the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 22 Jan 2024
Minions of Disruptions™: A Collaborative Adaptation Game for Promoting Climate Action
Abstract. With the onset of climate change, adaptive action will have to occur at all scales, including locally. This implies a growing responsibility for the public and, therefore, a need to spread awareness and inspire climate action. Communication via adaptation games shows potential in achieving social learning and addressing the so-called knowledge-action gap. However, few research efforts so far give voice to participants engaging with collaborative games in organisational and community settings. This paper advances this field by presenting a systematic research reflection on a collaborative tabletop board game, Minions of Disruptions™. It addresses two research questions: first exploring how to design a collaborative adaptation game for the general public, and then determining how the intentions outlined by the game designers are perceived by the game participants. Ten core design intentions determined through a focus group interview with game designers and facilitators were contrasted against responses from the post-game survey administered to all game participants from 2019–2022. The results of this study indicate that the design intentions behind Minions of Disruptions were largely received by the intended audiences, demonstrating success as a communication tool for collaborative climate action. Moreover, important insights about designing adaptation games for the public are raised, which can aid in drafting guidelines for successful engagement.
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2024-46', Pratama Atmaja, 27 Feb 2024
The manuscript presents a novel contribution to the important yet emerging body of knowledge of games for complex issue communication. Due to their highly interactive and engaging nature, games are increasingly employed to communicate climate crises and other complex issues to the public. One glaring question regarding this communication method is how to ensure that the message is well-received, and this manuscript offers a preliminary yet compelling answer. It begins with providing a concise overview of the current literature on climate crises and games for climate-related communication and education. It then presents a case study of a specific board game for promoting climate actions. It then shows that the game’s effectiveness can be measured by identifying the developer’s design intentions, design elements, and the players’ impressions of the intentions through a focus group and a survey. The manuscript discusses its research method, data, and results in great detail, culminating in design principles and directions for future research, the former useful for scholars and game developers wanting to replicate the game’s success.
At least that is what the manuscript seems to aim for. Unfortunately, its contributions are held back somewhat by ambiguities. At the core of its case study, the manuscript presents three findings: (1) the developer’s design intentions, (2) the players’ impressions of the design intentions, and (3) some design elements that are supposed to transmit the intentions to the players. The first ambiguity revolves around the first and third findings. Looking at the design elements’ descriptions, it is rather difficult to imagine exactly how some elements transmit some of the design intentions. For example, how exactly do “uncontrollable events” and “medium: board” transmit “relatability? The authors should elaborate on this more to make the findings more informative to other scholars and game developers. Additionally, the players’ impressions of the developer’s intentions are also riddled with ambiguity. For example, when some players complained about insufficient time for a discussion, why is this problem related to the “time constraints” element? Since “time constraints” typically apply to in-game activities, what does it have to do with the post-game discussion? Or was there actually an in-game discussion (which the development team did not mention somehow in the focus group)? Other than being confusing, such an ambiguity also indicates one thing: the design elements may not have actually encompassed every element of the game (understandably, the development team may have forgotten, or chosen not to mention, some actual elements in the focus group for some reason, including because they thought these elements were inessential to their design intentions). If this is the case, the authors should explicitly discuss these “unmentioned elements” to make the “transmission mechanism” of the design intentions clearer.
Regardless of these ambiguities, however, the manuscript’s novelty and contributions remain worthwhile. Thus, we would recommend the manuscript’s acceptance if the authors could resolve the issue.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-46-RC1 -
AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Mo Hamza, 25 Mar 2024
The first question that the reviewer poses relates to ambiguity around the game elements. We recognize that outlining the connections in a table instead of elaborating upon them in the text is most likely the cause of this ambiguity. The reason for this choice was to add this layer of complexity, which can help other scholars and game designers to follow and compare the design elements, while avoiding making the main text too heavy and difficult to follow. Therefore, we are thankful for this observation, as it suggests that the elements as they are currently described leave too much room for interpretation for a reader who has never interacted with the game.
In order to make this section more helpful, we propose expanding the descriptions of the elements in the annex to showcase the logical connections, which now remain murky. Addressing the specific examples that the reviewer brings up: The “medium: board” element is intended to transmit relatability with how the board is visually constructed. On the game board, the players recognise familiar concepts and structures from their everyday life, intended to help with forming a connection between the game scenario and the player’s actual life. The “uncontrollable events” element, on the other hand, intends to transmit relatability in the sense that it depicts climate change from a point of view that resembles the experience of the public. As in real life, the causes and effects of climate change cannot only be locally influenced, and the players lack control. Instead of giving the players tools to “change the world”, a more realistic scenario is presented, where disruptions from climate change keep mounting even if the team would put all of their efforts in to stop it from happening.
The second set of questions pinpoints ambiguity emerging from a specific finding, namely that the participants associate the “time constraints” element with lower quality in-game discussions. We recognize how this can lead to confusion, given that discussion was defined by the game developers as relating to the post-game debrief. While it seems that in-game discussion is completely omitted as a design element, and that it appears out of the blue into the discussion section of this paper, the fact that the game was designed to be collaborative - requiring rule-learning and joint decisions - suggests that in-game discussion was taken as a given by the developers.
While the in-game discussion element may be assumed to be included in the game format itself, the observation brought forward by the reviewer is a very interesting one. As the game element is mentioned by several participants as a limiting factor, it begs the question if the development team did not anticipate that the in-game discussion element would have such an impact, and perhaps that the discussion as it is currently structured in the gameplay should be rethought in the next iteration, or by other game developers. This is indeed an emergent quality as suggested by the reviewer, and while the paper currently scratches the surface of this question, it does not assess it with the depth that it deserves, as it is an excellent point of how the game experience deviates from the structure that was developed in the design phase. In order to make this discussion more prominent, and to reduce the ambiguity, we will format the focus group method section to include this discussion on elements that may not have been captured by the method (this particular example included). We will also deepen the argumentation around this finding in the discussion section.
Will submit a new version of the article in which we will execute the above noted changes once we get the comments from the second reviewer in order to include all changes in one complete and final version.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-46-AC1
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AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Mo Hamza, 25 Mar 2024
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RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2024-46', Johan Schaar, 05 Apr 2024
General Comments
This is an important and novel contribution to research on the use of games to build awareness and insights on a highly complex issue. It expressly addresses the knowledge-action gap and barriers that stand in the way of acting on insights. It critiques the limitations of narrowly cognitive-focused knowledge-transfer approaches and seeks to understand designer-participant interaction with a critical focus on less studied affective and relational aspects that are often the keys to transformational learning. The approach is particularly important today given the troubling situation that neither mitigation nor adaptation action, at all levels, are keeping pace with the very tangible impacts of the rapidly changing climate. New approaches are needed to understand what prevents implementation of effective policies Games offer a promising tool both to gain a better understanding of impediments and find new ways forward. In this, the paper provides an account and learning from a promising test from which conclusions can be drawn for "guidelines for successful engagement.
The paper provides a very valuable, comprehensive and up-to-date review of the interdisciplinary research field
Specific comments
For the reader less familiar with the world of games, it would be useful if a brief but slightly more detailed description of how the game is provided could be given.
The participating groups are largely self-selected with no attempt to design randomized or representative groups. The consequences of this could be commented on.
The fact that participants represent a number of distinct and different institutions should allow some comparison between them in terms of perceptions, game outcomes and conclusions, both from a focus group and participant perspective.
The 18 game events have taken place in a number of countries and in 4 continents. This indicates that the game is so general in character that it can successfully be introduced in very different contexts. A logical next step to increase its relevance as a tool that can create the foundations for real decision-making would be to adapt it to much more national/local circumstances. For example, it would be of much interest to see the game used in addressing close to real life and concrete trade-offs and tension of which there are many, as indicated in the description of the plan. It would be interesting to see the authors' views of how this kind of application in specific governance settings and bio-physical and social contexts could be envisaged. Can it help decision-making under real-life uncertainty?
Technical corrections
There are few technical issues. The paper is long, probably prohibitive for many potentially interested readers. This could be remedied with a slightly more elaborate abstract.
Line 184: it says that the paper adopts a mixed-method approach. My understanding is that by mixed methods we usually mean the use of both qualitative and quantitative methods. But what is presented are different qualitative methods, not mixed methods.
216. "A careful design of focus groups is key...". But the authors have not designed the focus group but have had to work with those that had actually acted as designers and facilitators.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-46-RC2 -
CC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2024-46', David Crookall, 10 Apr 2024
The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2024/egusphere-2024-46/egusphere-2024-46-CC1-supplement.pdf
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