of themes. And that's where somebody would sort of say, like, here's sort of this underlying theme that I saw, or here's this. And so the question I would have is, when we talk about different ways to play board

is a way to make these games communicate these ideas better especially for you know in this climate context to have that kind of conversation before or after them or is there something else that helps with that

I like the idea of mini-retros after a game, ⁓ you know, retrospective of what happened, what went well, why did some things work and others not. I think it would be really cool if you could ⁓ have an ESPN highlight reel of this game after you played it, and then you could have a breakdown of just...

This is why this worked, and this is why this didn't. ⁓ In lieu of that, ⁓ I can see if your motivation is to try to use gameplay as a teaching tool, ⁓ then more overt, explicit preparation before you start of, hey, these are some of the mechanics that you're going to need to think about.

And

like be aware of that. And then as you're playing it, think it'll like it, these things will sink in, would imagine much, much deeper.

absolutely. think going back to the education landscape, I seem to be representing that point of view a lot in this conversation. What we're talking about here is metacognition.

Metacognition is sort of the ability to reflect on your own thinking process and it itself is a skill that has been very in vogue in in the education landscape over the last decade or two where a lot of lessons just sort of being structured with some piece of metacognition at the end a reflection a discussion ⁓ and that's there's a lot of good learning science that says ⁓ Set up do a thing reflect

And that reflection step is critical for a number of reasons. So in the game context, think there's a few things here. ⁓ Part of it is when you talk to people after the game, you're just going to learn because they may have had access to information you did not have access to, or maybe they just have played other games, so they were thinking about it a different way. So it's just a knowledge sharing. There's a pure knowledge sharing function of we all just had a related experience. We were all experiencing the same game, but from different perspectives. Let's share those perspectives. ⁓

But I do think that there's also this metacognitive piece that when you do enough of this reflective activity, it teaches you to do the reflection better and it teaches you to do metacognitive activity as you play.

And so one of the purposes of having a wrap up conversation in an education context is to model the thought processes that we hope students will also start to develop in situ during the thing they're doing.

I think this this discussion of especially post maybe pre conversation is really good. Another one that comes up when we talk about this is the notion of actually changing either

game rules themselves, which I don't love as much, but some games that have scenarios. So it may also be that we could sort of say, hey, we're to play this game, but we're going to tweak this rule to make this particular aspect that we feel like bring some mechanic or idea to the forefront, like a house rule or, know, again, I didn't mean to harp so much on the zombie game, but that game has these different scenarios you play through and they really capture that really well because there's different sort of

difficulties, which is nice, but there's also this real emphasis shift in one scenario, you may be having to gather resources much more aggressively and another one you're building up defensive much more aggressively. So in some games you have this ability to sort of set up scenarios that might ⁓ again, bring something to the forefront. I'm curious if you think that that's a if there's examples to where you think that would be good way to make these these ideas come out or is that sort of get lost in the noise?

Yeah, I I certainly think that's a great tool. A game that immediately came to mind is a game called Sky Team, which is a two player game where you and your teammate are collaboratively trying to land an airplane. And that game is full of scenarios. And depending on the scenario you're playing, the difficulty may be higher or lower, but in specific ways. in one scenario, a ton more traffic ahead of you. have to be much more careful about radioing to clear the traffic. And in another scenario, they've given you a fuel.

and you're low on fuel, and so you need to really pay attention how much fuel you have left. In another scenario, it's super windy, and so you can't turn the aircraft as much as you might like to. ⁓ And so it gives you ways to sort of... the scenarios make you focus in on different aspects of the gameplay, and, in this case, different aspects of the theme.

Yeah. I think this, some extent, touches on what Laura was talking about earlier with...

ways to convey system complexity and that like sort of, you know, dynamic systems, sort of everything interacting with everything. One of the ways that we sometimes decompose systems or not decompose them, but try and understand their dynamics is sort of, you know, emphasizing one particular interaction, one particular component, either by enhancing it or by restricting it And then by doing that with multiple components, you eventually start to learn that overall sort of global dynamic. And so maybe one

way that you could talk about, this is probably terrible example, but we sort of jumped all over Catan as being a tool of the colonialists and I want to also call out what a great game it is and how much fun it is and there's a lot of really good mechanics in there and I'm imagining a series of Catan sessions where you might sort of add house rules to emphasize different things ⁓ in different ways, like maybe one time you're going to make ⁓

you know, the sort of civilization goals of, know, that aren't commodity related really count for a lot more. So you're to have to do one set of things. Another time, I don't know, this is dumb, but you can be like, you know, sheep is like much more general. I'm just wondering if there's games like that where you could sort of pin particular parts of the game and then move that around. I think some games

would lend themselves really well to that and others would be like you can't go in and just start you know making one thing more expensive without destroying destroying the entire game yeah so

Messing with the balance. Yeah.

I do think Catan is a great example of... ⁓ I think that would really be a really good model of trying to do that. like Nathaniel, Catan was also my gateway drug as a board game.

as I think it is for many, many people. It's one of the really core ones. ⁓ And I think it is because it is complex enough to really be interesting, but simple enough that it has a fairly simple ⁓ game area and set of rules that it's not overwhelming really for a lot of people. And so there's a couple of levers that you could tweak with Catan.

And when we think about climate, there's not much of a more complex system in the world.

it touches every aspect of society or it can. ⁓ And and that's one of the ⁓ challenges with it is, is it just feels too big and too overwhelming then for anyone to, to feel not overwhelmed, you know, to not feel completely helpless, like, how can I make any impact on this? Well, like, you can make impact in

infinite number of ways. If you just choose one, that's good.

One thing I want to

Yeah.

I don't know if this mechanic exists so much in board games, but I'm sure it does. But I know at least in video games, you can push the boundaries to the point of absurdity and that almost becomes the goal. Like how far can we take the system? How far can we push it? And to me, that becomes part of the engagement and part of the learning process. And I feel specifically with climate, something that is rather overwhelming and scary.

If you can push, find a way to quantify its limits and push things to their boundaries to the point of absurdity, I don't know. Injecting some sense of humor into that might, I don't know if it would expedite the learning process, but it might sort of help with the emotional component

the reduction to absurdity argument, right? Like a lot of times when you've got this system, a good way to understand it is to take one element of it and push it all the way until everything gets ridiculous to your point, because that sort of helps show the boundaries.

and that notion of games as like a model system and we sort of talked about, you know, enhancing one aspect of it so that the model system shows you this dynamic imbalance is interesting. But there's also the other extreme where you say, take this model system and just go in one direction until the whole thing falls apart because you'll learn a lot doing that is another interesting example of things you could do with games,

Right.

you start to get up into the boundary of sort of design constraints, right? So the best games can hold up to that kind of, you know, picking around the margins. You know, can choose to play a katan with what if I only acquire sheep? You know, like, you can play it that way. I think many games, you know, can, it's just a question of how much testing were they able to do? Did they prioritize that? Like sometimes,

when you start playing a highly unbalanced strategy in a particular game, yeah, the game just isn't designed for that. And sometimes very interesting and fun things happen, and other times very boring and unfun things happen when you sort of don't play the way the game thinks you're going to play.

we sort of jumped on Catan, ⁓ but it feels like a thing that would work really well. And I think one of the reasons it might work really well is that it's a sort of a simple model system. And interestingly, it doesn't have some of the things that I think are wonderful that we've talked about being so great in other games. For example, I imagine a game like Root, right?

we've talked about how cool it is you have these incredibly different rules and I'm playing, but I'm imagining now trying to do this kind of tweaking with root where you go in and, know, nudge one part of the game mechanic and change a cost or change a turn order or do something. And like, it's very easy for it. Imagine the whole thing would just explode. would just not work well. It is such a complex game.

Yeah.

we talked a lot about

where these environmental ideas show up in games. And I thought maybe it was interesting to talk about places they don't. ⁓ in particular, we've talked about exponential and compounded growth a lot, because I think that's such a core important idea. But I also feel like it's something that game design almost avoids, right? Because in a lot of games, if you have a runaway victory, it is no fun. Exponential growth will kill

a lot of games, right? If we're all playing Civ or whatever that is, and I get 1 % faster growth in my population early in the game, 90 % of that game is gonna be not that much fun because I just get on that different exponential curve and the nature of exponential growth is gonna demonstrate exponential growth really gonna be that much fun. So a lot of times game designers are putting in sort of what I would almost call blue shell mechanics to sort of break that and even that out.

Are there climate ideas that are like negative examples almost in game design? That's almost as interesting.

So example here, which is a very direct example, is when it comes to themed games, think one of the downfalls of a themed game is you have to make choices about how these real things from the real theme are going to be scored in the game. So one of the things I immediately noticed in Daybreak, to go back to that climate game example, there's a card type in Daybreak that's essentially geoengineering. Daybreak hates geoengineering.

They may be right. It may be that all of the geoengineering solutions are awful and they have horrible costs and maybe they modeled everything just right. Or maybe it turns out that cloud seeding is going to be this really important systemic fix for climate change. And they just sort of guessed when they designed the card and made it really awful and a thing you would never want to do in the game. like, so there's this sort of direct, like when you're doing a game on a theme, you have to decide how

rank.

thematic elements map to the model in the game, and you may be imparting your own values, your own opinions, or your own sort of constrained knowledge at a moment in time, and it turns out 20 years later with the hindsight of science and advancements, know that, whoops, that was just factually incorrect. That's not actually how that thing interacts in the system.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mentioned this game like Brass Birmingham, which has a lot of realistic sounding feeling things, but they are all abstract placeholders for not real things. ⁓ You build breweries and they're just as important as train lines, depending upon how you use them. ⁓ And it's just different.

elements of an economy that one side can stress more and the game is so wonderfully balanced that it works.

and sort of classically in a lot of computer games that are fighting and war-based Counter-Strike, all of these, you get the memes on the internet of like some, you know, 15-year-old who's played a ton of Counter-Strike, and then they, you know, go out, try, they want to go out in the real world and have a real battle, and it turns out that actually the way battles work in Counter-Strike is not equivalent to how real battles are fought in real life.

Awesome. I think that was really fun. ⁓ Thank you all for that. I feel like we should probably wrap up here. I think we talked about the idea that games could communicate some ideas pretty well, but that it's not trivial. And I think we had some really interesting science and thought around.

when that does and doesn't work,

I love the idea of the conversations in ways. I mean, I feel like there's a project there of just sort of like, here's a set of ideas you can take, go try this game, try it in these different ways. And here's some prompts for conversations to your point, Nathaniel, not just sort of saying, talk about the game afterwards, but play this game and actually discuss this prompt, this idea, look for this. And maybe that's something that teachers or people out there that just wanna...

explore these ideas could take advantage of it'd be really fun to put something like that together and see what that looks like. ⁓ That's my closing stuff.

I'll jump in and just say this was ⁓ really fun.

I could see ⁓ something that sounds really exciting is to do a modification of a game that we all can play pretty easily and ⁓ see how it works and do one intentionally so to try to bring out a certain element that we're looking to bring out. ⁓ Like, hey, we want to try to mod this game in order to accentuate.

feedback loops or try to make it so that exponential growth is something that occurs ⁓ and see how that works ⁓ and talk about the mechanics as we're playing and what we're learning.

Yeah, I agree. is a lot of fun. And motivated me to go out there and do some more homework on board games and the mechanics of them.

Yay, that was a lot of fun. Thank you all so much. I will see you around the Climate Base