the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 21 Feb 2024
The Long Game to mitigate earth system tipping points
Abstract. The devastating impacts of triggering earth system tipping points are unfolding, not only in physical and infrastructural losses and damages, but also in increasing eco-anxiety and trauma. Here we present and discuss “The Long Game”, i.e. a concept of gamifying education for triggering action at scale and self- efficacy as well as facilitating active engagements in real-world socio-ecological projects through collaborations with transformation actors. The Long Game can serve as a pedagogical entry point for hosting and fostering unlearning and double loop learning processes in the education system. This in turn can trigger self-reinforcing positive social tipping across wider socio-behavioral, economic, technological and political domains for rapid mitigation of earth system tipping points as well as for healing eco-anxiety and trauma.
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2023-2588', Anonymous Referee #1, 09 May 2024
The authors present an overview of an idea called The Long Game, which is an effort aimed at gamifying educational approaches for broadly supporting social movements to empower and steer society away from global problems such as climate change and a destabilized Earth system.
At present, the manuscript is very hard to evaluate given that the details of the Long Game are theoretical and general. Additionally, there appear to be several statements made, that are not at all supported by the corresponding citation.
The article would need to be substantially overhauled and rewritten to be considered for publication. Three general comments are provided to provide a sense of the scope of needed improvement.
1. Too many concepts introduced without situating each of them appropriately. In the span of four paragraphs, the reader is expected to ingest a very large range of topics, including earth system change, tipping points (and their legitimacy), social consequences of these tipping points and earth system change, the production of new harms (trauma, anxiety, etc.), the reactivation of existing harms (trauma, anxiety, etc.), the sensitivity of younger generations to these harms, the concept of gamifying, the suitability of gamifying for educational purposes, and the ability of gamifying to lead to large-scale transformative change.
This is a lot. And I think to keep it all, the Introduction would have to expand commensurately.
Acknowledging that a lot of concepts and jargon must be introduced in a brief time, the authors would need to better guide the reader through these concepts.
2. Writing feels somewhat biased. As written, the authors mention many topics that are of debatable scientific validity. Yet as written, they appear as settled fact. For example, the presence of some (if not all) tipping points is disputed. If a reader is aware of this, the blithe statements about the presence and severity of tipping point transgression reads as an agenda, rather than a scientific article.
More importantly, though, some of the citations appear to be wrong or mis-used. For example, the mention of “....lock-ins in the Jet Stream…”. This was an interesting piece of information to me, and in reviewing the article by Tradowsky et al. (2023), that text does not appear to mention the jet stream explicitly, nor the concept (even tangentially) of a lock-in. I suspect that the authors made some intellectual leaps that I did not follow. Those leaps need to be stated more explicitly.Generally, though, as a reviewer this type of thing severely erodes the confidence I have in what I am reading, and makes me wonder whether I need to be fact-checking the other references.
3. The Long Game in practice. While I recognize this is a Perspective, the authors put forward the idea of “The Long Game” as a concept that could be integrated at community scales of ~10,000 people. The authors provide some key features of what The Long Game can do (e.g., the process of practicing “active hope”).
However, as a reader, I’m left needing quite a bit more than an idea that feels very divorced from reality. Many questions arose for me: What examples exist in the world today, which come even close to the concept proposed here? Either in type, scope, approach, etc? How does something like this manage to navigate the polarized world in which we exist? What would implementation look like? How would success be evaluated? How does culture and societal difference manifest in the implementation? What evidence is there (theoretically or practically) for any of the processes to actually work (i.e., double loop learning and unlearning)?
I suspect the authors have ideas for many if not all of these items, and this should be reflected in the article.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-2588-RC1 -
RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2023-2588', Anonymous Referee #2, 10 Jun 2024
Thank you for your submission. My recommendations below assume that, while this is a short article and not an empirical study, you still have space to engage more deeply with some of the aspects that I find unaddressed or confusing.
A survey about climate anxiety in young people and children (Hickman et al., 2021) is used to argue that:
1. eco-anxiety and trauma are expected to have long-term consequences for physical and mental health. This makes sense.
2. young generations feel overwhelmed and helpless to take meaningful action. This also makes sense.
3. eco-anxiety and trauma ... can be best dealt with in schools through the transformation of education system. This is not said or argued for in the cited study as far as I have seen. Furthermore, the target of the cited survey is 16-25 years-old, which is not compatible with the stated goal of "involving schools providing primary and secondary level education." If the authors want to make these claims, they are free to do so, but the chosen source does not seem to support the argument in a meaningful way.The article does not engage much with the literature on games and gamification for climate change engagement. This is especially problematic since some of the claims are extraordinary: the figure 1 description says that gamification of education ... can heal trauma by providing self-efficacy and active hope. This claim requires very strong evidence if it is supposed to be somewhat proven, or it should be clarified that it remains a theoretical hypothesis. If it's the second, the hypothesis still needs a much stronger foundation.
Core concepts such as double loop learning remain undefined. I assume that most readers of this venue are not necessarily familiar with this term.
What this contribution seems to aim for, as I understand it, is the following: a call to implement and test gamified systems in primary and secondary education based on the idea of the Long Game, which "prioritizes an action research agenda acknowledging that catastrophic climate change is already here and capacity building and empowerment are key for triggering rapid action and positive social tipping to escape this catastrophe." The idea is alright, but I would like the authors to focus on two points:
1. Without the demonstration that the authors have had a proper look at what already exists, this contribution risks reinventing the wheel. What I mean is that it is quite likely that gamification has already been applied to schools in a way that aims to trigger rapid action and positive social tipping points (search for any literature review on games/gamification and climate change, or gamified interventions in schools focused on energy, mobility, personal and collective action, and so on). Whether these attempts have succeeded or not at the scale that the authors propose, they should engage with at least some of the literature and explain how their approach is different and, crucially, what is to be done to be more effective. This leads to the second point.
2. The idea's application and design are not clear. They remain at the theoretical call level, without explaining with examples how this could happen. A call for using games aligned with the long game narrative is somewhat confusing without a clear understanding of how the long game is operationalized (gamified) and how it is different from the use of any other preexisting gamified strategy aiming to engage young people and children.In summary, right now the article seems to provide an imprecise call for others to implement and evaluate games aligned with a preexisting concept, but I would argue that the authors should probably be the ones initiating the wave with their own first application and example so that others understand how this is achieved. If this is a call for collaboration with others, for example, I am not sure that a scientific article is the best format to use.
A minor point: The citation Tania & Wim, 2020 uses the author's first name, not her surname (Ouariachi)
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-2588-RC2
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