Okay, it is getting closer! No stress. But, I feel that I have a very clear challenge to grasp this Semester.
To date, my project is alive (in my head) and blossoming (in an ever-growing Google Docs of notes). However, safe to say that academically, it is still wrapped in mystery.
I know what I’m doing: a board game with the goal of inspiring/empowering people’s engagement in ecosystem restoration (ER) as a grassroots pathway towards optimistic futures even under the worst climate crisis (CC) scenarios.
Every day, I am getting new ideas and refining old ones on the various mechanics of the game and how they all fit together. But all of this is happening rather non-methodically. I have confidence in most of the ideas’ suitability for my project – I’m drawing on a good deal of personal experience with both forest restoration and climate-related empowerment.
But perhaps due to this pre-existing knowledge of the subject areas, I have, so far, not been doing almost any “academic” research into the matter. That means that my ideas can flow freely, but also that I will have to “academically justify” them only in retrospect – and I feel like that may not be the correct way to do things in a university environment.
So, on that thought, there are two main areas where I will need to change my approach, hopefully with the help of my so-far unidentified supervisor.
1) What kind of story do I want to tell?
Easy – a story where a community of humans team up to tackle restoring their local forest ecosystem and thanks to that, decades later, end up living in style and chill, protected from the various climate catastrophes by the ecosystem that they become an inherent part of.
Hard – a story that has a verifiable potential to inspire, engage and/or empower people from whichever backgrounds (as ER really is an interdisciplinary challenge, not one for just ecologists). A story that, at its end, makes people go “Oh wow, cool, maybe I could do that too around here!” instead of “So scary, but what can I do, let’s just grab a beer,” which is a much more typical response to works in the climate fiction genre.
My challenge is made more nuanced by the fact that I am not writing a linear tale but rather making a game where the story is told predominantly through mechanics and can go many different directions. Those can be good for me – for things like empowerment, as a player is in the story – but also not so much – for things like making sure the end result is always inspiring.
In any case, I know that I need a good storytelling framework to weave my mechanics around and make them into a story that has the potential to move for action. Just like the much-repeated Hero’s Journey can be considered an academically based framework for specific type of stories, I will need to identify a framework that suits my goals. That framework, I feel, has to inform my narrative structure, elements, roles, and which mechanics get the spotlight/get sidelined.
The challenge is to identify this framework and settle on one, and so far, I have no idea where to even start looking.
2) What disciplines will be drawn on for my game?
Here’s a quote from my KIPP proposal:
“[to] raise awareness on what ER is, support forming pro-environmental values and nudge players to see it as an accessible, bottom-up means for a better future [, I will have to synthesise insights from] narrative studies, game studies/design, (environmental) psychology, pedagogy, or even some behavioural economics.”
A paragraph later, I also list:
“I will have to effectively translate ER-influenced futures under CC into a set of game mechanics [, applying insights] from mainly ecology and environmental sciences, but also anthropology, sociology, philosophy, or future studies.”
Well safe to say, I cannot be that interdisciplinary.
Somehow, I think I have to decide which disciplines are really relevant for my project’s focus and goals, and which can be omitted and left fully to forces of creativity.
Environmental sciences and ecology are no brainers, they have to stay to present ecosystem restoration authentically with mechanics that have real-world counterparts. I also think that I got this part pretty covered with previous experience. Same goes for representing climate change in authentic mechanics.
But the social aspects – representing community-based action and empowerment – will require some narrowing down and choosing a specific body of literature.
Similarly, I will need to explore futures studies and identify a part of that discipline that can be most relevant for my range of possible futures.
Maybe I will find that comfort in choosing a specific author / journal / institute? No idea. Again, something to look into with my supervisor, I hope.
Anyway, that’s it for now, back to involuntary brainstorming!
