Global warming is inevitable, but if we play the game right, the results won’t be as catastrophic.
My data game is a modified version of Jenga. There are 3 stakeholders; environmentalists (pink pieces), politicians (green pieces), and human factors (representing fossil fuel companies, etc) . While staying in the confines of their roles, the players want to prevent the tower from falling as long as possible.
Player rules…
- Each round, the factors player must remove any tile.
- The politician player must remove or move one green tile each round.
- The environmentalist can remove or move one tile every other round. Every other round they may add to the tower at their discretion. The environmentalist starts with 3 extra pink tiles to do this.
What these rules represent…
The factors player represents the human factors constantly adding instability to the system. It is the job of the other two players to counteract this.
While politicians have a lot of power, they can’t change the system completely by performing additions. Also they are confined to moves that are dictated by their constituents and party (they can only move the green tiles). Therefore, their stabilizing effort is very slow and, could be, destructive.
While environmentalists have the power and knowledge to do good and help the system, this is slowed down by politics and destructive human factors. Furthermore, they have less influence than corporations or politicians, and therefore less tiles.
Player learning…
The first surface level learning comes from the pieces themselves, which all have different facts on them. The environmentalist tiles also have suggestions on them.
However the deeper level is understanding how these role confines actually represent the current system and the issues within it.