Gaming On For Environmental Awareness

A new board game launched earlier this month takes players on a journey to the Nilgiris biosphere. Called Biomes of Nilgiris, the game invites people to take on the roles of conservationists, photographers, citizen scientists and more, to go on conservation missions to protect endangered species, discover hundreds of animals such as the Nilgiri tahr, the Indian gaur, the Asiatic elephant and over 3,300 flowering plant species, and even remove invasive species. The game, designed to be an immersive experience, aims to build awareness about the Nilgiris ecosystem through experiential learning, says Shelly Sinha, founder of Bluencore Studio which has created the game.

In the last few years, several environmental and climate games have been rolled out in India. For instance, The Hoppy Frog shows players how frogs live in a human-dominated ecosystem, Map the Wild focuses on foraging, and Birds in the City explores how urbanisation impacts the bird population in Bengaluru.

While there are also virtual or online games, tabletop games provide a unique learning environment for the public to understand threats to the environment and connect with biodiversity. “It’s a great way to engage with people in a participatory manner. A game sets people’s motivation, drives, and barriers to a certain action. Even though the person might not know anything about a specific concept, they get introduced to it interactively,” says Sweta Bhushan, senior research analyst at the Centre for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP).

A tool for building environmental awareness

The Hoppy Frog, designed in 2024 by Seshadri K.S., Vidisha M.K. and Maria Antony P., researchers at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), is a simple board game. The 100 boxes with scattered white, green, and red colours are rooted in the familiarity of games such as Snakes and Ladders and Monopoly. The players play as a frog, which they make using origami. When the frog lands on green or red, they have to pick a corresponding card. Red indicates threats to the frog while landing on green is beneficial for them.

For instance, if the red card says vehicle passing through, the frog has to take a few steps back, which informs the player that vehicles on roads are a threat to amphibians. A much bigger threat is the exposure to chytrid fungus, which can kill the amphibian, forcing the player to start from the beginning. The game has been played by about 800 people from urban and rural areas. Through the game, the hope is that players learn a bit about frogs which are often assumed to be “dull creatures”, says Seshadri. “Frogs play a vital role in the food chain and the ecosystem, feeding on insects and controlling their population to keep the balance, which is not well-known,” he explains.

Meanwhile, in Biomes of Nilgiris, real, urgent matters impacting ecosystems such as loss of species, poaching, and human-animal conflict are integrated into the gameplay. For instance, to gain points, the players have to capture a poacher by installing a camera trap. Sinha explains that integrating missions based on real-life scenarios in the game was to give people a sense of the real world. “The hope is that they can connect the game scenarios with reality and understand the impact of their decisions accordingly,” she adds.

However, the focus for these game creators is often more on connecting people with the biodiversity around them which often goes unnoticed. Many a time, people don’t know about the flora and fauna in their backyards or the parks they visit regularly. It’s this disconnect with nature that these environmental board games seem to be addressing.

“Experiential learning sits at the top of the learning pyramid and board games are a great tool for this. They help us understand complex systems, build empathy for different perspectives, and spark ideas for solutions. When you merge education and entertainment and teach ecosystem preservation through gameplay, you instill a certain amount of environmental stewardship,” Sinha says.

Sweta, who has played climate games such as Daybreak, feels they are a great way to communicate and simulate real-world challenges. She notes how in a participatory workshop setting, when a new concept or existing problem is being presented, often data and lectures are used to make people understand how it affects them. “For example, heat is impacting different communities in various ways. But how can its impact be communicated more interactively to someone without prior knowledge about the subject? Games are one way to do that as they make the learning process easier and more accessible,” she says.

Increasing inclusivity

For about 10 years, Seshadri and his fellow researchers have been heading to Bisle, a small village in Karnataka, to conduct amphibian awareness workshops. Last year, Seshadri decided to introduce The Hoppy Frog game. It instantly broke the ice and got the students talking about frogs, Seshadri recalls. “Playing games is a good way to get people to talk about biodiversity in a fun way without it feeling overwhelming. It also draws their empathy which is an important lens when looking at the environment,” he adds.

About increasing the inclusivity in these games Seshadri says, “For instance, in our team, we speak four languages and that expands the number of people we can facilitate the game for. Among the 800 people who have played the game, half are from rural areas. The game is also designed with simple primary colours, so it’s also colour-blind friendly. The game can be made easy to understand and accessible. But inclusivity also depends on how the facilitators communicate it.”

Can board games lead to environmental action?

About a decade ago, in 2014, author and entrepreneur Paul Hawken collaborated with about 200 researchers to create an extensive database on climate solutions. Inspired by the project, a mechanical engineer from Montreal, Canada, Sam Levac-Levey, designed a tabletop game – Solutions – wherein players have to propose solutions to reduce global temperature. The idea was to get people talking about real-life climate solutions, understand their impact, and take the solutions forward after the game ends.

In August 2021, elementary school teacher Cassie Klein at Rosarian Academy in Florida, USA, talked about how the Solutions game inspired students to take action to reduce food waste in their school’s cafeteria and even got their school administration to bring back a garden in their campus and have composting pots in it. “The game inspired the students, who then inspired the administration to make a bigger impact right here in school,” Klein says in the YouTube video.

Games such as Solutions encourage players to take their learnings from the gameplay forward and turn that into action. Board games can be highly effective in showing the connections between a player’s actions and their impact on the game board, a 2020 study revealed. They also show potential as “more relatable, understandable, concrete and simplified forms of communication about the environment and the social issues that environmental decline might cause,” the study authors noted.

In another 2021 study, researchers highlighted that participants who played CATAN: Oil Springs, which was designed to make the popular board game CATAN, an environmental educational tool, showed “increased pro-sustainability attitudes and self-reported sustainable behaviours.”

However, while designing environmental games such as The Hoppy Frog, the focus is on making people aware of the topic, which they might not know much about, says Seshadri. “Learning about something is the first step in conservation. If environmental games can connect people with biodiversity or just make them curious about it, they are doing their job,” he adds.

Sinha agrees and says while designing Biomes of Nilgiris, they collaborated with ecologist Godwin Vasanth Bosco and botanical illustrator Sanjana Singh, to make sure the content was authentic and educational. “The idea is that through the games, people will learn about different factors that affect an ecosystem, the threats to wildlife, why conservation is important, and the importance of indigenous communities,” she explains.

Whether playing a game translates into action or creates awareness also depends on the players’ interest, Sweta says. “If someone is interested in the environment and climate space, they are likely to enjoy the game and learn from it. But if their attention is on just the gameplay, then they will view it as any other board game,” she says.

For effective impact, these games should be facilitated by someone who can also make them educational, Seshadri adds. However, he also acknowledges that’s a limitation, as it’s not always possible to have that component. “The idea is not just to create a game and stop at it. As facilitators, we have to take it to different areas and communities to engage as many people as we can and introduce them to different aspects of nature such as amphibians. Curiosity can be kept alive by encouraging people to join nature activities.”

Sweta also believes that games can focus on long-term engagement by introducing people to community groups and climate action labs, so that the games can directly flow into the kind of work that people could be part of. “For instance, if the games are related to issues such as lake restoration then the game can be used to educate them about the issue, for people to interact and those who feel inspired can be guided to volunteer opportunities or other citizen groups,” she adds.

The game creators try to get the players to nudge them a bit, says Seshadri. “We give the players stickers of different frogs after they play the game and ask them to look for them in their neighbourhoods. It’s just a simple way of getting them to appreciate the biodiversity around them,” he explains.

When people play, they are not just learning facts; they are feeling the urgency, the stakes, and the hope, Sinha says. “This isn’t just about entertainment. It’s about creating awareness, sparking conversations, and inspiring change,” she adds.

(Published under Creative Commons from Mongabay-India. Read the original article here)