Imagining the Future: Game Hacking and Youth Climate Action

Abstract:

Board games are big business. Heralded as enjoying a ?renaissance? (Booth 2015, 1), the board game industry and consumer market has grown year over year for over a decade (Brown and MacCallum-Stewart 2020, 1?2). This popularity suggests that board games have a cultural, civic, and educational role to play in confronting and negotiating the problem of the contemporary climate and ecological crises. As Alenda Y. Chang notes, games have ?significant environmental affordances,? not least because they provide less didactic and moralizing ways ?to encourage people to consider environmental problems and their solutions? (2019, 11, 15). In this chapter we

Board games are big business. Heralded as enjoying a ?renaissance? (Booth 2015, 1), the board game industry and consumer market has grown year over year for over a decade (Brown and MacCallum-Stewart 2020, 1?2). This popularity suggests that board games have a cultural, civic, and educational role to play in confronting and negotiating the problem of the contemporary climate and ecological crises. As Alenda Y. Chang notes, games have ?significant environmental affordances,? not least because they provide less didactic and moralizing ways ?to encourage people to consider environmental problems and their solutions? (2019, 11, 15). In this chapter we