As part of our first workshop for the module, Principles of Interactive Media Design, we played the Perspectivity Challenge Game that focused heavily on climate change and how we can have an influence on this. Through this game, the players are faced with the trade off between long term sustainability and short term economic growth, how the players play and cooperate with one another is completely up to them.
Having split into groups of twos and threes, each group was given a large set of clean and regular (less clean) factories. With our set budget we were to build out our factories and connect them with roads, once connected, each factory would earn the same amount of points per round completed, we then calculated our revenue/expenditure at the end of each round. The decision between building up clean factories versus regular factories was the main decision to be made here, clean factories cost more to build and generated the same revenue as regular factories but regular factories had a negative effect on the environment. When there was an imbalance on an ecological or financial level, this would result in some form of a disaster that could potentially effect a number of players.
This game was really interesting as the way other players manoeuvre can have a big impact on the other teams. Our team decided that we would only build clean factories from the offset. However, we were still struck by natural disasters due to the massive amounts of regular factories that we watched the other players set up throughout the game, something that was so very frustrating as we were simply trying to choose the best environmental option but still suffered. The financial aspect of the game and the teams collaboration was also interesting, at one stage, our neighbouring country was in financial crisis so we decided to buy a clean factory for them. Surprisingly though, this was the only act like this made throughout the duration of the game, likely because the end goal is to have the most resources of all the teams. Overall, the game really signified how greed can lead to worldwide problems and how collaboration can truly help prevent such issues. The scary thing is that I can understand how easy it must be to be drawn into this selfish state.
Sean Fogarty 