Category: Changing the Game of Consumption – game design blog

What became apparent in Wageningen was that we were onto something with this design, which centred on poker chips in different colours representing food, furnishings, and vacation and population teams assessing the well-being of their part of the population by comparing the piles of chips they had managed to get hold of during the round both to how they did last turn and also to the piles of the other teams. The conference participants were enthusiastically participating in what I later came to describe as an “intricate dance” in which population teams sold their workforce to companies and regional authorities (who turned it into products and service – and ultimately profit), and bought products from the same companies on the local market and received service in the form of police, healthcare, and education cards from the regional authorities teams. The economy was very much like a fishtank, meaning that financial decisions made by the players affected the whole system – and the interface with the outside world was almost exclusively the map and the world market, which very few players were interacting with, but through which the system in the fishtank was very much affected.

This first version underwent an overhaul a few weeks before we were scheduled to run a playtest in Västerås. The reason for this late change was that I realised something very important about the structure of the game: I had structured it for two-player teams that together would go through the entire sequence of actions in a single round, e.g. population teams would find employment (sell workforce chips) during Phase I, then go do some politics in Phase II, and lastly buy product chips in Phase III. The advantage with this structure was that teams stayed together, discussing every decision, and that teams could vary in size (even down to a single player) without any serious consequences.

After running a Watch the Skies game in January 2024 I realised that the way the game was structured didn’t take advantage of the megagame structure in which several different subgames are played at once, with teams sending players to all or some of them simultaneously. I set out restructuring the game so that teams would consist of three players, each of which would go to one of five subgames: the labour market, the local market, the national assembly, the international market, and the production table/map. Population team players would go the first three, company team players to the local market and the last two, and regional authorities team players only to the last two. The implications for the game involved the effects of actions being delayed (increasing the price of imported goods on the international market on Turn 1 would cause prices to increase on the local market on Turn 2) and also that players would have to use their team time to discuss strategy, but would have to act on behalf of their team during the subgame, having to explain their actions and decisions to the rest of the team afterwards. My thinking was that this would make for a more interesting game experience and also involve some dynamics that exists in real life – and discussing my idea with people confirmed that they too saw this potential.

Above is a rough schematic of the flow of workforce (blue), food/goods/vacation/raw materials (black), public services (purple) and money (green) in the game. It was after I made this that I realised that what had been created here was an ‘intricate dance’, seeing as workforce, goods, and money needed to flow smoothly in order for the whole thing not to come crashing down. It did not do so during the three turns of the Västerås playtest, even though we had a shortage of players (two regions and one company were not played), and it remains to be seen if it will do so when played again with a full set of players.

I learned from this playtest was that the game is currently difficult to grasp as a first-time player, which may have caused things to go better in the game than they should have: it may be that players simply did not understand what they were supposed to do and so reused tokens that were supposed to have been thrown away. The two-page player briefings gave a step-by-step description of the game round, but that did not seem to have been picked up by the players, many of whom mentioned afterwards that they would have required step-by-step instructions, preferably in the form of an online instruction video, to understand what they were supposed to do. As we were playing with upper secondary pupils with no particular gaming experience (real-life or digital), this setup needs to be tested with older players to confirm if the game is currently too complex to be playable.

What I realised from this playtest was that what I had done was create subgames that acted as interfaces in different ways: the local and labour markets and the national assembly were formalised arenas for negotiation between players, the production table (and the resource aspects of the map) a ‘game mechanics handling area’, which is to say an interface with game mechanics, and the international market (and the strategic aspects of the map) map an interface with the scenario. The players could have handled all negotiations either at a flag saying “market” and  mechanics by going to control and exchanging workforce and resources for chips, but formalising them made for simpler, more easily described actions for the players to perform, possibly representative of the structures in place in society that keep it relatively stable and predictable despite the myriad interactions between individuals taking place every second.

Based on this understanding of the structure of the game, I have come to consider a different take to the whole idea behind the game, which is to communicate the research results of the MISTRA Sustainable Consumption project. The current game illustrates (and quite elegantly so, if I may say so myself) the complexities of society and the structures that people have put in place to support it: the marketplaces, the assemblies, and the places of production, all of which are represented in terms of subgames. If we wanted to communicate just that, this setup would have been ideal – however, as we set out to communicate around the three focus areas of the project, i.e. how to sustainably consume food, furnishings, and vacation, I’m currently considering if there should be subgames for those three areas, along with perhaps production and political subgames, which focused on the effects of the list of enablers for sustainable consumption that has been proposed by the MISTRA project in much simpler terms. I will pursue this idea in the months to come, alongside developing and testing the version played in Västerås, which shows quite a lot of promise as a game.

On February 15 2023 the village of Åkervalla opened up for the very first group to attempt to achieve sustainable consumption. The following are some reflections from the first playtest, with some ideas about what direction the development of the game will take.

The first decision to make is always whether the concept worked or if I need to return to the drawing board to create a new one that better fits the bill. In this case, what we were looking to do was involve the players in a megagame experience that allowed them to meet and work with the enablers from the MISTRA project.

Some players tried their best to beat the game using the rules, some were confused and frustrated by the mechanics (and the format in itself), and some decided to circumvent the rules and make up their own story. The enabler cards were used by some both as they were intended and as inspiration to other actions, while others looked at them with a perplexed expression and went on to play the game using only the basic game mechanics. From this I conclude that we managed to present the players with an megagame-format experience, and that this experience both inspired to creativity and showed some of the complexity of the real world. Thus, I’ve decided that we’ll keep the concept of Åkervalla and further develop the current version of the game for further playtesting, primarily focusing on integrating the enablers into the game.

Before going on to analyse the outcome of the playtest, I’ll briefly discuss the core of the game as development of it was concluded only days before the playtest (as is traditional in megagame creation, I’ve been told). Overall, the game consists of three types of teams: producers (farm, factory, farming collective, climbing centre, B&B, recycling centre), retailers (food store, restaurant, furniture store, travel agency, B&B, gas station, second hand store), and free agents (local politician, influencer, sales team, researchers). They are involved in the game in different ways, and Figure 1 shows the game from a game mechanics point of view.

The current version of the game would work without the enabler cards had it not been for outside influences, such as extreme weather or market fluctuations – thus, the next iteration of the game will need a clearly defined scenario handling system that allow control to impose changes on the game world that compels players to consider the enabler cards they have on hand. The lack of a clearly defined system to link news reports of e.g. extreme weather or trade wars to impose noticeable changes in the game in terms of mechanics that is also manageable for the control team was evident in this first playtest.

The game mechanics gave some of the players a headache for the first round (we played four rounds over the course of the day), and some said they still hadn’t worked out how to make sense of their own table at the conclusion of the game. I noticed that the resolve phase was quite control-dependant due to the requirement on shuffling and placing customers according to their preferences and special abilities – it may be too much of a board game mechanic to make it to the next version, and I’ve decided to go over the mechanics of each table to see where I can cut down on complexity. The game isn’t overly complex, but bearing in mind that it will be almost exclusively played with inexperienced groups of players I will attempt to simplify things to increase accessibility.

The enabler cards are to be at the centre of the game experience, but in this game most were not used and were left lying around in heaps on the tables. I believe there were two reasons for this: the first was that the players’ knowledge of the game mechanics wasn’t deep enough for them to understand and decide if the enabler cards were good for them or not, and in which way they would benefit them and other players. The second, and possibly more important, one was that they simply weren’t relevant enough to the challenge the players faced: they were struggling to get customers to change preferences, but the fact that there were over 60 customer cards, most of which preferred grey goods at the start of the game, combined with the limited amount of enabler cards changing even one customer’s preferences (and then only by one step each turn) made this task overwhelmingly difficult.

There are several ways in which this may be dealt with, but I believe it’s important to consider what the players learned from facing this challenge, which may be very real in an era of information overload and immunity to information campaigns. The enabler cards need to be worked into the game in a better way, but possibly the difficulty of changing people’s preferences should remain, and factors from outside of Åkervalla (wars, effects of natural catastrophes) be allowed to change many customers’ preferences at once, but only after some part of the world has been lost. This ties into the game’s learning goals, and how the discussion afterwards is structured, and so will have to be discussed with the entire team.

As for the role playing part, the role descriptions and goals didn’t seem to present the players with any problems; some asked a clarifying questions or two, but most of them just read it and then went on to try to understand the game. One or two of the players went into character – one by loudly stating that they would leave ‘cold and wet Åkervalla’ behind and move to Portugal as soon as possible (their goal was to accumulate 10 money at the end of the game). The descriptions involved quite a lot of ‘village intrigue’ intended to give some flavour and incentise players to go talk to other players, but as there was about as much movement between tables as in other games I’ve played, it’s unclear if this made any difference. The goals stated things to achieve in terms of game mechanics (have x money at the end of the game, sell all six goods in the final round, get re-elected, etc.) and several of the players referred to them both during and after the game, so it seems they were important to some players and less so to others.

And the criminal empire? Before turn one had even started, two entrepreneurial players came up to me and asked: ‘Can we sell drugs?’. My answer was obviously ‘Of course! There’s a risk of getting caught, though…’. They were called out on Turn 2, but as no one made a serious attempt at stopping them, there was a drug business running from one of the tables throughout the game. They managed to get hold of so much money that in the end, the criminal empire funded not only the local politician but a substantial part of Åkervalla’s change to sustainable consumption. Anything can happen in these games – partly thanks to the ‘Yes, and…’ philosophy!

In all, this playtest went about as good as could have been expected, and gave quite a lot of things to consider for me and my team. The next post is likely to discuss the learning outcome (players answered a survey after the game) and which course corrections are required to reach our destination: better discussions about sustainable consumption.

The latest development involves myself and my colleague sitting down a few hours to discuss how to proceed with development of the game – and ended up in us rethinking the whole thing. We realised that the problems and solutions the players would be dealing with are very abstract and general in nature, and for them to be able to engage with them we needed to make it all utterly – to the point of ridiculously – clear what each of the enablers actually meant. As we had previously gone for abstract groups of people taking general kinds of actions that generated statistics-like results on a huge map, we went the completely opposite direction and decided to try taking it all down to the village level, with very real (fictional) roles that would have to deal with negotiations regarding how to make sense of all of the enablers and try to understand which of them were reasonable. Thus it was that we came up with the (entirely fictional) village of Åkervalla.

The scenic little village of Åkervalla has a population of a few hundred people and is situated in the south of Sweden, half an hour’s drive from the town of Eslöv. There’s a primary school, a church, a small grocery store, some shops where two roads meet, and a combined garage and filling station. In the countryside outside the village there are a few farms, one of which has been transformed into a picturesque bed and breakfast, and one which has opened a flea market in a barn. Most people commute by car to Eslöv or take the train from there to Malmö or Lund – and it’s not very far to Kastrup and from there by plane to the world.

Åkervalla has it’s own local politician, who has a seat on the Eslöv town council. From there, news arrive that action is to be taken to ensure the future of not only the village and the town, but the whole world – and this involves everyone in Åkervalla stepping up and doing their part. This news was delivered by a rather excited but somewhat clueless council member along with a bunch of directives – which go by the friendly name ‘enablers’ – and the people of the village is now trying to make sense of what it’s all about and who is to do what. What actions will have to be taken to achieve ‘sustainable consumption’, and – perhaps more importantly – what kind of place will Åkervalla be once the (apparently very high) carbon emissions from food, home furnishings, and vacations have been taken care of?

This take on the problem of communicating the research results of the MISTRA sustainable consumption project is intended to allow players to take on roles similar to the ones in megagames such as Urban Nightmare: State of Chaos and Aegon’s Conquest, i.e. personas that are relatable through their strong connections to fictional characters and places/stereotypes. Problems that present themselves in the game will be handled via the players’ personas and result in actions that are not only available to the players but reasonable from the personas’ point of view. We hope that this will have players process the enablers to make them work for their roles in the game while at the same time processing them for use outside of the game, in real life. Also, by involving stereotypes and a setting with mildly comical circumstances, we aim to have the game strike a not too serious note in order to involve players and have them take a positive view on occurrences that would be rather grim should they happen in real life, such as the school building sliding into the nearby river or half the buildings of the village being demolished to make room for a combined train station/collective housing project.

Should this approach run into problems such as too high expectations on players to roleplay to make it work or perhaps the setting taking over so that the learning goals are obscured, there’s a Plan B. This is more structural in form and uses Hayworth’s doughnut as a basis for a game room with eight tables, each of which represents an aspect of the world and society (biodiversity, equality, control over resources, etc.). At each table there’s a number of enablers that players representing businesses, local/government authorities, lobby groups, and politicians can spend resources on in an attempt to achieve more sustainable consumption – however, progress at one table may prove to be a step in the wrong direction at another, making negotiations more interesting than they may at first seem.

The first stage of the design process of Åkervalla is to populate the village based on the enablers from the MISTRA project. Next, we will figure out which resources and game pieces are required to make the enablers possible to implement; once that’s done, we will process all the enablers to make it possible for the players to understand and play them in the game. Then, we’ll structure game play into rounds and add a layer of outside influences such as world politics and extreme weather, part of which will be direct consequences of the players actions. Lastly, we will flesh out the role descriptions to make them come alive in the players’ imaginations when they read them, and also make for interesting goals that each player strives to achieve.

Hopefully this design process will go fast enough that I’ll be able to write a report after an interesting playtest session held in February, 2023 – otherwise, I might discuss what comes to my mind during the game design process.

Rethinking a concept even before I begin to create the game happens to me all the time – and so it was not unexpected that it would happen for this game too. What was unexpected was when it happened: a week before we were set up for a playtest. As it turned out, the playtest was cancelled and we made a workshop of it with a few of the participants instead, and in this post I’ll discuss some of the ideas that came out of the workshop and which I will consider implementing in the first version of the game to be playtested, likely in February 2023.

The version I had intended building have been discussed in an earlier post, and the one-hour version of the game that was one of the things that made me rethink the concept I’d settled on was the subject of the previous post. In short, what I had in mind was six teams of players using their resources – in the form of five different forms of capital – to realise and maintain enablers over several game turns, reshaping the way parts of society works and hopefully managing to reduce CO₂ emissions for Sweden as a whole. I had a map laid out which would be used to show geographical differences, but on the whole the game would be about using legislation and local initiatives to incentivise and force a non-player population represented by various numerical values into doing what the players wanted them to. Both the population and the players would be affected by the outside world in terms of events that would be played into the game by Control based on what changes the players managed to implement.

The first bug to hit my windshield came from a member of the project team who, when I mentioned the number of different types of capital commented that there ‘were a lot of them’. This brought to mind something another megagame designer said at one time about resources in megagames: ‘there should ideally only be one, so as not to complicate things too much’. This stuck in my mind and as I created the one-hour version, this turned into every player having only one card, but in a different colour.

The second came during the workshop, when the use of the map was questioned – there are really no geographical issues to deal with in the research we’re communicating, as consumption patterns has a different set of boundaries. In combination with the fact that it was stated early on that we are not to focus on individual con-/prosumer perspectives as related research shows that consumption patterns are not guided primarily by the choices made by individuals but what’s made available to them by businesses, I began to think that the map we should be playing on should be more of a mental/social character rather than geographical. In connection with this, we discussed using Raworth’s doughnut as a possible way of showing progress in the game, and this may be the kind of map we’re looking for.

During the workshop, we also discussed the overall structure of the game and I put forward the idea that we structure it so that there are number of endpoints that the players will encounter depending on which enablers they manage to realise and maintain: call it a number of paths they can walk down, but with a rather short space between them, so that if they take a sharp turn during one round, they will end up with a very different endpoint, but still one Control has planned for. This would be beneficial to Control, as they would not have to wing it every time, trying to assess what things are plausible, but instead would have a scoring system that they can rely on to tell them which path is nearest and which events would make the most sense, and then improvise based on that (or stick to the script). Most of all, it will benefit the players, as they will be aiming for an endpoint (happy ending) which simply isn’t available – and this will make the debriefing and learning outcome the more rewarding. We’re considering using something like ARUP’s Four Plausible Futures as inspiration, and the idea is for the endpoints to be not quite what the players expected, and hopefully different most of the time, in order to increase the replayability of the game.

What’s left to consider, which became apparent during the one-hour game, is the enablers themselves: they are (part of) what we aim to communicate, and so should be explored more in detail. Rather than having a set of fancy systems controlling resources, buildings, and trade, we should be focusing on the enablers and go into more details regarding what each enabler really involves – who needs to know what and be working with which things, and when? Here, the easy solutions – let someone else do all the work, i.e. just have the politicians put some legislation in place to fix the problem (and look surprised when no one followed it or everyone used vague wording to get away with doing only 1% of what was intended) – will likely be very tempting, whereas the more groundbreaking changes involving players going against their roles (e.g. businesses forgoing profit to achieve long-term goals) will be more challenging. How this system is supposed to look is as yet veiled in mist, but I’m thinking they should consist of several smaller steps, each of which risks interfering with other players’ agendas and counteracting other enablers.

Another aspect is that of ‘business as usual’ activities: if the only choice in the game is between which enabler to realise and doing nothing, the game risks being rather dull and predictable. Ideally there should be a range of actions to choose from, only some of which are beneficial to enablers, so that players are tempted to improve their situation by e.g. economic growth with the vague hope of doing something in the last round that will change everything and win the day. This part of the game, i.e. making what we’re doing currently as exciting and promising (in some ways but not in others) as the future envisioned by the enablers, should be given some real thought, so as not to end up with the ’business as usual – spend all your resources to make €5 and wait for the next round to begin’ action.

These are my thoughts at the moment, and over the coming month they will be developed into what I’m hoping will be the first, playable prototype of the Changing the Game of Consumption megagame. Did you have any thoughts when you read this? Feel free to express them in the comments section below!

A week before the planned playtest of version 0.1 of the Changing the Game of Consumption megagame, two of our project members were to hold a one-hour presentation, and so came up with the idea of playing a short version of the game. This proved to be a welcome challenge, as it worked to question some of the ideas I put forward in my previous post and on which I had planned to base the first version of the game. Creating a 20-player version of a megagame with the time constraint of 60 minutes, including role distribution, rules explanation, and debriefing, would certainly prove Wallman’s point about the need to keep the complexity of the game mechanics low enough to allow a large number of players to play it without slowing the game down that is equally valid for the six-hour megagame we plan on creating. In this post, I’ll present the game I created and draw some conclusions regarding what parts of this can be used in the megagame.

My plan of using five different kinds of capital (economic, cultural, social, political, and technological) would be far too complex for this game, and so I boiled it down to that several players need to agree on a proposal for it to be implemented and that the time it took for players to negotiate would be the only resource they spent. However, as the game is so short (ten-minute turns) and some players may be more interested in winning than playing the game, they may skip negotiations and simply walk over to a table and state that they agree to all proposals, as they’re more concerned with the world not ending than about themselves getting the best deal possible as individuals. I’ve seen this kind of ‘altruism’ before, and feel that it cuts the game short in a way that doesn’t help players reflect on the world but rather leads them to comments about the game being unrealistic.

Thus, I decided that players would have to put their card down beside the enabler card and wouldn’t get it back until it was realised; this cost would stop blanket support and furthermore incentivise players to try to get others to sign on to help them get their cards back. Again, I saw before me a trio of smart players realising that they could simply realise all cards on a table with their three colours on in under a minute, then going on the next table, and then the next – after which they simply had to find a player with another colour on their role card and repeat the process, without need for negotiation, again breaking the game.

This dilemma paired with the realisation that the roles were rather vague – players wouldn’t have time to read role descriptions beforehand and come up with role interpretations – made me think of how to represent common interests in the form of game mechanics: I put tags on cards representing less/more (orange/green) of a number of basic ideas, such as individual means of transportation/vacation by plane (car symbol), meat-based diet (plate and cutlery), buying new furniture (house), and profit-driven market economy (dollar sign). This would guide players regarding which enabler cards were interesting for them (same symbol and colour as one of the tags on their role card) and which were directly opposing their goals (same symbol but opposite colour). After some thought, I added the rule that players would only get their cards back (and thus be able to use them again the same turn) after realising an enabler card with the same tag (symbol and colour) as one on their role cards.

These additions would both say something about the roles and prevent power gamers from ending the game on the first turn. There were another aspect that I felt I needed the game to communicate to, and that is that just because a bonus-malus system for flight travel has been agreed on, or an initiative to eat less meat or buy more second-hand furniture put in place, players would now be free to move on the next issue, as they had now ‘fixed’ the problem, as this is not how complex systems work (see Donella Meadows’s excellent book Thinking in Systems). Thus, I made all enabler cards two-sided with a cost to maintain it on the back – to ‘win’ the game, players would need not only to say yes to a bunch of exciting proposals, but also out in the work of maintaining them, every turn. This would also mean that players that didn’t like the proposal but were unable to stop them could negotiate with those who were to maintain the policy and offer them juicy deals on other proposals (more suited to their goals) to let the policy go back to being an unrealised policy again. This felt very much like how things work after the hype has passed, and so I felt it was worth adding.

After implementing the proposal/policy sides of enabler cards, I added some special abilities to role cards to make some players favour the hype around proposals and some disinclined to take part in it. One such pair is made up of politicians, who get their card back regardless of tags if they have supported a proposal, and government agencies, who get their cards back just for maintaining any policy. I also added other kinds of incentives, such as the ability of the Influencer role to once per turn return someone’s card to them (even themselves) regardless of tags, which could be used as a bargaining chip.

The original idea was to show projected CO₂ emissions based on which enablers had been made policy and for how long they had been in place, but there was no time to implement this, so it may have to wait until the full version of the megagame. Instead, to give players a common goal and define an endpoint to the game, I set eight symbols (printed on the ‘policy’ side of most cards) in each of the three categories as a winning condition. As it turned out, three 10-minute turns were played and only a handful of enablers were flipped to their ‘policy’ side, so the goal was clearly too high in relation to the level of difficulty/complexity. It would perhaps have been more rewarding with some kind of projection to measure the impact the players in fact had on the world, and so this will be implemented.

As for other take-homes, I’ve realised that reducing the complexity of the game I envisioned earlier this autumn is a very good idea, as it will help players focus on the topic of the game and negotiations with other players. Also, some feedback from the participants in the game session suggested that the enabler cards were rather anonymous, i.e. as the title was the only text on the enabler cards they had very little idea what they were trying to accomplish, and so these need to be not only equipped with QR codes to allow players to read more about the findings of the MISTRA project, but also game mechanics such as tags and in-game effects that will help players decide which enablers they should spend resources and time getting off the ground (and maintaining).

Role descriptions are important parts of any megagame, and I’ll make sure to put in some work on those, both in terms of general descriptions and goals and game mechanics that help them play the game. I will also take some time to consider which roles are to be included, as the six groups used currently may not be the only ones. Also, the tags/categories of interests that I came up with didn’t exactly match the enabler cards, so that very few of them had relevant tags other than food/furniture/vacation, so work will have to go into finding connections between the cards that are more relevant.

This concludes this after-play reflections post, and in the next post I’ll discuss the workshop that was held in late November during which this version of the game was discussed.

In this post I’ll be going into some of the ideas that guide the game design process at this point. If some of them seem contradictory or very, very vague to you, that’s fine – the game is still in the concept stage, at which (at least to my mind) it’s quite alright to leave blanks to be filled in later. This work will eventually lead up to a prototype, which I’ll present to you in early 2023.

In the game, a number of players divided into teams will struggle to change the patterns of consumption of a population – for the moment we’ll assume that it’s the population of Sweden – to become more sustainable in terms of food, travel and furnishing. To their help they have various types of capital, e.g. economic, social, and cultural, that they can either use to gain advantages in the current system (following a ‘business as usual’ logic) or place on ‘enabler’ cards that may put the population on a slightly different path. The teams have different ideas of what ‘sustainability’ means and so do not necessarily agree on which enablers should be prioritised – or even realised at all. To top this off, events such as extreme weather and (inter)national crises and representatives of the powers of the outside world may influence their understanding of the enablers and what the future should look like.

First of all, we need to describe the current situation, i.e. the consumption patterns of the population around which the game revolves. The current concept is based on the assumption that at the start of the game, the production of raw materials and products is more sustainable in Sweden than abroad. This may well be debatable as a general statement, but as we’re constructing a game, simplifications of this kind are necessary. Thus, we need to show where raw materials are sourced and production takes place, and below is my current attempt at showing this in the game:

Here, a distinction has been made between sourcing of raw materials and manufacturing of products – this may later be changed, but at the moment seems to reflect the fact that although factories are built in Sweden, the sourcing of raw materials needs to be done elsewhere for various reasons and so affects the overall environmental/CO₂ impact of the products consumed by the population. The idea behind this section of the board is to make it easy to check progress and realise whether the game is going the way players want it to in terms of where production takes place and – although this may take closer inspection – either the current level of consumption and/or efficiency of operations (indicated by the number of tokens), and degree of sustainability. In the case of the food category, the track showing to the balance between meat and vegetables on people’s plates has been added to show degree of sustainability as it is pretty much universally agreed that meat leaves a much larger CO₂ footprint than vegetables.

In my experience, most games benefit from including some kind of map, as it both gives players a sense of where the game takes place and allows for interesting conflicts based on geography, and so I decided to use a map of Sweden for the first version of the game. This immediately gave some ideas as to which issues are prioritised in different parts of the country, and so I put in some tokens to reflect the general idea that the sparsely populated north rely heavily on their cars to survive and the densely populated south rely on the north to provide them with energy, mainly electricity. Thus, any enablers that affect either availability of cars or electricity will meet with heavier resistance in some areas than others and e.g. a law banning fossil cars may cause riots (red tokens with a hand) in some areas unless players do something to ease tensions regarding this issue, e.g. pay out subsidies (economic capital) or appeal to the inhabitants emotions (social capital) or traditions (cultural capital).

Much of the game will revolve around negotiating with other players to put enabler cards into effect and so they will have to have a cost in capital that needs to be met. As players and teams will have different types of capital, they need to make deals with others to have them put in the right type of capital to activate the card. As we enter into a world that is already progressing (at full speed, some may argue), players won’t have a bunch of easily accessible capital to spend and instead will have most of it tied up in various projects and ideas. This is a way of representing society and bring to light the values that are embedded in people’s minds, such as a liberal market economy or – in the case of Sweden – Folkhemmet (the Swedish Welfare State). These may be very difficult to represent correctly, but play a very important role: they tie up capital in a way that provides players and teams with benefits (e.g. making one capital into two), which will have players think twice about e.g. shifting to a local economy based on small farming collectives in a single round – they may do so if they all set their minds to it (and many of the players will be against this), but the cost to all players will be very, very high as the population has a very different idea of what the future is going to look like and (unless faced with an extreme situation) will normally change their view on what’s a reasonable future very slowly, which in game terms involves spending large numbers of capital of various types over a number of turns. Here, ‘cost’ means decreasing the general state of mind of the entire population as represented by a track from 1–9 on the lower right on the game board – the lower it is, the more difficult will it be to implement enabler cards.

The concept I’ve outlined here is a long way away from playable a prototype, even if I’ve done some work on tokens and boards to help explaining my thoughts to myself and my team. As you may have noticed, I’ve not mentioned which players will be included and what their roles will be – the media was suggested as a group of players earlier this week, and I think it was a great idea so I added them above. In my next blog post, I’ll briefly discuss a slim version of this game that I constructed for a one-hour event that one of my project members held in mid-November, and which formed the basis for a workshop we held in late November.

The goal for the first part of the journey is to understand the kind of world in which the game will be set. It could easily be assumed that it should be the one we’re all living in – especially as what we’ve set out to do is help people move towards more sustainable consumption patterns – but in fact all games come with a world view of their own (which often happens to coincide with that of the game designer). This involves asking some rather tough questions, such as what kind of view on the future in terms of access to energy, the part played by technology, the role of governments, etc., and so, since my first post in this blog, I’ve done some reading of the publications by the MISTRA Sustainable Consumption research project and also had two long discussions with my colleagues about what this game will ultimately be about. The process of trying to understand the world view that the research my colleagues have been conducting was based on and converting that into game mechanisms has been very rewarding, both in terms of learning more about the game but and as it has allowed me to review my own preconceptions about the world.

One of the main outcomes of this process was that the game will work on the assumption that ‘supply [largely] dictates demand, rather than the other way around’. In short, people in the game will buy the products that the shop owners have in stock (rather than refraining from buying things at all) – however, they may like the choices they are presented with (and ‘forced’ to make) to a higher or lower degree. This aspect is represented by the concept of ‘acceptance’ as used in connection with the 62 ‘enablers’ proposed by the MISTRA research project. As a result, unlike in the Climate Change Megagame, no players will assume the roles of consumers/citizens that react to and may choose to adopt proposed changes based on whether they consider them helpful in achieving their goals in the game, and I will instead experiment with a ‘Public opinion’ track (see illustration) to express how well the population as a whole take to changes implemented by players. This is not at all controversial, as it has been used in similar ways in megagames such as Watch the Skies and Urban Nightmare. However, it means relying on game mechanics designed beforehand to handle the reactions of the public, which may necessitate the use of dice not to turn the whole game into a large-scale exercise in calculating the exact route to the future.

The second team meeting resulted in a sketch (done in Miro during a break to stretch our legs) that we used to discuss the game in more definite terms. This is one step in making the outcome more tangible and in my experience facilitates boiling our ideas down so as to become manageable and also encourages associations to things that have not yet come up during the discussion, the importance of which are such that one later finds it incomprehensible how one could have failed to see it for so long. The rough sketch we made is of a 4-5 player board game in which the players take on different roles (i.e. ideas of what’s important). Players have personal goals and their own resources, but they also have a couple goals in common (keeping the public happy and implementing more sustainable consumption habits) and a number of cards with ‘enablers’ that – if realised by spending the required amount of resources – will potentially take them closer to their goals. The two main conflict surfaces in the game are which enablers should be realised (or in what order) and from where/who the resources required to realise them should come. Progress in the game is tracked in terms of CO₂ emissions and result in consequences that alter conditions in the game, e.g. draughts (less food in the world) or trade wars (access to/prices of resources change).

This is game is uncomplicated enough to create – if we disregard the time-consuming science of translating the enablers/CO₂ emission-related consequences/etc. into game terms – and can be both played by smaller groups/families and used as a base for the creation of a megagame. As described by Wallman in his excellent four-post guide ‘Megagame Design The Easy Way’ (which I discuss in a post in the Switching the Current game design blog), using an existing board game to create a megagame involves adding teams of players and reducing the complexity of game mechanics to allow a larger number of players to handle them while focusing on interaction between players. However, before going on to this, I’ll put in some more work on the sketch and discuss it with my colleagues in two weeks’ time, so that they can see in which direction we’re going with this and I gain their help with filling in the gaps in terms of content. The fact that there’s already a card game version using the enablers is a great help in this as we’ll be using some of the cards and also be able to draw on the experience of playing that game with different groups of players. The major difference between the existing and new games is that the former does not have the resource part that the latter will have, and so the experience playing the two games will be quite different.

In my next post, I imagine I’ll be reflecting on the process of refining the sketch to create an outline of the game and also share some insights regarding what exposing it to my team members led to in terms of new directions and ideas.

Let me introduce myself: my name is Magnus Persson, and I’m lead game designer of the Changing the Game of Consumption megagame, which is created to communicate the results of the Mistra Sustainable Consumption research project. If you found this introduction oddly familiar, it may be because I’m also lead game designer for the Switching the Current megagame, which I’m also blogging about – in fact, some parts of this post are very similar to parts of the first post of that blog. In this first post, I won’t discuss game design as much as the purpose of this blog and what can be gained from blogging while designing a megagame – and more specifically why I keep a separate blog for each game I’m designing rather than just throwing it all into a single one.

The reason we have chosen to use a game to communicate research results is, in the words of Claude Garcia, that we want people (or in this case players) to “[rather than] negotiating about the world [they] want, [negotiate] about what’s available”, as we believe this will help them “understand the issues faced by other players”. This is particularly important in a project where we are attempting to communicate not only ‘hard facts’ about sustainable consumption, but dealing with emotions related to learning more about what a sustainable lifestyle may look like in the future and trying to prepare for what the road towards that lifestyle is going to look like – not merely as individuals, but as a society. We hope that people playing the megagame will have an opportunity to see things from a variety of perspectives and based on that experience and both make wiser and better-informed decisions in the future and use their insight to help others do the same.

This is not the first time I’m involved in megagame design – I was lead game designer for the Climate Change Megagame (CCM) that was played for the first time in November 2020. I won’t go into the background of that game here, but simply note that I learned that, following the conclusion of the design phase, it was very, very difficult to remember the thoughts that guided me through the steps of the design process that led to the final version of the game. Thus, I’ve chosen to use this blog to help me record my thoughts along the way and enable reflection on the choices made based on the information I had at the time and not only in hindsight. Although the latter may be preferable in some cases, I’m more interested in getting insight into what the design process looks like from the game designer’s perspective while they are in the ‘midst of the fray’, and I’m guessing I’m not the only one.

This blog is meant to function as a research journal that will allow me to reflect on both my thoughts and ideas during the game design process and how and why I made the choices I made after the design process is concluded. It is also a way to allow members of the Changing the Game of Consumption project group and stakeholders in the Mistra project to stay up to date with the game design process and encourage them to contribute to it between meetings. Moreover, it is intended to give game designers insight into the process of designing a megagame. Regardless of your interest in my blog, I hope you enjoy it and learn something from reading it!

So, why one blog for each game? First of all, as they belong to two different projects, keeping them apart means less ’spam’ for the members of both projects (and indeed anyone who is interested in only one of the projects) and an easier time summarising my reflections at the end of each project. Secondly, at the outset it seems to me the games will be quite different in character and so, as the designs are already going to influence one another due to coexisting in my brain, I feel it is necessary to keep them separated to help me focus on reflecting on one in light of the other rather than on both at the same time. Thirdly, I suspect that there’s a lot to learn from comparing the posts of the two blogs – an aspect of the research project that I will happily hand over to the researchers I’m working with, should they be interested.

In the next blog post, I intend to write about what comes to mind when I study a game-like discussion/negotiation exercise that the Mistra research team has already constructed in order to see if and how I can use an existing structure to create an idea for a megagame. To my help I have Jim Wallman’s excellent guide to megagame design, about which I will also write some more in that post.

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Would you like to know what others say about blogging about your research? I recommend reading Janet Salomons’s very insightful post Share Your Research on a Blog, which helped me define the purpose of this blog (I believe it to be a combination of solo/researcher-to-public and collaborative/researcher-to-researcher, but I may well be wrong). Mark Carrigan’s insightful Prezi Using your blog as a research journal gave me a lot of food for thought on what to do with my blog and how to do it, and Duncan Green’s An antidote to futility: Why academics (and students) should take blogging/social media seriously made me confident that this is the right approach – and convinced me to try to keep my posts relatively short, for the sake of both myself and my readers.