A game-making workshop to bring complex systems to life

While playing games encourages people to solve systemic problems, designing games deepens their capacity for systems thinking. Whether the participants are students, policymakers or the general public, the process of game design engages them with underlying assumptions and power dynamics, helps them anticipate emergent behaviours, and requires them to balance competing forces.

The skills of systems thinking – setting boundaries, bringing in multiple perspectives and holistic analysis – are required across disciplines to address complex problems like the climate crisis. When these skills are applied to game design, the experience becomes empowering rather than overwhelming.

The iterative process of game design asks participants to empathise with players, define core experiences, prototype rapidly and test assumptions. By modelling real-world systems, they learn how to analyse dynamics and – more importantly – to ground them in reality. A game is, after all, a playable model of a system. And players bring it to life through making meaningful choices that change the game system.

• A co-curricular approach to SDG education
• Empower students as co-creators in sustainability education
• Ease student climate anxiety through nature and community

Board games in particular offer distinct advantages for teaching: their rules are visible (unlike in a video game) and players collectively learn, understand and negotiate them; materials are readily available and accessible; and handling physical objects facilitates collaboration.

Recognising this potential, our Make Your Own Climate Board Game workshop at Winchester School of Art aimed to harness the power of game-making as a pedagogical tool that helps participants explore the systemic nature of complex problems. We invited climate activists, artists, designers, policymakers, university researchers, students and the public to prototype their own climate-themed game. As an optional gateway activity, participants could critically play eco-games beforehand.

The following framework outlines how to conduct analogue game design sessions within your educational context.

Set up your game design workshop

A four-hour workshop is long enough for meaningful engagement while fitting in with timetabling constraints (or it can be run over several sessions). Before the session, prepare the basic toolkit for “paper prototyping” a board game: paper, cards, dice, tokens, coloured pens, sticky notes and scissors. 

Participants form teams of between three and five, based on shared interests. Each person writes down their own climate interests and concerns (such as sustainable energy, biodiversity loss or urban planning). The notes are clustered thematically, creating a visual representation of the group’s collective concerns. This stage already models systems thinking through relationship-mapping.

Hack instead of starting from scratch

In their groups, participants hack rock-paper-scissors into a new game. This aims to reawaken their abilities for rule-making and game design. Rules describe the system’s essential elements and define interactions – and they enable players to shape narrative. Win/lose conditions are what articulate the purpose of the system. 

Start with a story

Shifting from a linear story to a game framework of behavioural rules is crucial. It puts the focus on causal relationships and exploration of an issue as a series of interconnected incidents.

Participants are often more comfortable with story structures than game design, so use narrative to ease them into it. Ask the groups to create a narrative or scenario related to their climate concern, identifying key actors, resources and tensions. Then deconstruct this story using questions: what do the characters believe (rightly or wrongly) about the world? What actions can the characters take? 

These decisions translate linear events into a playable game idea with rules and victory conditions.

Prototype rough board games

Once all teams have a game idea, ask them to share it with the rest of the group for a quick round of feedback and cross-pollination. 

Encourage the teams to move rapidly from abstract discussion to making something playable. A sketchy, low-fidelity paper prototype will become an object to think with.

Play, test and iterate

After 60 to 90 minutes of building game prototypes, move the group to play-testing, reminding them not to become too attached to untested ideas. Use a speed-dating format where half of each team stays with their prototype while others rotate among other groups as testers.

Keep the feedback protocol simple: one thing that worked well, one confusing element and one suggestion. Emphasise that confusion and failure are valuable data points in the design process, not indicators of poor work.

Help teams to distinguish between fundamental issues and refinement opportunities. The goal of constructive feedback is rapid iteration. The session should incorporate at least two design cycles.

Never skip the debrief

The debrief and reflection are where learning is consolidated. Facilitate a structured discussion to unpack each game’s emergent dynamics and link them to real-world systems. Ask questions like: what aspects of climate systems were easiest or hardest to represent in your game? What did you learn about climate systems through the design process?

Encourage reflection on design choices: whose perspectives are represented or missing in your game? What assumptions about human behaviour are built in?

Facilitate discussion about transferring insights beyond the workshop: how might this design approach apply to other complex problems?

The depth of discussion that concluded our workshop provided strong evidence that the game-design process fostered a deeper, more systemic understanding of the climate crisis.

Adam Procter is principal teaching fellow of games and interaction design at Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton. Matteo Menapace is a games designer, educator and a PhD candidate in games and the environment at Manchester Metropolitan University. He co-designed Daybreak, a cooperative board game about stopping the climate crisis.

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