The Biodiversity Game 15 Feb

The second session of the development of the sustainability game focussed on the biodiversity game based on Monopoly. We brought a couple of old Monopoly games and started to list what the chance cards, jail, community chest, hotels etc would represent.

Claire cutting and pasting a new board...

We decided to stick as closely as possible to the game mechanics of Monopoly for now, with some possible amendments later:

1. The game board design

Last week Susanne suggested that we could use something from nature to represent the board, such as a snail. We decided to keep the circular player movement of Monopoly for now, but used some images to inspire potential future designs.

The spiral pattern could for example be applied for another type of game objective, where rather than playing until someone "wins" as in Monopoly, the game could end itself when the first player reaches the centre of the spiral. This could for instance indicate irreversible climate change tipping points and the end of the planet...

2. Roles

We discussed whether introducing roles (such as the hunter, the farmer, the logger, the politician and the musician) would make the game more exciting.

A tally of not only money but also fame, knowledge, power etc could then be used. This would however make the game more complex and possibly confusing.



3. Loops

The loops we considered incorporating last session from the game Careers, might come back into our design later. The loops in Career could possibly function as roles in our game.

Positive loops would make players who enter them gain more animals for themselves (more biodiversity) and negative loops would make the other players lose animals (less biodiversity).
 


For the chance cards we came up with events (looking at Wikipeida's 100 most threatened animals) caused by both nature and humans.



For the biospheres we agreed on testing out eight and came up with three animals for each ranging from common through to endangered.

A question I thought about during the session:

What would this game look like in an online version?

Perhaps something like the game EVOKE, but where you could travel virtually between the various biospheres to tackle environmental problems and save animals...