Sliced Bread Animation, together with the Immergency team, created a collaborative game in AR that educates players on climate change policies, and the importance of working together to reduce carbon emissions as part of a XR competition. The game works as a virtual ‘escape room’, in which players go through a series of puzzles and minigames to reach the goal of lowering the CO2 levels before 2050.
As collaboration is an essential aspect to the story of the game, the developer used Augmented Reality, in their own words, since “unlike Virtual Reality, AR is something most people can experience as long as they have a smartphone, making it much more accessible”. Players can gather around a phone and try to figure out puzzles together, but they can also join in on different devices, which allows for accommodating larger groups of people. As companies like Apple are developing collaboration between AR-capable devices further, this may allow for expanding the cooperative gameplay in the future.
The game is played using ‘tiles’ that act as AR markers, but also serve different purposes within the game; the first tile is the ‘Town Hall’, to which players can return after completing puzzles; a CO2 emissions trajectory graph is projected above the Town Hall throughout the game to constantly visualize the shared goal. Using the ‘Energy Hub’ tile, players can start the minigames and tasks. The tile contains three different minigames which relate to different uses of sustainable energy sources. The rewards obtained through these mini games are “climate change policies” that can be “slotted in the town hall” to lower CO2 emission levels. This approach makes policies appear rather ‘modular’ and deceptively tangible, but – if the real-world messiness of climate politics can be addressed elsewhere – it may also facilitate engagement with otherwise elusive climate policy developments.
One of the minigames e.g. involves spinning three turbines fast enough to get a policy; according to developer feedback, it was positively received; the focus on (kinetic) action may facilitate (literally) active engagement – e.g. important for potential intergenerational play – but it may also create confusion about real-world requirements for using wind turbines effectively. Once all three minigames are solved, virtual crowds of people appear on the corresponding tile, players can push the two tiles together and all the characters move over to the Town Hall tile. Visual feedback mechanisms like this serve as a ‘reward’ and visualize the notion of collective action; this could be strengthened e.g. if a sense of community with real-world players and/or virtual characters were first established, which would the tangible aspect of engaging with one’s ‘imagined community’ stronger.
While the gameplay is relatively basic, the AR technology may – again, in the words of the developers – foster “positive memories”, i.e. unusual and potential memorable moments that register primarily on an emotional level. The game also offered further information, e.g. by clicking on each policy and visiting a webpage to find out more about the policy in real life.