Climate tipping points are a major area of research in the AGU community, but their relevance and implications for policy-making and governance are not yet well understood. Using climate tipping points as a case-in-point for the challenges of effective science communication, this full-day (8-hour) workshop explores the potential of serious games as novel tools in Earth system scholarship, teaching, science-policy engagement and governance. Serious games have enjoyed growing popularity in these various domains over the last decade, but the benefits and challenges associated with their design and use are not yet well understood. In particular, serious games hold significant potential to advance diversity and inclusion from college classrooms and research groups to various decision-making contexts. 

Building on a transdisciplinary research and science-policy engagement project (Gaming Climate Futures) that purposefully designed a serious game to support decision-making related to climate tipping points in the international climate negotiations, the workshop will invite participants to (1) play a serious game (climate negotiation simulation) and (2) use their game experience as a starting point for in-depth discussions about various aspects of serious-game design, deployment and evaluation. Discussions in break-out groups will be guided/pre-structured and facilitated by the workshop organizers with the aim to produce tangible outcomes, e.g., a network of educators planning to introduce serious games in the classroom, a syllabus for a methods class on games as a research tool, a set of research hypothesis concerning the effectiveness of serious game play, a list of potential funding sources for game-related research, etc.

Price

$150 (regular)/$75 (student)