Playing with the Environment: Games about Climate, Infrastructure and Society

This week, as part of the ESRC’s Festival of Social Science, Members of the MMGC and the Manchester School of Architecture (MSA) ran two events to test two new board games that challenge players to think about building and developing nation-wide infrastructures and their wide-ranging impacts.

The games, designed and developed by MSA students as part of ongoing research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (The Landscapes of Post-War Infrastructure: Cooling Down), question the delicate links between climate and infrastructure, and the challenges and opportunities these structures play in our current response to the climate crisis.

In order to connect our student’s research with the game design process, this work ran in tandem with two research led units at MSA: an undergraduate, 3rd year Humanities Elective unit, and the School’s outward facing collaborative unit, MSA Live. During the undergraduate Humanities Elective unit, ‘Landscapes of Post-War infrastructure, each group met their tutors as well as game designer and educator Matteo Menapace and MMCG co-director Paul Wake to discuss their work in progress throughout the term. Early workshops covered the fundamentals of game design and set out a method of hacking, reworking, or reskinning, existing games, while later sessions focused on playtesting and refinement of the students’ prototypes. Key to the project is the understanding that games provide a way of modelling systems and that in doing so they are capable of constructing arguments and offer distinct rhetorical possibilities. These affordances allow games to function both as research method (requiring of students a sophisticated level of comprehension of their research topic) and as research output (in a form that invites interaction).

Connection board.

During the MSA Live! unit, a group of first year Masters students directed first and second year undergraduates in the further play testing and design of one of the games – Connection – and were able to produce a physical version using access to workshops and studios. The development of this game is ongoing, but you can see some of the process of the work through this blog: https://live.msa.ac.uk/2021/group/24/.

3D printed power station tokens from New Town Power.

A second game – New Town Power – also made it into physical form after two further rounds of development by the original designers and, then, by another Masters student. New Town Power is set in the post-war period and imagines the development of New Towns as requiring connections of roads and power to enable their development. Between 2 and 4 players take turns and play cards to connect their New Town to existing cities and new power infrastructure. New Town Power has now been play tested at two events, the first with university students and the second with school children at St Peter’s RC High School in Belle Vue. The second playtest, which involved 18 pupils drawn from years 7, 8 and 9, saw the game in front of its intended audience for the first time. The pupils we met were brilliant to work with – not only were they incredibly knowledgeable about the environment but they were also keen game-players, the ideal group to play and comment on the game. Their feedback will make a huge difference to the next stage of the game’s development.

Pupils from St Peter’s RC High School playing New Town Power. Photos by Kris Hasford.

Of the two playtests this event was the most significant in terms of forward planning. Beyond identifying a number of areas for improvement in the game’s next iteration, the engagement with this group of young people suggested that presenting our games as works in progress rather than as finished products is a productive way to engage future participants. Rather than presenting research as ‘finished’ this approach allows us to invite critique and to recognise the knowledge, experience and expertise held by children and young people and going some way to dismantling the perceived hierarchy of expert/non-expert.

We’d like to thank the pupils and staff at St Peter’s for making us feel so welcome (in particular Claudia for the making the whole thing possible), and very much hope that we will be able to return with the next iteration of the game.