Climate Tick-Tock: sparking climate action through a cooperative and educational game on climate change in the 21st century

Feeling the need for an interactive tool to make the human-induced climate change more tangible to the broad public, climate scientists from LSCE proposed to develop an educative game to raise middle and high school student awareness. A serious and educational, cooperative board game for up to 5 players, named ClimaTicTac (https://climatictac.ipsl.fr), has been created at IPSL with the help of ASTS, a scientific outreach association. This presentation describes the game mechanics and diffusion strategy.

The game is adapted to all players with good reading and abstraction capabilities (≈10⁺ years). It simulates essential processes related to climate change and associated impacts, mitigation, and adaptation. It is based on a world map including 30 cities vulnerable to climate change, which may become uninhabitable following damage accumulation, a timescale showing the rounds of play throughout the century, and a CO₂ atmospheric concentration scale. Randomly drawn cards describe initial scenarios, and hazards and possible positive actions affecting CO₂ emissions and three categories of damages to cities (on health, food, or infrastructures). To win the game, players must reach a double objective, with thresholds depending on the game difficulty level, on atmospheric CO₂ concentration to limit global warming and on the number of cities rendered unliveable. Optional fun challenges (drawing, mime, word-of-mouth) are randomly proposed to counteract eco-anxiety. Rules have been designed to help players feel the climate change impact at both global and local levels, and realize the importance of early reduction of CO₂ emissions, of collaboration for optimizing action strategies, and of inequalities in exposure to impacts. The game fully relies on current knowledge and realistic events, and the project team has been awarded the CNRS medal for scientific outreach.

The game has first been distributed by local authorities for open-licence use in middle schools. Science animators can carry game sessions for teenagers and adults, followed by discussions on climate change. Middle and high school teachers may also be trained. The game content has been translated into Catalan, English, Portuguese and Spanish (new translations welcome), and is available for self-printing and non-commercial use.

Following success towards a variety of public, the board game has been slightly adapted as a family game by Bioviva Editions for distribution in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada under the name Climat Tic-Tac (https://www.bioviva.com/fr/bioviva-famille/169-362-climat-tic-tac.html), including a semi-cooperative game option with lobbies. In addition, Climat Tic-Tac has been adapted by the association Games for Citizens as an electronic game available online on the Ikigai video game platform (https://ikigai.games/games/gameDetails/105). Challenges consist in quiz, gap-fill or timeline questions. Several connected players can share a game but a single player can simulate several players. Additional university-level educational content will be linked and an English video version named Climate-Tick-Tock is planned.

Finally, a multidisciplinary research project (EVABIO) is underway involving high school teenagers to investigate the impacts of play sessions. Integrating social psychology and experimental economics, it aims to analyze changes in explicit and implicit attitudes, transformations in social representations, enhancements in knowledge, and the extent to which the game influences pro-environmental behaviors.