Here’s a video giving you a glimpse into the serious fun we had during the Let’s Adapt workshop. You can also visit us on Flickr to find images from the workshop.

We often think of games as just for entertainment and fun and as an activity to pass the time, possibly when socializing with friends. We spend 3 billion hours a week as a planet playing videogames. Fortunately, there are also games out there designed to make a positive social impact by either making players aware of a political concern like the Darfur conflict or a socioeconomic issue like unemployment and poverty. Games are also starting to be used by humanitarian organizations that have a tough job explaining intangible concepts with long-term consequences. Like climate change adaptation, well-designed games involve decisions with consequences.

According to the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, “participatory games can offer numerous advantages over more linear, traditional forms of teaching and learning that cast decision-makers and stakeholders as passive onlookers at best.” We can look at games like Poker and automatically see the risk associated with playing: you may bet a lot of money on the odds that something will or won’t happen: that you will have a great hand like a full house while your opponents have nothing more than 2 pair. The same goes for whether or not to prepare for a disaster or to pay for early warnings.

Thanks to funding from Invoking the Pause, the University of Miami’s School of Communication (UM), the IFRC Red Cross Caribbean Disaster Risk Management Reference Center (CADRIM), and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre (RCCC), were able to partner together and introduce an innovative approach to reaching stakeholders in the Caribbean. We conducted a dynamic two-day workshop entitled ‘Let’s Adapt: Games for Climate Change Resiliency’, facilitated by four of us (Lien Tran, Reynette Royer, Mini Saraswati, and Clay Ewing) who are a mix of humanitarian workers and game designers with experience creating games to communicate climate change and adaptation practices. The selection of workshop activities was informed by the 3CA toolkit that CADRIM has been designing with help from the Red Cross National Societies and several partners as well as the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. As a result, we chose to focus the workshop and select games that address the 3CA’s climate change adaptation module.

Participants represented the Barbados Red Cross, Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Caribbean Institute for Meteorology & Hydrology (CIMH), Community Disaster Response Teams (CDRT), and the University of the West Indies’ Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies (CERMES). By connecting relevant parties from Barbados and around the region on new participatory approaches to adaptation, this workshop explored how interactive resources and game-based activities can assist in the task of communicating climate change information and invoking grassroots participation within Caribbean communities.

Early in the workshop we broke down what makes a game a game (borrowing from the book Rules of Play, the source on game design): a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that result in a quantifiable outcome. We also presented a few reasons for why games are better than the standard alternative (a lecture or PowerPoint): they provide active learning opportunities where you can interact with peers, they are engaging and naturally result in emotion response, and they can provide an opportunity for data collection on decision-making by simply recording what players choose to do through the game. Games are also flexible enough to be optimized for the audience playing the game, including low literacy and even experience with games. Since these are all facilitated experiences, players just need to be able to learn the rules as they play, even if it means being in a slight state of confusion at first. The confusion quickly dissipates and then what remains is the enjoyable, active learning!

After giving a short intro to games, we split participants into two groups to play Let’s Get Ready!, a game about disaster preparedness that we adapted based on the game Ready! (Please see below for more specifics on how to play Let’s Get Ready!) This initial version of Let’s Get Ready! provided a simple framework to simulate the importance of prioritizing actions and working quickly, working against the clock. However, we saw opportunities to improve the game and invited participants to further develop the game. Essentially they had to get hands-on and take on the role of game designer within the first 2 hours of the workshop! In one group, participants added roles so that each player was given so many units of ‘work’. For example, the grandmother only gets 10 rolls of the die compared to the father who gets 20 rolls of the die. Another addition to the game was a wild card deck with unexpected events. For example, if a wild card says that the father is out of town on business when the impending hazard is announced then the father can’t help at all (he gets no rolls). Other events are a family member getting injured reducing their ability to help. The group wanted to reinforce understanding that you may also have to work with what you have and which may be less than ideal.

Some feedback from participants related to the lack of design of the game. Indeed, you have a different visceral response when you see and play a professionally produced game. However, the message we wanted participants to get was that you don’t need much to make a game. The real-world lessons of the game can come across even if you use everyday objects to play. The barriers to entry are in fact low as long as you can apply systems thinking to design the actual game system.

A pleasant surprise for me was realizing that another game that I had designed, Humans vs. Mosquitoes (HvM), addressed a major concern in the region: vector-borne diseases, including dengue fever and chikungunya. The general consensus was that both awareness and mitigation of these diseases is essential, especially as the prevalence has increased with shifts in climate. Another benefit of playing HvM was to show how the same message could be translated in two formats: a gesture-based game requiring no special materials and a professionally designed and printed card game.
You can read more on the 2 main game variants below (and at humansvsmosquitoes.com), but the main premise of the game is that players are divided into two teams: Team Human and Team Mosquito. The goal is to weaken the other team and become victorious! There was indeed a lot of excitement and competition playing the game, but ultimately the level of discussion and interest in the game stemmed from its relevance to current concerns about increased cases of vector-borne diseases including dengue and chikungunya in the region.

Participants were eager to start working on the Caribbean adapted version of Humans vs. Mosquitoes in the following game design session. The original games expresses the basic relationship between humans, mosquitoes, breeding grounds, and disease, but the real-world mitigation strategies were basically limited to clearing the breeding grounds. Additionally, there were only 4 breeding ground options: gutter, tire, kiddie pool, and wheel barrow. While these are all plausible breeding grounds, there are more prevalent ones in the region like garbage sites (indiscriminate dumping), coconut shells, and plant pots. Workshop participants therefore focused on identifying these regionally relevant breeding grounds as well as coming up with chance cards that might assist either team. For example, using insect repellent or doing space spraying (spreading microscopic droplets of insecticide in the air to kill adult mosquitoes) would help Team Human. Increased rainfall or illegal dumping would help Team Mosquito.  

It is important to highlight that there were notable unexpected results in the areas of capacity development and partnerships. For example, graphic design students from the Barbados Community College not only participated in the workshop as CADRIM interns but were responsible for photography and videography over the two days. The students expressed that this provided invaluable professional experience for them. This cooperation/engagement with two tertiary level institutions has now formed an informal non-traditional partnership with benefits that should not be underestimated. This has prompted both UM-SoC and CADRIM to consider creating other opportunities whereby a reciprocal internship program or similar type of activity could foster creative skills development for tertiary level students based in the United States and the Caribbean. Additionally, the extensive research and experience of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre presents exciting proposals for bi-lateral partnerships in the Caribbean related to tools development and research with institutions in the region.

Each participant brought incredible exuberance and experience to the workshop which enlivened the two days confirming that this group can established a core cadre of regional ‘gaming for change’ practitioners. While the hope for the workshop was to spark interest beyond the 2-day agenda, the extent to which it has already is far beyond our expectations. The Grant Partners see this workshop as the first of a series of collaborative initiatives aimed at further innovating actions to increase awareness and resilience in the Caribbean!

How to Play: Let’s Get Ready!
The game starts with players reviewing about 20 pre-existing preparedness action items: anything from reinforcing hurricane straps to storing important documents in a safe place. Players then added additional actions that they thought were important when preparing for  a disaster. At this point, each team needed to discuss with each other – simulating a family or community working together – how they want to prioritize these preparedness actions. How do they select their top 8 priorities you ask? It’s simple – with beans! Another great thing about these games is that you don’t need special materials to play – Let’s Get Ready requires index cards, pens, some kind of timer, a few 6-sided dice, and a bunch of counters (you can use beans, candy, poker chips, etc.).  Each player gets 8 beans and can put up to 1 bean on 8 of the cards. The 8 cards with the most votes are now the 8 actions this household decides to do to prepare. Now players need to choose how they will allocate their time completing these action items. Each player takes their same 8 beans but can now place as many as he or she would like on one or more cards. The more beans a player places on one card means they are most interested in completing this action. Now it’s time to see if the team can complete their tasks within a fixed amount of time. In the case of the game, you complete a unit of work when you roll a 6 and the team has a minute to roll as many 6’s as there are beans on the 8 top actions. This mechanic of rolling 6’s lets us abstractly convey that it takes longer to do some tasks vs. others and that you are always constrained by available time.  It also means players are frantically rolling dice hoping for 6’s and getting vocal when they succeed or fail! If any item still has beans on it at the end of one minute, the team failed at preparing.

How to Play: Paying for Predictions
Documentation of rules and an instructional video can be found on the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate website: http://www.climatecentre.org/site/p4p

How to Play: Humans vs. Mosquitoes
Each round, each human is trying to clear eggs from a breeding ground, which are what give mosquitoes their strength, without getting ‘bitten’ and losing ‘health’. Mosquitoes on the other hand are trying to either lay eggs in those same breeding grounds or bite humans in order to gain strength to lay more eggs in said breeding grounds. If a human player loses all its health units, he is eliminated from the team. If a breeding ground has no eggs in it, a mosquito player is eliminated.

In the gesture version, anything from sticks to stones can be used to signify the strength of humans (i.e. health) or of breeding grounds (i.e. eggs). Then players discuss as a team before counting to 3 and gesturing at the same time to communicate what action they wish to take. Synchronicity is critical to ensure no one is cheating. Game effects are then settled before the next round takes place. In the card version, players each establish a desired action and then pick the matching card from his hand, which he places facedown. Once all players have selected a card, the cards are revealed and the related game effect is made. The card allows players to make decisions asynchronously and then reveal their choices once everyone is ready.

More documentation of rules as well as images and video of gameplay are also available at http://humansvsmosquitoes.com