gamesforsocialtransformation

In this fourth and final post about Playtests 1 and 2, we will discuss some of the parts of the game that were less visible, but if and when they changed would have altered the conditions noticeably for all players: the financial system. Linked to this is the bank, created prior to Playtest 2, and the market, which represents most of the outside world and what is going on there. These parts of the game that takes on the macro scale – and here it is good to remember that it is set in a small part of a small country – and so largely fall to Control to handle. This means that there must be a system in place for players’ actions to influence the macro scale, lest we end up with a roleplaying game in which the game master has decided which boss monster the players will face during the epic final battle. This is a megagame, and so there is no such thing as a set ending or a predictable way the players will navigate the obstacles an uncertain future throws at them – however, we will use scenario-like system which allows us to make quick decisions regarding which financial levers to pull and extreme weather knobs to turn depending on which way the players are leaning, leaving players to react to these situations and handle them in any way they can and find reasonable.

The least intrusive control mechanism is the market, which basically represents the rest of the world, from other parts of Sweden to the EU and beyond. Raw material shortages, price changes (up or down) for any resource, or even simply a headline on the news saying ‘unstable market’ are very subtle tools to change players’ outlook on almost anything on their game boards. Such events may also shift their attention from project cards promising a 30% reduction in electricity consumption as there is no raw materials to construct the passive houses, or it may be that something else they need all of a sudden becomes so costly that they simply have to postpone their construction plans to save some other part of their board from falling apart. However, players are in no way forced by Control to do something, roll any dice or take decisions other than if they can afford the resources they purchase from the market at the current price – the worst that can happen is that they no longer have access to a resource they depend on, in which case they need to get creative to avoid cascade effects.

We have used this kind of effects to a limited extent and mostly in the form of price changes based on the gut feeling of members of the Control team. However, in future games we will structure this a little more: should a trade war have ensued during Playtests 1 and 2, the fact is that no member of the Control team knew the amount of e.g. Goods on the market, which means that a shortage could not be effectively implemented – all that would have happened was that there was no more Goods to be purchased, but all the Goods on the population and local authorities boards would have stayed where they are, making no impact on the game unless someone wanted to buy more Goods than they currently had. A more reasonable course of events would have been to announce a 50% reduction in Goods tokens across the board and a 100% rise in prices at the start of the turn, having players return their markers to the market and trying to negotiate black market terms with Control to be able to cover some of the losses of QoL and money.

I found that the version used during Playtest 1 was unable to implement a worldwide depression in any other way than simply stating that it had happened. Thus, for Playtest 2 I created the bank board, which is meant to capture the essence of the clay feet of the financial system: the bank borrows money from the national bank, which it uses to give out house loans to the population and invest in shares in both domestic and foreign companies. I haven’t had the chance to run this part of the system by anyone with relevant expertise, but I’m hoping to do so before the next version sees light of day – what it is meant to do, however, is to provide Control with the ability to reflect the state of the world in ways that will create cascading effects in the game: the interest on the loan from the national bank goes from 1 to 5% overnight, which means the interest on house loans effectively puts the poorest population players out of a home, putting pressure on employers to raise wages, forcing them to increase prices, and so on. Also, plunging one continent into financial chaos means the bank needs to cover losses equal to the housing loans of a whole section of the population, which means they need to either increase the interest or increase their loan from the national bank. There are several ways this system can go wrong and create situations that make players look up and notice the world around them, very much like what has happened over the last few years.

The purpose of the financial system is simply to provide Control with means of changing the conditions in the game – but where does the game end? Well, it could be anywhere, but as we’re working with the Swedish Energy Agency, we’re planning on using their Four Futures to create a scoring system that each turn will help Control decide on a set of external factors will be implemented, e.g. extreme weather events, local/global political incidents, etc. The scores will at first be based on which project cards the players implement – and should no cards be implemented, as was the case during Turn 1 of Playtest 2, there is a default scenario track which will send the players down the road of one of the four futures.

This is our way of using the setting to make sure that the Control team isn’t overwhelmed by all the questions from inexperienced players (which will make up almost the entire player base for this game), thereby preventing them from implementing more extensive changes to the exterior world. This has happened a couple of times during playtests, and this disappoints players as they feel that there aren’t any challenges aside from negotiating good deals with the other players, which is a full-time job in itself, but not the reason they came to play the game – after all, why play a game about making society more sustainable if the game setting does not in any way indicate that these changes are needed? These questions are related to the main learning goals of the game, and so the limited-number-of-scenarios system will be designed to enable players to reflect on the choices they made during the game and promote rewarding discussions during the debriefing after the game.

These are some of the thoughts that come up after the two first playtests – if you have ideas, questions, or want to contribute something from a player’s perspective, feel free to do so in the comments section: all ideas are welcome!

In this post, I’ll discuss the local authorities boards, which expanded quite a lot between Playtests 1 and 2. This was not entirely due to the fact that Playtest 2 involved people working in the local authorities, but also that the two players that played the local authorities during Playtest 1 was quite confused by the many different areas in which they were involved: healthcare/schools, waste management, and the public transportation system. Thus, I divided up the local authorities in three departments with one board each, and added a fourth called the Mayor’s office, handling all financial matters and receiving instructions regarding how to manage the municipality from the Regional Council, consisting of one player from each population team.

This seemed to work reasonably well for the three department players (one per department, sitting around one table) – they didn’t seem overworked and had time to interact with other players around project cards. The Mayor and her financial advisor, on the other hand, who sat at a separate table a few yards away, were busy talking to other players coming to their table every minute of the order phases of both turns. I failed to give the members of the Regional Council clear instructions regarding where and how they were to meet, and so they got stuck halfway to the council chamber/Mayor’s table on the first turn, meaning the Mayour didn’t speak much with them. This was remedied during the second turn, and the politicians spent more time at the Mayor’s table – however, the Mayor hardly spoke a word with her department heads, meaning that the initiative for the few changes they made didn’t come from the Mayor’s office and/or Regional Council. This part of the game will undergo development as I now have a better understanding of the way players see the roles and how negotiations work – one thing that may be attempted is to have a stricter round structure, so that the Regional Council will have scheduled, set-agenda meetings with the Mayor, followed by a meeting between the Mayor and the departments heads to set the budget.

Although all three departments are important in their own way, the Health & Education department were criticized the most for not being able to provide all the service the populations desired (which was by design from the start of the game). However, this system was quite straightforward, which was not the case with the waste collection system. In Playtest 1, only the part of household waste that goes to the waste-to-energy plants were included, which meant that all waste was placed on the population boards, and frankly ignored as no changes to the amount of waste was done during the three turns the game lasted. In Playtest 2, a division into waste, recycling, and landfill was made, and – based on data on handling of waste in Sweden – only 25% of all waste was placed on the population boards and the rest on Regional industries, as a representation of all other businesses in the region.

This part of the game was not used much in either playtest, which indicates either that it is as yet not an important part – it is in reality, however, as the district heating system is heavily dependent on access to waste, and the region is heavily invested in its district heating system – or that it was difficult to understand, possibly due to being distributed all over the room and half a dozen boards. This needs to be looked at in more detail in the future, but this does not necessarily mean the system needs to become more detailed and complex – perhaps it could be reduced to domestic market access to burnable waste and the Technical department board discarded. As waste and consumer goods are tightly linked, there should perhaps be a separate ‘waste board’ that allows players to see and change this part of the energy system from a slightly different perspective.

The maintenance system was added to the game for Playtest 2 to represent costs involved in maintaining complex systems. The system is quite simple – for each building, roll two dice and add the number of wrench symbols printed on both the building itself and any tokens on top of it – and were received quite well. How to remove the tokens was described on cards (Repair team and Skilled engineers) given to the players, and this took a bit of time for them to connect. The timing of when to roll was also a bit unclear, and may be remedied by clearer game turn structure sheets being printed and handed out to players and Control next time.

Overall, the local authorities boards will undergo changes based on whether it is deemed they are contributing to the game experience – that the local authorities are an important piece of the overall puzzle is beyond doubt, but in which way they are to be played is as yet not clear. When creating the Mayor’s office quite a few financial aspects gathered there – almost by themselves, it seemed – and so gave rise to the idea that the financial aspect of the game needs to be expanded, not least to enable Control to throw interesting challenges at players in relation to the monetary system. This is the topic of the final post in this four-post expose of the two first playtests, and will involve some discussion of possible scenarios that the players can encounter and how the project cards, which we have just mentioned in passing so far, may come to impact the game.

The previous post gave a rough description of the population boards, and in this post we’ll have a look at the companies, all but one of which are involved in making sure the population has all the energy they need (and can pay for). This part of the game changed quite a bit between versions: the overall structure of the version used for Playtest 1 was based on models of the energy systems and divided companies into either producers or distributors of energy (two and three companies, respectively). As most of the energy used in the region is imported, this structure worked reasonably well for fossil fuel, biofuel, and electricity; for waste-to-energy, however, this was much too detailed, as what is in reality a single company working closely with the local authorities’ waste management department became two companies, one producer and one distributor. Thus, these two were merged for Playtest 2, and may even be merged with the waste collection department in the next version.

Also, during Playtest 1 one member of the Control team noticed that many of the players wanted to talk to someone in charge of the ‘general industry’ board which I had placed on the sidelines as I did not at the time see them as directly involved in the energy system. For Playtest 2, I constructed a proper role and board for the export-oriented industry (called ‘Regional industries’ in the game) and gave them the role as the major employer in the region – the idea was that the population players, whose wages are paid for mostly by the export industry, would quickly notice when the export market began to fluctuate. This did not happen during the playtest due to time and scenario constraints, and so this connection will have to be tested in a future version.

The company boards are to be relatively straightforward: raw materials/energy is bought and then used in various types of building to make products/other types of energy, which are then sold to other players (or the market, in the case of Regional industries). Although this seems rather simple, I’ve found it to be rather difficult to implement in the game in a way that is easy to quickly understand for the players. This is partly because I’ve limited myself to using A3 boards – which are too small for the amount of cards and tokens stacked on them for some companies – but mostly because I’ve avoided going into designing game parts describing very detailed production/conversion mechanics, as this is to be a game that deals with the overall development of society rather than finetuning of specific mechanics: in short, more Diplomacy than Agricola.

For Playtest 2, all companies were designed with three roles: CEO, salesperson, and operations manager. The CEO would be managing overall strategy and shareholders, the salesperson agreements to purchase the company’s products, and the operations manager purchase of raw materials/energy and the production/distribution buildings and their maintenance. As there were two players per team, they mostly took on all roles simultaneously and so this part of the system is relatively untested. An idea for next version is to expand the board horizontally so as to separate financials/shareholder happiness, available products/sales contracts, and production/maintenance, making for a more organized game experience.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the company boards in Playtest 2 was the profit/loss system as a motivator for CEOs to use the company’s money to keep shareholders happy rather than spending all on altruistic initiatives and blue-sky research. This has been a problem in other games I’ve constructed, and the share price track used in Playtest 1 was mostly ignored, likely because it didn’t do anything to the company, only to the final score of a single player in a game that is seen as being won by all players collectively (saving the world) or at least the team. The system used in Playtest 2 was confusing to get into, but at the end of Turn 2 was very noticeable – huge sums were paid in dividends and the companies that didn’t manage to were severely hampered (and very susceptible to invitations to use ‘creative bookkeeping’ to dip into next round’s earnings to pay for dividends this turn). A slightly modified version of this system will be used for coming playtests and the rules written down for CEO to study beforehand, so as to make it easier for them to plan ahead and set aside part of the profits to get ahead in the game of having enough money to spend on making changes.

A very interesting observation is that none of the players objected to this ever-growing-profit system, and only one company tried to plead with their shareholders using a promising plan for reusing waste as raw materials to keep them happy without having to pay steep dividends. In degrowth scenarios this will probably come to a point where companies need to choose between paying off their entire share capital with locally raised funds or going bankrupt, which will be interesting to see. It will also be interesting to see a game in which population players become aware of and begin questioning the system as it enriches some of them, but drains quite a lot of money that could have been used to aid in transitioning to a sustainable society.

In the next post I’ll be covering the local authorities boards and the waste management system, among other things.

Since my last post, we’ve run both the first and second playtests of the game and I didn’t hold my promise of discussing how to write a rules document was written – as there was none. Going into the game design process very often swallows up a whole week of design, during which I wander from one part of the game to the next, making game pieces, connecting them, figuring out their logic and then redesigning other pieces until as much of the game as possible fits with all the other parts. At the end of such a week, I could easily write a rules document, and it would even be very beneficial to the game as that would allow me to iron out the last creases, but by that time I’m very often out of both time and mental energy, unfortunately. Thus, no blog posts or rules documents, so far – I’m planning to have better luck next time, as the modifications to the game structure will gradually become fewer with each version (I hope).

This post is the first of a series of after-the-fact posts in which I in turn will discuss the four main parts of the game: the populations, companies, local authorities, and the financial system. I will discuss both versions 0.1 and 0.2, which were played during Playtests 1 (12 players) and 2 (19 players), respectively, and discuss the reasoning behind design decisions and differences between versions. Let me just say that both playtests were very intense, rewarding, and enjoyable experiences as our enthusiastic and brave playtesters plunged themselves headlong into the megagame experience and really made the most of our hours together – thank you!

The heart of the game is the people for whom more or less all the energy in the game is intended: the population. The reason for letting players take on the role of population is that we want to avoid making the masses into a metric that is simply to be manipulated by the other players – instead, we want to create situations in which the population players not only resist change or thwart other people’s schemes, but also put pressure on e.g. CEOs of large companies by negotiating directly with them, or even scream at them.

Thus, in the first playtest we had four population boards with one player for each, sitting around a table. Even though the populations were very different (rich/poor, city-/country-dwellers) this created a very strong team which were considered a tough crowd by the companies – perhaps too tough, some said, as the population is more easily led in reality. This may have been due to them effectively forming one team (we had planned on there being two in each, but there were not enough playtesters), so for the second playtest the number of teams were cut to three (roughly upper, middle, and lower class, with the latter living in the countryside), and we had two players each. They still sat at one table, and still formed a strong team, but less so than during the first playtest.

The basic function of the population board was to provide information on the current happiness, energy consumption, and financial situation of the section of the population. The first was measured via the Quality of Life (QoL) track of the section of the population, based on fulfilment of needs/requirements of energy in different forms: transport, housing, food, goods, and healthcare. The second was based on data on import, production and consumption of energy available on the website of LEKS, a collaboration between the county administrative boards in Sweden, and used tokens that each represented 100 GWh of energy. The third, keeping track of the population’s financial situation was a bunch of tokens in different colours and a ‘Savings’ track (first playtest; see my previous post) and a track with green and orange markers and some green tokens (second playtest). Based on this information, the population players were able to assess the situation for their section of the population and take that into account when negotiating with other players.

Also, implementing the -1 QoL stated on the card in Playtest 1 was found to be difficult as players often were unsure on which number the marker stood at the start of the turn and so was unsure if it had changed, and so for Playtest often sad smiley token was invented to represent -1 QoL, making it easier for Control to make the necessary adjustments during the Resolve phase.

The effects of making changes in a rapid pace was a decreasing QoL, which during the Resolve phase resulted in the population receiving a number of red tokens (one for yellow, three for orange – no one ever reached red). More than two red tokens meant increased costs of making changes to the Transport and Housing categories on population board – more than five meant no changes could be made at all. This was an attempt to represent reactions to radical changes and make players think in terms of acceptance among the population. This was about to become a real problem after three turns in Playtest 1, where one population would have been unable to make any changes on Turn 4, had Turn 3 not been the end of the playtest. The only way to remove red tokens was to get QoL to green, which would have meant heavy investments, especially for the less wealthy section of the populations.

In playtest 1, the players used green tokens (poker chips) to keep track of recurring income, and when making deals with other players they gave (or received) green tokens the deal was then represented by an equal amount of orange tokens (white poker chips were used during the game) which were placed on top of the energy tokens they were used to pay for. This gave rise to a problem in terms how to represent money that was not recurring income, i.e. one-time spending such as savings or paying one-time costs stated on cards. This was solved in part by using blue tokens for savings, interest on savings and one-time grants given out by e.g. the government, but did not really solve the problem as players wanted to use their surplus green tokens for one-time costs as well. Thus, Playtest 2 used tracks for recurring incomes and expenditures, and the players received any surplus funds in green tokens (poker chips) that they were free to save or spend as they saw fit. Also, deals were kept track of using agreement cards, which existed in two copies, one for the seller and one for the buyer.

As for all the tokens on the population board, I’ll discuss them in coming posts, as well as the role of politician, which was held by some of the population players. In the next post, I’ll cover the companies, which all deal with energy in different forms.

The past week I’ve done a lot of designing (and redesigning) of game pieces. In this post, I’ll discuss how the design of game pieces in a megagame may impact players’ movement in the game room (and possibly destroy the game experience).

One of the major concerns of a megagame designer, Wallman argues, is keeping the complexity of the game mechanics low enough to allow a large number of players to play it without slowing the game down. In essence, this means I need to concentrate on the essentials, i.e. “what players must do first and foremost”, which also means reducing the minimum amount of movement and negotiation players as much as possible. The latter may be difficult for board game designers (such as myself), who are used games in which all players sit down around a table, having good overview and game pieces within easy reach. In a megagame, a player who wishes to do a simple sell/purchase action that would take seconds in a board game needs to pick up the game piece, walk over to another table (possibly being intercepted by someone who wants to talk or seeing something interesting they need to check up on), and there hopefully find the right person to talk to – even before negotiations on taking the buy/sell action begins. This takes considerably more time and also consumes a fair amount of focus, which is something a megagame designer needs to take into account.

Our game focuses on energy various forms, and so various types of resources and their exchange for one another and money is at the centre of players’ attention. When designing the Climate Change Megagame we went up against a similar challenge, and having watched twenty people stand in line to talk to a very stressed salesman we reached the conclusion that we needed to use a ‘steady-state system’ in order to minimise the need for players to negotiate for the same resources every turn.

Thus, if a deal to purchase a resource that is consumed every turn (e.g. fuel or electricity) has been made, it will remain in place until one party wishes to break it (to sell the resource to someone else, or perhaps because the resource is no longer available due to e.g. market fluctuations or natural disasters), or change the terms on which it was originally struck (increase/decrease the price, exchange it for some other resource). This has implications for the beginning of the game too, as unless players do something other than go around to see which deals they already have in place, the affairs in the game will remain the same at the start of turn two as after setup. This means that beginners to the game (or even the megagame genre), who may feel a bit confused about all the new impressions and rules, may well spend their first turn looking around and talking to people without too much of a risk. This could be seen as a fair representation of the attitude of the vast majority of people to the climate question at the moment – it’s ‘business as usual’ until they can wrap their heads around what it’s really about and what to do about it.

The primary concern with a steady-state system in terms of game pieces is ownership of game pieces – in a computer game, the computer hands me a list of my game pieces, their location and what deals they are part of, but not so in a physical megagame. In addition to stressing the need to decrease the number of different resources each player handles as much as possible, this has two implications for the game: marking all game pieces so that it’s clear who owns each one of them and imposing a strict rule regarding how deals are broken or renegotiated.

The first is a matter of designing game pieces so that instead of having a bunch of generic ‘electricity’ tiles, each must have a coloured border that corresponds to the team/player to whom the tile belongs. This does not just mean more problems with sorting and storing game pieces, but also that it’s less easy to get change for a large-denomination resource as you can’t simply grab some from a nearby player but need to go to the player’s own stash. The biggest problem here is money, and in order to get away with making it generic, it needs to be placed in a specific way to show the terms of the deal.

Currently, Populations have Needs tiles that show a symbol for its category (Food, Goods, Housing, Transportation, Heath & Education) and a coloured square indicating which kind of energy (fossil, electricity, biobased) is required to fulfil it. For example, the blue team has an electric Housing Needs tile (blue border with a house symbol on a yellow background) that, at the start of the game, is placed on a 10-value Power Grid card (orange border with the number 10 and a power pole symbol on a yellow background) on the Electricity distributor’s (orange player) game board. Underneath the Housing tile is a coin (green circle with the number 5 on it) which is the price the blue Population player pays each turn for the power they use. As long as this stays this way, things are fine – the orange player has 5 money to spend each turn (some of which will be tied up in a similar way to secure the electricity needed to power the grid from the purple Electricity Producer), and the blue player has all the power they need to make people in their neighbourhood stay contented.

The moment someone wants to change this, however, they need to observe a simple yet crucial rule: a deal cannot be broken until the counterpart has been notified. This means that should the orange player want to get rid of the blue player’s tile, they can’t just simply take it and place it beside the game board, as that would mean the blue player – who thinks the deal is still on – will likely never know this has happened, and so go on playing as if they have all the power they need. Thus, the orange player must take the money and the blue tile and walk over to the blue Population player’s table and notify them of the fact that the deal is off. Similarly, if the blue player decide they can get a better price elsewhere – or they change to from electricity to heating with oil – they need to notify the orange player that they are taking their money and blue tile elsewhere.

Also, in this system money show up twice – as the money paid by the blue player for the power needs to stay put under the blue tile in our example, the orange player cannot just take it and spend it elsewhere, but needs to take a new coin and use that instead. When breaking a deal or negotiating a lower price for something, this would mean that the orange player needs to take the same amount of money from somewhere, which may not be done very quickly – they likely need to think about the implications and may need to renegotiate one or more deals – and so may cause not only serious chaos, but may require players and control to count the money spent and received for all deals the team/player is involved in throughout all the boards in the entire room, which may be detrimental to the game experience (and even more so should discrepancies be detected).

One solution to this problem is working with a money track, that may go below zero (short-term debt, in effect). This track is adjusted every time a player on the team makes a deal, and money tokens are simply used to show the value of deals. Thus, a player going over to another table to buy something worth 5 money would move the money track back 5 steps, take a 5-value money token from a central stash (overseen by control), and make the deal, whereupon the seller would move their money track forward 5 steps and start thinking about what to do with the money. When the buyer takes back their money, the seller moves their money track back 5 steps and start panicking about which deals they need to renegotiate so as not to end up on a deficit at the end of the turn, when interest on the credit they’ve run up is due.

There are a lot of ifs in this system, and should this system be too difficult for players to grasp and adhere to during a hectic game, parts of the purpose of the game may break down. Thus, the playtest on October 20 is set up to test if it works and if so, how they will improve on it to make things faster and smoother: players can almost always be relied upon to find shortcuts that a game designer would not come up with.

In my next post I’ll discuss my preparations for the playtest in terms of writing a rules document, which always results in interesting findings regarding things that need to be finetuned to make the game work better and which parts of it need a complete overhaul.

After a few weeks discussing what this game is really about, it’s time to realise what’s in my head and playtest it on October 20 at Linköping University (sign up here to join us – it’s played the old-fashioned way, i.e. on-site and face-to-face). In this post, I’ll tell you a little bit more about how I work as a game designer and also what I’ve learned about working in game design processes involving a team of experts and stakeholders.

For those of you who read my last post, I’ll just add that it generated some really excellent feedback from my team, which resulted in me reading e.g. Hagens (2020). This provided an overview of the issue the game will be dealing with, and gave me a better idea of the scope of the energy system and the changes it may undergo during the game. For the first playtest, we’ll restrict ourselves to the parts of the game in which populations interact with energy distributors for fossil fuels, biofuels, and electricity, who in turn interact with energy producers. Although this is only a very small – and very likely the easiest – part of the game, it will likely prove difficult enough for the players and control team to deal with. The objective will be to give me a fair understanding of how players handle the kind of game mechanics I’m imagining us using in the final game, and I believe this will also give my colleagues an opportunity to learn more about what kinds of negotiations and interactions this level of detail give rise to.

When I design board games, I have an idea (which may come to me suddenly or growing glacially slow over periods of months or even years), which is then followed by sketching, often on a classic paper notepad. What’s in that sketch varies – sometimes it’s a map with game pieces strewn over it, sometimes the structure of the game round or some mechanic – but what never varies is that there are always (huge) gaps that need to be filled in. It seems my mind can only do so much abstract work without losing track of things and, at times, several sketching rounds are needed, during which the game idea changes (sometimes radically). In the end, there’s really only one way to fill in the gaps enough to come close to the structure of a playable game: constructing game pieces.

This is the point where I’m at now – in fairness, however, I’ve already been doing some of this for weeks now. What I’ve learned since I designed my first megagame together with Ola Leifler and Ola Uhrqvist three years ago is that a clear understanding of what the game is about can almost only be reached by sitting everyone (i.e. the experts and stakeholders connected to the game) down and drawing the structure of the game on e.g. a (digital) whiteboard (such as Miro) along with some game pieces to represent key features.

In my experience, discussing things without the assistance of drawing leads mostly to abstract discussions and people stating (often over and over, as if they are likely themselves making up their minds as they speak) what they want the game to be about or what it should do – often in theory or very abstract terms. This is valuable in the beginning of a research project, but until the team sit down and sketch together, I find that the understanding of each individual differs quite a lot from the others, which is very confusing in the game design process. Thus, for my next project (which just so happens to be the Changing the Game of Consumption megagame), I’ll get to sketching a lot faster in order to allow the project participants to create a joint understanding of what the game we’re creating is really about.

As for how my brain works, it cannot create clarity when viewing all parts of the game simultaneously, i.e. from a birds-eye view, and so I need to delve into making game pieces to get to grips with how the game really works. This process is really the same as someone setting about untangling a heap of yarn: they pick a thread, any thread, and follow it for as long as they can without getting stuck. When they do, they pick up another thread and repeat the process. After following a fair amount of threads in this way, I’m usually able to take step back and see the structure of the game in a new light – it may even be that a structure has emerged that was not there before.

What I imagine myself doing when I throw myself into making game pieces is putting myself in the shoes of the player and seeing the game at ‘ground level’, from the perspective of those who are going to play it. If I have a certain game piece placed in this position and tied to this kind of action, what options am I left with as a player standing in the room by this table, looking out over a sea of people? Will I be so engrossed in understanding my options and meticulously planning the perfect move that I will lose sight of the focus of the game? Will I realise that I need to talk to a number of people to make sense of what’s really going on, understanding which actions and resources I have access to and how to use them to survive the round?

This work is both intensely enjoyable and very frustrating, and it takes a lot of time, some of which is spent realising that all I’ve done so far is not going to work. Also, it is best done on my own. I find that discussing the game with others should be done in relation to more or less complete parts of the game (or when completely out of ideas), as such discussions inevitably lead to taking a step back and looking at the overarching theme/goal of the game, which is less than productive when creating/modifying existing game pieces and making sense of how they fit together. This is my current view, and it may well be that it changes over the coming months and years of game design.

Those are my thoughts looking up from a number of hours creating game pieces and fitting them together to make a game – in my next blog post, I’ll likely discuss some thoughts that have popped up during the week and after presenting and discussing the prototype to my team.

In this post I’ll first deal with the three design directions that I outlined in an earlier post and then go on to an attempt at formulating the main real-world issue that I believe we’re trying to get at with the game. This is surely not the final wording, but it may be enough to actually complete the first version of the game, which we’re going to playtest this autumn (sign up here if you want to participate – the form is in Swedish, however, and in case this stops you from signing up, please let me know).

Over the past week, I’ve pursued the three design directions and tried to make a basic megagame out of each one of them. This endeavour has been less than successful, and the reason is that each one of them all failed to encompass the entirety of the issue we’re trying to get at with this game in a different way, which meant that each time I realised that I was indeed creating a whole new game. This in itself isn’t a problem (Wallman even mentioned in his series of blog posts this would be the case), and through this exploration I found that I was still struggling to define the main real-world issue on which I am to base the game.

In the case of the Power Grid board game, the definition of energy as ‘electricity’ and leaving out the need for/consumption of electricity/energy made the scaffolding provided by the game too narrow to make it useful – this isn’t a game primarily about producing and distributing electricity/energy in competition with other companies, but about a society trying to get to grips with its reliance on an unsustainable energy system. As for building a game directly on the model energy system created by a member of our team, this included both the production/transfer and consumption of multiple types of energy (electricity, various fuels/gas) connected to data on expected behaviours of individuals, which meant that the society that the energy system was set to provide for is invisible. The opposite was true for the Climate Change Megagame, which is primarily about deciding which parts of society that are to be changed in order to reach a carbon-free society by 2050, and thus leaves out the matter of energy or – more precisely – leaves it to be handled by invisible mechanisms such as the ‘market principle’ or ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’ reasoning.

What dawned on me as I studied these three games was that the megagame we’re constructing needs to – in addition to making energy the main concern on which all other, environmental or otherwise, depend – take into account the whole of the energy system, not just the parts of that I – and likely most people – normally think about. Energy is so fundamental as to make it difficult to think of as a separate entity, and so in our everyday lives we very often do so only in terms of electricity, gas, and various types of fuels. This is one conception we should be challenging, so that players become aware of all the energy produced and expended by the role they are playing, wherever and however this takes place. Otherwise, players are likely to repeat the mistakes of the past and in so doing we risk perpetuating the misconceptions about the energy system on our planet that led to the situation we’re currently in rather than give people a chance to see it in a different light and get innovative about solving problems related to it after playing our game.

The problem became even more apparent as I attempted to create a game based on what I had learned. After sketching up the traditional parts of the energy system – transportation of people and goods, heating of houses and food, and powering industrial production processes – which are indeed very easily represented in a game (sourcing, production, distribution, consumption), and began working on consumption goods/food and building of vehicles/houses, I noticed that I automatically changed focus from energy to which raw materials were used, how much of a carbon footprint was created, and what kind of environmental impact would be involved. I found that I was unable to understand how to approach e.g. the purchase of a cheap flashlight from an energy point of view – the complexity of trying to figure out the steps in which to get to grips with how something as mundane as a one-dollar trinket came into being in terms of energy was simply baffling to my mind.

However, I understood that this was something I could not simply hand-wave and leave for later, as it stands at the very centre of the main real-world issue we’re trying to get at: a sustainable energy system – for the entire planet, not just the parts we arbitrarily select to look at. From a game-design perspective it would in my opinion be ridiculous to expect players of a game about the transition of the energy system to a sustainable one to not question the fact that consumption goods appear in stores each turn from outside the game, are sold by business players to satisfy the demands of population players, and are then incinerated to produce heat and electricity to be used by industrial players and population players. I found myself asking where this (almost magical) resource came from, where the energy required to create it was expended, and – perhaps more to the point – who were so kind as to supply it in endless amounts whenever we asked them to (by way of giving them money)? Was it part of an exchange of energy of some sort, so that we give them (or someone in a multi-partner trade deal) an equal amount of energy in return? These questions are crucial in understanding what we’re trying to do here:

Understanding the sustainability of the energy system in light of all of the energy imported, exported, produced, and consumed by the people represented by the different roles in the game.

This way of seeing the issue means that consumer goods and food cannot be treated as separate parts of the game, and that buying a car made abroad or building a house does not primarily mean expending ‘resources’ but energy. With this, the game will most likely move into disputed territory by making use of some rather broad generalisations that may not sit well with everybody – but this is one thing that I find that games are good at, i.e. help us traverse bridges that are too narrow for our everyday shoes or too weak to support the weight of our preconceptions of things. It will most likely involve (Swedish) players facing the fact that they are used to having at their command a vast amount of energy that they need not be overly concerned about spending as there is (very nearly) always more where it came from, all but free of charge.

For my next blog post, I’ll be going into how the talks I’ll have with my colleagues – who are far more knowledgeable in all things energy than I – will impacted the design of the game. Unless I’m simply too busy designing the first playtest session to write, in which case I’ll update you on that event and what was learned.

With all the games I’ve designed so far, there has come a moment when all (or at least some) of the basic tenets of the game suddenly become utterly clear. This may sound suspiciously like an epiphany, but I would say that it is more of a decision, reached through hours and days of sifting information, listening to other’s ideas, and failed attempts at drawing up lists of the things I’d like to see in the game. Nor does it mean that I’ve drawn up a comprehensive plan, so that the rest of the process is simply a matter of putting in a number of hours of design and playtesting to make this grand idea into reality. On the contrary, I often find that what this stage of the process is mostly about is my brain catching up to what has been evident (to many others) all along. I suspect this is the case here, so please bear with me.

The game will be about negotiating the allocation of available energy in light of the fact that our supply of energy isn’t unlimited.

This very basic – and to be fair, even crude – statement is the sum of the realisations about the energy system and the world in general I’ve made over the past few weeks. I’ll list them below, not only for you to marvel at the size of the stone I’ve been living under for most of my life, but to clarify my thinking regarding the basic tenets for the game that I’ve put down at the end of this blog post.

The first realisation I made was that the real problem with the current energy system is that much of our current use of fossil fuels, and indeed some of the ‘renewable’ energy types as well, can in fact be compared to using our/the world’s savings to pay for an ever-increasing consumption of everyday products rather than investments meant to yield higher returns later on. The second was that the word ‘transition’ is mostly used (and thus understood) in the context of from which sources we will obtain our energy in the future, rather than addressing our use of energy in terms of scale of consumption and who is given access to energy. The third was that when we say that energy has been ‘saved’, this often means that we have managed to shift energy consumption from one part of the process to another, and that the amount of energy consumed is roughly the same on the whole.

The fourth realisation emerged from the combination of the facts that we expect our children to lead not just comparable but better lives than we do, and that most people consider a fair reward for a hard day’s work to be something that requires energy to make, such as a bag of crisps, a hot shower, a new sweater, or a weekend in a nearby city. This means that any vision of the future in which people are expected to work as much as we do and be rewarded (or even compensated) with access to less energy than we currently are appears utterly undesirable to most people’s minds – it simply doesn’t fit with our expectations on life. In my opinion, this isn’t extraordinary in any way, but part of being human: I imagine that, throughout history, people have been expecting more of life for both themselves and their children (call it hope, if you will) – what’s changed over the last hundred years or so is that quite a few of those people have been able to use Earth’s vast supply of fossil energy to get (some) of the things they were asking for. Being children of our time, the only thing that separates us from our pre-fossil-fuel-using ancestors is that we’re less used to being refused when we ask life (and society) for more than our parents had.

The implications for the game are these: when it begins (in the 2020s), the population has a lifestyle that consumes a certain amount of energy either directly (e.g. fuel for driving cars and heating houses) or indirectly (e.g. transportation of goods to the country/stores/houses, production of goods/food, building of housing, healthcare, community services). No actions can be taken in the game without allocation of energy – money is simply the grease to make the wheels go round, nothing more. This means that e.g. eliminating all private cars in the game without making any other changes will only force players to allocate more energy to public transportation and delivery services, as the distance people and goods/food must travel to be consumed has not changed. This also applies to shifting production of goods/food from global to local in order to avoid spending energy on long-distance transportation between production sites and stores/houses – this means more energy must instead be allocated to the sourcing and transporting of raw materials and powering of production facilities. At the end of the game, players will realise that their success should really be assessed based on their access to energy, which is not necessarily related to the amount of money they have.

To my mind, this game is meant to address what I refer to as the ‘slippery aspect’ of the problem that the energy system is set up to solve – unless players become aware of the assumption inherent in the game – i.e. that a perceived need for energy not automatically means that the world should produce more energy so that we can have what we want, which is to say more than our parents had – and actively attempt to change this, they will spend most of the game shifting the problem around rather than dealing with it. As for the strategy of relying on technological development and the possibility of solving the problem through increased energy efficiency without having to make any changes to consumption patterns, it will certainly be available in the game. Taking this path will, however, require spending energy on researching these new solutions and investments to make them available to the public, as well as running the risk of technology not being available when needed – in my view, expecting results from research the way one does from factory production is akin to gambling, however high the odds of failure are. Else, players are looking at a future that will either be considerably warmer (small or no changes in energy consumption patterns) or very restricted in terms of individual freedom (severe cuts in the use of non-renewable fuels).

Based on this, I’ve formulated some basic tenets for the game:

• The primary currency in the game will be energy. Money will be used primarily to facilitate trade and may be useless to players in many situations.
• The game will be based on a status-quo system, meaning that at the start of the game all energy will be allocated based on the current consumption pattern and during the game players will negotiate changes to the allocation rather than spend their time buying and selling energy.
• Populations will be very sensitive to changes in lifestyle and, unless radical action is taken during the game, will expect to be able to consume more energy, i.e. have access to more energy and/or enjoy a higher energy-to-consumption ratio, at the end of the game.
• Individuals’ desire for independence/personal freedom will be the main problem facing all attempts to increase energy efficiency based on them forming communities/collectives in order to share resources.
• Populations will initially expect all deficiencies (of energy and otherwise) that they suffer to be handled by the local authorities to handle, which will involve allocation of energy.
• Politicians will have the power to declare the direction society/populations should ideally be moving in, but are limited to persuading other players to do things, even their own agencies/authorities.
• Businesses will be faced with the Fishbanks dilemma: if they make more money now, they may make no money later – however, if they do not cater to the needs of the population now, they may not be around to enjoy their profits later.

So far, so good – next I’ll go on to see what this means in terms of the three design directions I outlined in an earlier post.