While I’ve played a few “serious” video games (i.e., games that follow the MDAO structure), I had the privilege of playing Daybreak as my first serious analogue game. Daybreak is a cooperative board game created by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace that takes on the daunting challenge of addressing both the many issues of, and possible solutions to, climate change.
Daybreak, in an attempt to meaningfully address the nuances to the problem and solution spaces of climate change, includes quite a fantastically large number of moving parts. Players each take on the role of a global industrial/economic entity that meaningfully contributes to climate change (i.e., the US, China, Europe, the remaining world). Each entity produces a certain amount of carbon emissions, which when exceeds a certain capacity will negatively advance the game state toward a collective loss. Players must together reduce their carbon emissions in an attempt to reach the overall win condition: being collectively carbon negative.
Daybreak enables its players to advance to a path of clean energy and industry via sound tech and planning decisions, while simultaneously weathering the simultaneous challenges of climate change during so by relying upon fostering resilient communities.
Such complexity certainly lends itself to offering fun in “challenge”, but the intensely communal and cooperative nature of the game provides a rich opportunity for “fellowship”. Viewing the game from a designer’s perspective – rather than just from the player’s perspective – Daybreak very archetypally follows the principles of MDAO in attempting to achieve a positive learning outcome in its players.
A central mission of showing the direness of climate change and the necessity for its mitigation guides all further components of the game. It is no coincidence that the game’s complexity and esthetic seem geared towards adolescents and young adults – the very individuals most capable of making future and longstanding change when exposed to this intervention. Messages and solutions are kept positive and simple, with dynamics that support the skills necessary to not only succeed at the game, but also begin tackling the real-world climate issue. Overall collaboration and communication, future move planning, and literacy in climate helping/harming actions serve as the game’s foundational dynamics.
From here, the game employs a certainly non-trivial number of mechanics to support all these communal dynamics. Cards help to record actions that players can take to locally mitigate the global climate issue, while further cards represent actions that all players can contribute on. A myriad of counters, tiles, and boards exist to help keep track of the basic carbon producing/eliminating elements.
Overall, I was surprised how an obviously educational/morally-focused game could be both so fun and enlightening! In the end, we did lose – but in the end the game also had me standing and walking around the board to help guide our quickly assembled climate-focused task force.
What sticks with me is not only the feeling that I’d like to play again, but that perhaps the real world issue can be solved with some aggressive teamwork.
