Fate of the World is a global strategy game dedicated to solving the climate crisis, which was created by Red Redemption in 2010. The game is set ten years in the future, in the year 2020. All twelve regions of the world have opted to put their faith into a new governing body – the Global Environmental Organisation (GEO), and you – the player – are the President. You must take on a series of simulated real world policy missions. You win if you reach 2120 with your climate and societies still intact. You lose if the world warms more than 3 degrees centigrade, if the global human development index falls to an unacceptable level, or if regions lose faith in your leadership.

‘Mankind stands at the brink of two disasters: the spectre of peak fuel production alongside ever worsening global warming. Your job is to navigate humanity’s way through these potential disasters and reach 2120 with hope still intact.’ – The game’s ‘Peak Oil’ mission

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

The game features a background animation of the earth from space slowly revolving, indicating that days, months and years on earth are slowly passing. As President of GEO you can navigate to one of twelve geographic regions, and using a series of intricate menus you can make drastic policy changes with one click. Decarbonise energy systems in Europe? . Shift food systems in India? . Boost research funding in Brazil? . After each turn the game moves on 5 years, showing whether your actions have had utopian or apocalyptic consequences (or something in between).

The game’s strength is in combining multiple datasets about societal and environmental development into one model-like system. The game is eco-social in tying together sustainable development for the world’s poorest (you lose if they go hungry) with robust climate action. The game’s developers worked in collaboration with Oxford University climate scientist Myles Allen, to create a comprehensive and integrated overview of pathways to decarbonisation using official data sources, notably from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Transformative creative practice:

Climate change is often framed as a ‘wicked problem’ of immense complexity that is difficult for individual people to fully understand. By putting the Fate of the World into players’ hands, as Presidents of GEO, the game invites them to experience the complexity for themselves in a much more interactive way than reading policy documents or looking at individual datasets. Indeed, it may help players to question the lack of concerted political action around the urgent challenge of climate collapse. However, the game remains complex and best suited to players that have at least a basic knowledge of how earth systems are changing, and the dominant policy perspectives.

On learning and evaluation:

An increasingly large body of academic research explores the possibilities of playfulness, and game-like formats in helping people to imagine alternative futures. CreaTures Researcher Joost vervoort argues that deep seriousness and deep playfulness are not opposites, but rather deeply intertwined in our everyday lives. In this blog post, he asks:

‘Can we let go of the associations of playfulness as the opposite of seriousness, and therefore perhaps also frivolous, superficial and not valuable? Playfulness can loosen us from the constraints of society and its norms and values, and help us to re-perceive what is simply considered to be accepted reality. It can subvert and invert the ‘normal’, it can challenge existing power structures and ideologies and spark the imagination needed for new societal alternatives. With playfulness, after all, comes humor, the breaking and hacking of rules, and imaginative pretending…it also points to endless possibilities for imagining things otherwise.’

Learn more:

The game is available on the Steam platform.

Since 2019, developer Soothsayer Games have been exploring how to raise funds for an updated iteration of the game, Fate of the World online.

More blogs from Joost Vervoort on games and sustainability are available at Anticiplay.

The purpose of the game is to help players co-envision a desirable future state in 2030 and then backcast to find out pathways on how different UN SDGs have been achieved. The game is designed to be free from a specific context: it has a holistic societal outlook and allows players from diverse backgrounds to co-create desirable future scenarios and take away from that what matters in the context of their organization’s ambitions and values. Even though it includes educational elements, its main purpose is inspirational and provides ‘food for thought’ for participants’ work practices. Hence, outcomes of each gameplay vary between participants, depending on what they find interesting and relevant. This diversity of perspectives is aimed to increase out-of-box thinking, find opportunities, and create different pathways for reaching the SDGs.

The Sustainability Futures Game has been designed as a continuation of the Nordic Urban Mobility 2050 Futures Game game, which was created by Hellon for Nordic Innovation Nordic Smart Mobility and Connectivity programme in 2019.  

In practice, the game can be played as a half-day session, or as a one-week sprint with much more in-depth analyses and documented outcomes. A game session starts with an introductory presentation by the facilitators to prepare the players for the right mindset and introduce the key terms and concepts of the game. In the first part, the players collectively write a fictional story, which depicts a desirable near-future state of 2030 for a selected city. The fictional story evolves through several collective tasks including, for instance, visual probes, probing questions, and questions related to the UN Sustainable Development goals. The main objective of this part is to facilitate a dialog on desirable futures and collectively imagine a fictional story that integrates multifaceted characteristics of this future narrative, such as personal desires, societal norms, or political structures.  

The game can be seen as an example of a futures-oriented design game that helps participants make the abstract and ambiguous topic more engaging and personal by incorporating elements from design, games, and fictional storytelling. The game session combines varying methods from arts and design, such as improvisation, fictional storytelling, visual prompts, and creative ideation. 

During Autumn 2020, Hellon organised online and physical game sessions with different service designers, researchers, sustainability experts, and system designers which resulted in continuous iteration and redesign of the original version of the game. The final design has been tested in November 2020, with sustainability professionals from the FIBS Corporate Responsibility Network – Finland’s leading enterprise network to promote financially, socially and ecologically sustainable business.

During the first quarter of 2021, Hellon met 15 public and private organisations in Finland, to present the Game and gather feedback. The game was further presented at Hellon’s online webinar and followed by a game session “Helsinki 2030” with selected webinar participants representing different public organizations. In autumn 2021, Hellon organized one more game session for adult students at the Laurea University of Applied Sciences.

The Commoncpoly project emerged in 2015 as a way to bring back the spirit of the original Monopoly game as designed by its creator, Elizabeth Magie, who wanted to bring the perils of monopolisation to attention. Each space on the Monopoly board shows goods and other resources for purchase, but in Commonspoly these goods can be turned into commons. The first prototype of Commonspoly was created at the 17th ZEMOS98 festival, during a working session facilitated by Guillermo Zapata and with the participation of Vassilis Chryssos, Francisco Jurado, José Laulhé, Carmen Lozano, Rubén Martínez, Peter Matjašič, María G. Perulero, Virginia Benvenuti, Natxo Rodríguez, Igor Stokfisiewski, Menno Weijs, Carla Boserman and Mario Munera. After this, the ZEMOS98 cooperative took over the coordination and started facilitating the Commonspoly project development, making the game available for free and open to peer-editing.

The Commonspoly game is typically played in public sessions at cultural events, engaging diverse local communities, but it can also be purchased or downloaded as print-ready files and played privately. ZEMOS98 also provides editable game files to encourage collaborative game development, enabling anyone to adjust the game to their specific contexts. These new game versions created by players are then distributed under the Peer Production License and their creators are listed as authors, while ZEMOS98 stays listed only as the author of the game versions that they develop themselves. 

This peer process creates an open space for the development of a collective, distributed authorship of the game, where the game proliferates by accumulating diverse local and personal knowledges of various stakeholders interested in the topic of commons. Emphasis on collective authorship is a key part of the Commonspoly project: the openness to an ongoing re-negotiation is designed into the game, which becomes a commoning artifact on its own.

To scale out the game distribution and nurture a growing community of practice around the game, ZEMOS98 has recently initiated a network of ‘Ambassadors’: individuals and small bookstores that manage the sales and distribution of small game stocks locally, acting as Commonspoly advocates as well as gameplays facilitators. Ten bookstores around Spain have been successfully secured and the network has started to expand internationally, for instance into Finland, Greece, Portugal, and Italy.

Through these playing formats and development strategies, Commonspoly has already reached people in 23 countries and was released in five different iterations and four different languages. For instance, a Brazilian teacher adapted the game to the local context for her students; a UK-based Esperanto expert made a game translation. ZEMOS98 themselves have developed four game editions so far, with the latest one known as the Commonspoly Green Edition that has been used in the CreaTures project. Initially, the Commonspoly plan for CreaTures was to produce a series of live gameplays in Seville; however, due to the pandemic, the gameplays have been partially adapted into an online format.

The main goal of the Commponspoly project is to stimulate a collaborative, commons-based approach to the use of public resources as a sustainable alternative to the extractivist model of neoliberal privatization. The game fosters collective dynamics to the detriment of strategic visions based on competition and individualism and helps people imagine and negotiate various commoning strategies applicable in everyday-life contexts.

Along with the globally distributed Ambassadors network, Commonspoly builds a trans-local community network of stakeholders interested in long-term engagements, critical discussion, and education related to the topic of commons and socially sustainable economic models. The game thus works as an educational artifact supporting peer-learning and critical discussion about these topics and co-envisioning of socio-economic systems based on collaboration, mutuality, and solidarity rather than exploitation and extractivism.