The Authors: Science and Games

You might ask why a scientific institute seeks to develop a board game. It is certainly not the primary task of scientists and it is despite of its potential success nothing which promotes our careers. Yet two questions were interesting when we started to develop the game:

• Is it possible to reduce the complexity of the issue "climate change" to make it available for a board game and still retain the major elements and processes?
• To what extent can a board game promote the general knowledge on climate change and the understanding of difficulties and obstacles for reaching an effective climate protection policy? In other words: can a game help to communicate scientific results?

These are not only interesting questions, but are actually very important when it comes to communicating the complex problem of climate change and protection. An interdisciplinary effort is needed as knowledge from different scientific disciplines, ranging from economics, via political science to physics and ecology need to be integrated. The reduction to a "good" game, however, was actually a scientific challenge: what is essential about all these elements and processes. In the end, it turned out that desiging such a game was actually like building a model. And that is what this game represents: an interactive model of climate change and protection.

The second question is purely scientific, stemming from the field of "environment communication". From the test rounds we have the impression that some "real" scientific work on this can follow.

The persons who tried to reduce are:

Dr. Gerhard Petschel-Held is acting head of the Department for Integrated Systems Analysis at the Potsdam Insitute for Climate Impact Research.

Klaus Eisenack
Mathematician at the Department for Integrated Systems Analysis at PIK