Gaia Station, my Rooted in Crisis contribution developed with Lev Horodyskyj, the founder and CEO of Science Voices, asks what turned out to be a hard question: is it OK to make the climate crisis, and specifically the human effort to expand beyond our own biosphere, funny?
Ok, maybe not laugh-out-loud hilarious. But darkly humorous? Satirically pointed? Once we settled on the framework for our game, I think we made a pretty good case that despite the seriousness of the subject, you don’t need to be doomsaying all the way down.
Lev is a geoscience and astrobiology educator, and he thinks big. So I needed to come up with a playable framework to contain his ideas about the expansion of our biosphere to other worlds. The big problem we’re facing, of course, is that we need to not destroy this biosphere before we get it together enough to seed another one. That’s… a lot. So we abstracted the forces that shape our world and embodied them in a crew of working stiffs just trying to get a job done. And as with our own planet, it’s at the behest of, and constantly challenged by, the short-sighted and selfish demands placed on them by their boss, which is to say, us.
By placing the players in the roles of those forces in our natural world, facing the vicissitudes of our own civilization, we hope to convey both the peril and the potential of expanding our footprint into the rest of our solar system and the galaxy beyond. We also wanted the game to show how those planetary systems work together, and what happens when they function poorly or not at all (like on Mars or Venus, say).
That’s some pretty heavy stuff, so turning it into what essentially amounts to a dysfunctional, bad-boss workplace satire was our key to hopefully making it actually entertaining to play out that tension. So, please: have fun with this game. There are other deeply moving and entirely serious games in this visionary collection. It’s OK to laugh during this one.