Habit’Action: a serious game approach to exploring human habitability under Climate Change in mid-mountain communities

Climate change, combined with other pressures, threatens the habitability of human settlements and makes long-term decision-making more uncertain. The Habi(Li)ter research project, funded by the “Initiative d’Excellence Lorraine ”, aims to investigate how climate risks affect the habitability of human settlements in the mid-mountain Vosges Massif in France. Using a transdisciplinary approach, the project integrates values, knowledge, and expertise from both academic and non-academic actors to develop a conceptual framework for analyzing climate risk dynamics and their impacts on the habitability of local communities.

To help the general public understand these dynamics, we developed Habit’Action, a serious game that simulates the management of a mid-mountain community facing climate risks and socio-economic challenges. In the game, players are tasked with maintaining and improving the community’s habitability across multiple dimensions, including economy, connectivity, environmental resilience, basic needs, and social inclusion. While designed for high school students, the game is also well-suited for adult audiences, offering an interactive way to explore how cooperation across sectors and actors can support successful adaptation to climate change and ensure the long-term habitability of communities.

In the game, players assume diverse roles, such as policymakers, farmers, or scientists. Each role comes with unique abilities, budgets, and influence on specific aspects of habitability. For example, farmers can implement sustainable agricultural practices, and scientists can mitigate environmental risks. Across multiple rounds and turns, players confront climate-related crises, including droughts, floods, and pest outbreaks. To respond, they implement adaptation options and make strategic choices that simulate real-world trade-offs. Adaptations allow players to enhance resilience and reduce vulnerability to specific hazards, such as promoting summer tourism to offset snowmelt, or greening city centers with trees and parks to adapt to heatwaves. Strategic choices might include rehabilitating an abandoned industrial site into a park or social housing, or managing a forested area as a nature reserve. Special bonus and malus cards introduce unexpected events, reflecting the uncertainty of real-world decision-making. Players collaboratively vote on key decisions, negotiate trade-offs, and observe how their actions influence the different dimensions of community habitability. Scoring tracks both successes in adaptation and losses from crises, with failure triggered if any dimension drops to zero, encouraging holistic thinking and anticipation of cascading effects.

By providing an interactive and educational experience, Habit’Action allows players to explore trade-offs, practice collaborative decision-making, and develop critical thinking about sustaining human habitability under uncertainty, offering a practical tool for learning about the complexities of climate adaptation in mid-mountain communities.