Developed by the art and research collective Disnovation.org, Post Growth Toolkit: The Game is a tactical intervention into how we conceptualize the climate crisis. Most commercial environmental simulation games like SimCity or more recent ‘green-tech’ city builders operate within a neoliberal framework, challenging players to optimize resources, deploy eco-friendly upgrades, and manage carbon metrics, all while keeping the baseline goal of endless economic and spatial expansion intact. Disnovation’s design tweaks this paradigm as it does not ask players to win by extracting or building but foregrounds systemic deconstruction and collective debate. The key principle of the game is ideological reorientation, forcing players to confront the material realities and implications of our current lifestyle and imagine alternative ways how energy and materials can circulate in society.
The game – though the term is used somewhat liberally here, similar e.g. to an indie storytelling RPG – revolves around examining one’s relationship with modern commodities and is structured around a central game board and a deck of highly stylized, concept-driven “notion cards”. Players begin by choosing one of five everyday “critical objects” that represent the backbone of contemporary lifestyle convenience like ‘the Internet’, cow’s milk, fossil fuel, or a USB charger. Players complete a baseline questionnaire analyzing their immediate relationship with the item, examining its lifespan, its hidden biophysical footprints, and how long its components would take to be digested back into the biosphere.
The perimeter of the bright green game board outlines the 10 ‘pillars of capitalism’, including resource extraction, infinite growth, innovation, short-termism, and overconsumption. Players draw notion cards that contain core ecological, philosophical, or thermodynamic realities and must collectively debate where to place these cards on the board to expose the contradictions of their chosen object.
Once the object’s systemic dependencies are mapped out, players pivot to the center of the board, the ‘virtuous circle’, which highlights corresponding counter-ideologies like limits, sufficiency, reciprocity, and mutual care (e.g. ‘deep time’ as opposed to ‘short-termism’ etc.). The group must collaboratively imagine a future where fossil fuels are absent, redesign current habits, functions, and collective values that would emerge to replace the original object.
For example, a group may evaluate how ‘the internet’ as their critical object would interact with the notion cards. A player could link the Internet to the pillar of ‘overconsumption’ using Buckminster Fuller’s concept of Energy Slaves, referring to the invisible mechanical energy equivalent to the physical labor of a human adult. The game highlights that a contemporary European lifestyle relies on the invisible labor of 400 to 500 ‘energy slaves’ driven primarily by fossil fuels. Players must calculate how much physical labor is extracted from the biosphere just to maintain server uptimes, cloud computing, and daily data-intensive habits. When looking at the Innovation pillar, players can introduce the Jevons Paradox card (referring to the rebound effect that occurs when increasing the efficiency of a resource inadvertently boosts its total consumption rate rather than reducing it). This can spark a debate about why 5G or highly optimized optical data centers do not reduce but intensify the internet’s ecological impact by enabling and accelerating phenomena like high-resolution streaming etc. To move the Internet toward the Virtuous Circle at the center of the board, players might activate the card Collapse Informatics; the group must imagine a speculative, low-tech version of the internet that respects planetary boundaries (another notion card), for example, a decentralized, solar-powered network that only operates when sunlight is available, shifting our interaction with it from instant gratification to a more deliberate rhythm dictated by ecological cirumstances.
The Post Growth Toolkit aims to avoid the more binary paths towards climate futures in eco-media like techno-optimism or eco-fatalism by focusing on speculative environmental storytelling and back-casting. Through cards symbolizing concepts like “Ancient Sunlight” (which reframes fossil fuels as the product of millions of years of sunlight shining on flora and fauna) or “Zombie Energy” (‘dead’ energy ‘animating’ current technology), the game nudges players towards a macro view on temporal processes, treating the future as a ‘budget’ that isn’t measured in capital metrics but in terms of thermodynamic constraints and physical limits. Instead of placing the burden of the future purely on individual consumer guilt, The Post Growth Toolkit highlights that sustainable futures can only be reclaimed by systematically altering societal structures, turning the climate crisis into a creative ‘design challenge’.