Paper short abstract:

This paper explores learning from game-design-led fieldwork with a young climate activist. It discusses how hope is not created through a fixed vision of utopia. Instead, hope is generated through present action with the knowledge that the present will, in ways still unclear to us, shape the future.

Paper long abstract:

Since the Fridays for Future school strikes began in 2018, young people in the UK have been part of a new wave of climate activism that has activated more people than ever before. This paper explores learning from game-design-led fieldwork with a young climate activist in Lancaster, which asked what motivates us to take radial climate action. The outcome of this fieldwork was a design prototype for Solidarity: a cooperative board game set in a dystopian 2040s Britain that aimed to generate hope and collective action. Designing the game world and its mechanics revealed that rather than being concerned with a fixed dystopian or utopian future, my collaborator’s futurity and hence also their sense of hope was continually fostered in relation to their urban present. I discuss how the collaborative practice of board game design, intended to provide a playful ‘frame’ within which to explore possibilities and make my collaborators' visions of the future tangible, resulted in an experience of mutual discovery and reflection on what lies ahead and the role we may play in shaping it. For both myself and my collaborator, designing Solidarity stimulated our sense of agency to act in the present whilst recognising the uncertainty of the future. I suggest that game design offers a form of ethnographic elicitation that is specifically suited to researching futures as both collective and evolving, due to its capacity for building and playing with uncertain worlds and the nature through which insights can emerge iteratively throughout the game design process.