Climate change is a global crisis and it is convenient to turn the focus and blame on individuals for international cooperation. Compared to big cooperation, actions at an individual’s scope seem to be tiny and futile. So...there is nothing we can do? What can I do to come up with a solution for a huge problem like this, as a designer?
“All the little and big things people are doing — from changing light bulbs to installing solar farms — are not adding up to a solution. Decarbonizing a world energy system that’s 80 percent fossil fuel is massive in scale.”
According to “The Carbon Majors Database CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017”, 70% percent of the world’s green gas emissions are from 100 companies. At this scope, individuals’ actions do seem to be rather minor, but individuals are contributing to part of the other 30%. Maybe my design can help with that? Let’s take a look at the impact of different individual activities.
I’m designing a game to help to solve global warming by changing people’s behaviors, then the most effective way is to focus on the highest impact activities. The most influential individual activities include having fewer children, living without a car, avoiding flights, purchasing green energy and reducing meat consumptions.
The biggest advantage of building a game with A-frame is accessibility. Running the game on the web with mobile phones or computers provides a wild coverage of users in public. If my audiences are the public, it’s necessary to take a look at the green gas emissions by population.
According to the chart, the top 10% of the world population are responsible for almost half of the carbon dioxide emissions and the poorest 50% contribute only 10%. It’s also not fair to blame people who don’t have a choice for having more children and living in a non-environmental friendly lifestyle. Is designing a game for the richest 10% the best way to reduce greenhouse emissions?
Among all of these environmental actions an individual can do, the most powerful one and has the actual impact is voting. Saving energy from daily use is helpful but it’s not effective. No matter rich or poor, people’s votes weigh the same. Voting is the most influential tool given to the public.
Our behaviors are influenced by many factors, like social connections and our attitudes and mindsets. At the same time, the actions we do also help develop our mindsets. The purpose of behaviour change is not about the energy saved directly from the actions, but the potential influence on one’s mindset and social norm. The goal for this design is encouraging environmental friendly actions which help develop the environmentally-conscious mindset and form the social norm. Then, when people vote, they vote with consideration of environmental aspects.
The audience of this game is the public in general. Considering the purpose is to encourage behaviour change for as many people as possible, the behaviours should be accessible for the majority of the population, the 50% poorest people.
According to the Fogg Behavior Model, actions happen when motivation and ability is in a good balance. People tend to make behaviour changes when they have enough motivation or the tasks are easy enough to do. With the audience and behaviour change model in mind, behaviours targeted in the game should be things that are easy to do for everybody.
The first design for the game was a series of small scenes overlapping each other. The game was divided into three main stages as the storytelling goes on. There were animal scenes and human activities scenes. The animal scenes would be affected by the human activities scene and level up the difficulty. The idea was for the player to connect all dots together while playing the game and realize the negative influence on the environment from daily life activities.
To test if multiple scenes work, I built the first prototype in the P5.js editor directly using quick hand drawing. This prototype included: Polar bear scene, two human action scenes. The main purpose was to test the mechanism and storytelling.
Because of the pandemic, user tests were conducted online. The focus for this prototype was the storytelling that players play multiple scenes at the same time. The result of user testings showed that it might be too complex and confusing to some users but most users enjoyed the interactions in different scenes.
Another helpful feedback I got from the class was switching from asking the player to do certain negative activities and show the impact, to encouraging the player to do positive activities and reduce the impact.
To make the game easy to understand for most audiences but also remain interesting interactions in different scenes, I decided to focus on one animal scene and include all other human action scenes. To make the human behaviour in the game have a negative influence on the environment but provide positive interactions for the player, I redesigned the structure. The player doesn’t control the polar bear’s directions anymore. The player will only move forward with polar bears and interact with objects.
In the original design, the red sphere is the abstract element in the scene that represents human impact or heat. Red spheres the results of human actions. To extend the concept, the red sphere now directly shows the heating source. The game is a combination of the environment and humans’ daily life.
The level design is based on the content of the podcast “Future Makers Climate change: Do individual actions matter?” In the game, the podcast will play in the background while the player playing the game.
The feedback gathered from user testing helped the design move forward. With flexible audio background choices, I gained more control over the content and level design. The content was not based on the podcast anymore. The choices of daily behaviour follow the purpose of the design which is to ask for the easiest behaviour changes that everybody can do.
I’m very happy that I made the decision not to focus on building the final prototype which ideally should be rendered 3D game with fancy models. I spent much time on the research and conceptualization parts instead. The biggest takeaway is learning to be flexible and let the research drive and guide the early stage. The idea changed a lot while the process goes on. User testings and peers’ feedback also helped the project grow a lot.
First, empathy plays a huge role in this game. If I would develop the game more, the focus will lean to displaying the connection between the polar bears family more. More interactions and animation on the animals and environment. At the end of the game, the player is lead to another web which is the place where I can input more research and cooperate with local nonprofit organizations. Then the player can engage with the environmental movement more from there.
