As climate change, biodiversity loss and other poly-culminating challenges disrupt future life in the Anthropocene, technology- and knowledge-driven responses alone are not enough. Community-centred, collaborative and arts-based approaches help us navigate the uncertainties and existential dimensions of living together on a rapidly changing planet. The SSRP-funded Global Imaginaries project has worked to develop a multi-community, multi-level and intergenerational game to connect people in diverse communities globally, enabling them to imagine sustainable futures that consider and deliberate the impact of their desires and actions on others, while sharing valuable local knowledge and reflecting on their collective contributions to global issues. Combining improvised storytelling and role play with a tabletop game, Global Imaginaries draws on diverse heritages and plural knowledge systems, stimulating imaginative worldbuilding and cooperative problem solving. 

By foregrounding deep uncertainty as a key characteristic of our times, the game not only aims to elicit thoughts and ideas on different practices and positions, but also encourages surfacing the feelings these imaginaries generate.

This summer, the project has hosted and co-hosted play-testing events of the game, engaging player groups in Kenya and Sussex. Through a collaboration with Applied African Speculative Fiction, Masters students at the Universities of Strathmore and of Nairobi have proposed key ideas about the game’s local contextualisation and possible hacks and spin-offs. Meanwhile, in Sussex, with SSRP and Faculty of Social Sciences Higher Education Impact funding, the project team have run two play-testing events – one with a group of Year 9 Young Climate Leaders from a local partner secondary school and another with staff and volunteers from a local food community partnership.

Across these two interactive Sussex events, participants deliberated in small groups, making collaborative choices in the nexus of novel technologies, cultural heritage, traditional farming practices and local ecological knowledge, mitigations against climate change, biodiversity loss and soil degradation, alongside agricultural policy and governance systems of the future. Participants from both groups – the Young Climate Leaders and the community partnership members alike - responded to the challenges of the game with energy and enthusiasm, creating their own unique farms in groups while debating and choosing game actions that would help life and habitats flourish in both the present and future. Different player groups created visual representations of their stories, using drawings or Lego blocks and figures. A common theme at both events was the ambivalence elicited by techno-futurist approaches, such as AI-driven tractors:

“…we can cut labour costs!” – “…we can do it ourselves!” – “what if it’s 50 hectares, are you going to farm all that by yourself?”

Another group debated the uncertainties of the social and ecological impacts of novel or future technologies:

“… it’s also called the emperor’s new clothes when you don’t know what you’ve investing in.”

Other practices such as inter- and perennial cropping, low- or no-till, or wildlife corridors encouraging pollinators enjoyed widespread popularity, but player groups also considered they needed to weigh up the benefits of sustainability actions against the everyday economic pressures of farming:

“And sustainability is such a massive thing anyway, it takes a while to get your head around it... and farming is a massive thing, even if you’re doing quite standard farming. So…”

“… this thing might be good for the global climate crisis, but is it going to help our farm, ‘cause it’s nice if it helps the world, that’s a nice thing, but we’re, you know, economically, having to run a viable business…”

Feedback from participants across the events generated suggestions on varying game mechanics and methods and expanding its range of creative modes and materials. Players valued the game particularly for the opportunities to imagine, design, collaborate and deliberate climate, farming and biodiversity futures while also having ‘a lot of fun’.

These playtesting opportunities have provided the research team with key insights about how the project’s methodologies, pedagogical premises and thematic challenges play out in practice. This learning is particularly valuable as the Global Imaginaries project enters the next chapters of its own story of growing collaborations and partnerships, including as part of a recently submitted rich and ambitious European Union Horizon consortium bid that brings together a diverse interdisciplinary group of academic and policy partners from across Europe.

About Global Imaginaries: the project involves Sussex academics and researchers from a range of disciplines and perspectives, led by Dr Perpetua Kirby (Childhood and Youth, ESW) with Prof Kate Howland (Interaction Design, EI), Dr Jo Walton (Arts, Climate and Technology, MAH), Dr Sam Ladkin (Creative Writing, MAH) and Dr Nathalie Huegler (Associate Researcher, ESW/MAH). It draws on earlier research and game development of the Farming Futures collaboration. Earlier this year, the project secured British Academy Pump Priming funding used to successfully build an EU Horizon consortium partnership and bid.