The story of our game
A deep dive into the thinking that started this journey, and how we decided on key game features.
We wanted to make a game appropriate to our era. This time of things being turned upside down. Of Tik Tok and Greta Thunberg. Of Trump, Brexit and Bolsonaro. Of culture wars, civil wars, wars in Europe and…oh yea, global pandemics. Our world has gone beyond the sterile relativism of millennial postmodernism. This is a whole new era, and we want our game to express the spirit of our age - not just in its content and narrative, but also in its incentives structure, ethos and means of production.
Board games as cultural reproduction
We believe board games, like any cultural artefact, are an expression of their epoch. But we couldn’t find fitting examples when we were playing new games around 2016. The closest we found was the War on Terror, an apparently underappreciated product from the ephemeral Terror Bull Games (future game critique coming soon), which included a Balaclava of Evil for players to wear.
The story telling, artwork and incentive structure captured the hypocrisy, darkness and amorality of the Global War on Terror, infusing it with the satire you’d find in Private Eye, The Onion or Jon Stewart. But the game could end without warning (by design we believe) and the irreverent nihilism of launching dirty bombs and political kidnappings could too easily descend into apocalyptic recklessness that thwarted strategic approaches or diplomacy. It was an archetypal postmodern game - amoral, unpredictable, nihilistic and making fun of itself.
What comes after postmodernity?
We wanted a game that would do justice to the bewildering complexity of contemporary life. We didn’t want something preachy and moralising, where you save the world by stopping climate change. Because that’s not the world we live in. Climate change is already here, and it’s going to get a lot worse. Very few of us feel we can take meaningful action to mitigate it. Because it feels like the people in charge - politicians and big business - are mostly proceeding with business as usual, clinging onto power by whatever means possible and lining their pockets as they do so. That’s the world we live in. And that’s the world we bring you in our game.
The love of money is the root of…
There’s a familiar saying which we think is important in any consideration of how to mitigate climate change.
Money makes the world go round.
Wealth, possessions, security, status - like it or not, most people in this world are heavily motivated by money. If we cannot find a way to halt and reverse climate change that also makes people rich, we’re unlikely to succeed.
That’s why in our game, there’s only one way to win. Money. The player with the highest stock price wins the game.
And just like in business life, as the game proceeds, you can see everyone’s stock price at all times. But it’s not always clear who will receive which corporate bonuses, so there can be surprises when the last dice are rolled.
When and how will the fossil fuel era end?
Although there is only one victory condition, the game can end in two different ways: in climate catastrophe, or with the banning of fossil fuels.
In both cases, your career as a fossil fuel tycoon is over.
Why did we do this? Because we think that those are two very possible futures facing us. If we don’t get climate change under control, all bets are off. Geopolitical instability could lead to financial meltdown on a scale we’ve never seen before.
Alternatively, we will phase out fossil fuels to the point of them being a negligible slice of the economy. The EU has already legislated that no cars sold from 2035 onwards may emit CO2. That’s a harbinger of what’s to come. And the simplest way we could express that in the game mechanic was with the idea that public opinion leads to the banning of fossil fuels.
Corporatocracy
Did you know that, after slavery was abolished in the UK, former slave owners received £16.5 billion (converted to current values) in compensation for giving up their ‘property’?
That was about 40% of the national budget, so the payments were issued as bonds. Very long term bonds, because payments by the British government only finished in 2015! That means the taxes of living descendants of slaves have contributed to some of that ‘compensation’ to living descendants of their former owners. See a fact check of this story here.
What’s that got to do with climate change and the phasing out of fossil fuels?
A similar structure (albeit less heinous in its details) is being repeated already, and it’s being celebrated as the cornerstone of the energy transition. That’s basically what the Inflation Reduction Act is. Biden’s government is handing half a trillion dollars to companies already raking in huge profits, to incentivise them to go green. It’s carrot instead of stick. A carbon tax could never make it through Congress so, what policy tools remain?
This is how contemporary politico-capitalism works. We might dream of and strive to create the world we’d like to see, but for now we have to make do with the one we’ve got. John Perkins would see this as evidence of the Corporatocracy, as described in his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which we will be reviewing in due course.
So, how does that relate to game play in Climate Change the Game? If you do manage to end the game with the banning of fossil fuels, corporate bonuses get paid out as ‘compensation’ to the company with the largest fossil fuel infrastructure. So, ironically, if you’ve got a huge energy empire you might actively seek to have fossil fuels banned so you can benefit from the corporate bonuses at the end of the game! That’s one of our attempts to replicate the realpolitik of contemporary capitalism and politics within the strictures of a board game that’s not too complex or heavy.
End game
On the other hand, if at the end of the game your ruthless self interest led to climate apocalypse, the CEO with the strongest green credentials will get some extra cash to help pad out that space ship to the Moon or bunker in New Zealand.
Hopefully we will never know what that really looks like in reality but, if did ever come to that, we can fully imagine the hypocrisy of carbon billionaires touting their green credentials and wringing their hands with regret as they walk into their hermetically sealed climate bunker to wait out the wildfires, floods and civil unrest. Let’s hope our game is less prophetic than Pandemic was!
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