What we keep calling it
A climate world-building choose your own adventure game and discussion experience
Every time I run a playtest, I ask participants what to call this. Three times out of three, the same word comes back: experience. To me, this is an interesting Rorschach of a description, so let me give you another recurring referent.
Multiple people have referenced Joanna Macy's Active Hope framework without prompting. I'll be transparent: I only listened to Active Hope last year, and not since, so I suspect I've absorbed her teachings through osmosis from other writers and teachers. This is why I name the repetition instead of claiming it myself.
The playtest group today landed on "climate world-building choose your own adventure game and discussion” experience. It’s a jaunty little jingle, no?
Let me tell you what happens.
Players build a world together by responding to prompts, drawing on a shared map, writing down their feelings, and repairing relationships—with each other and with local environments—through rituals. The newest addition, I’m told, is essentially equivalent to the Jewish ritual of Tashlich. (I had no idea!) The perspectives players take on constitute a community grappling with accelerating and compounding climate crises.
A design note
Currently what the experience is for and the audiences I intended.
Common Ground lets a group face and feel grief, anxiety, and frustration about climate issues without tipping into despair or going numb. The land is carefully built over a ~4 hour span, letting people get to know their environment before the weather turns.
Meta-prompts along the way foster reflection about things like transferability. Is this world so different from that one? Emotions and imagination come together with prompts for action.
It gives a group a structured way to transform conflict into generative imagining, with each other and with place. What people leave with is a time-bound artifact: an unfinished map. They also leave having said hard things out loud in a room that held them, and finding they could imagine forward anyway.
Stated differently, three intentions drive Common Ground:
to talk about climate change and name (and feel) emotions around response,
to bridge imagination, mindfulness, and outward action, and
to practice relational communication and repair.
The original audiences were non-profits, universities, sanghas, organizations like the Good Grief Network. I’m newly told climate tech companies would be interested in this as a tool for innovation and team-building. That wasn’t the original vibe, but I’m intrigued.
I come from performance studies, where "performative" is not hollow: it's everything. No human meaning-making happens without speech and action. A game is a made-up system of arbitrary rules you can choose to follow or not, which makes it a container for practicing both.
Below are some of the things that have informed the current shape.
Game influences
Credit to the people who have made these mechanics accessible.
The Quiet Year, by Avery Alder
Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year runs on cards representing weeks of the year, suits representing seasons, and players ticking down the doomsday clock. It is elegant, lean, and holds loads of potential for emotional brutality. It spawned countless iterations.
This core engine remains and, for those familiar, Projects, abundances, scarcities (for now). Otherwise, everything else has changed or been removed.
I’ve added a respect economy, so players can circulate goodwill, the Tashlich-like way to honor a rift being addressed, several trust and safety tools. A list of safety scripts from the next game.
Parable of the Future, by Affinity Games Collective
One such “child” of The Quiet Year is Parable of the Future. Instead of imminent doom, Parable asks players to build a regenerative and more hopeful community over a much longer timespan, integrating things like fauna, local creatures, and farming. I have lifted and adapted what I’m calling the “pattern” framework from this game.
The way we move through the environment affects its shape. Patterns represent changes on the map, and have discussed an example (the buoy battle) in this post.
Lamplighter’s Festival, by ira prince
Lamplighter tied dice scrying with community ritual in a way I found absolutely beautiful.
Even Alder supplied starter maps to speed up play for time-crunched groups. While I don’t currently intend to facilitate this between rounds of Pathfinder at game conventions, I also don’t want players to sit around feeling like they shouldn’t play the game because they don’t know enough environmental science.
Concerned the game would take too long (though my science advisor says the game is fully engaging the entire time and not to worry about duration), I implemented world-building dice mechanics similar to Lamplighter’s Festival and was so excited I wrote a whole post on it.
Recovery of Your Inner Child, by Lucia Cappacione
This isn’t a game, but if you look at my previous ventures into building my own, everything involves at least a couple aspects of expression: drawing, writing, embodiment, speech.
Cappacione’s entire non-dominant hand drawing to allow one’s inner child to speak was the basis of my game The Present (using William Lentz’s “Second Guess” system). My favorite review of The Present remains, “I got this in a bundle and will immediately be showing it to my therapist.”
Play is ephemeral. I intentionally include as much of the body, and as many modes of expression, as possible.
World-building foundations
The main influences for how I think about the structure of affect and action.
Performing Science and the Virtual, by Sue-Ellen Case
My dissertation advisor wrote this book, connecting spirituality and science, talking about how so much of what we “know” is made up. It exists because we think it exists, and all that “knowing” frames how we move and act. I can’t not credit her.
Disidentifications and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, by José Esteban Muñoz
Disidentifications changed my life and entire fields of research. In it, my thesis advisor José wrote about “over-identifying” with stereotypes as a means of survival. A queer body over-performs, a kind of caricature of stereotype, and that becomes resistance.
Cruising Utopia kickstarted the whole imagination framework I work with. But the idea is living “as if” because the future we want can't arrive unless we practice it in the present.
Together, his books create a powerful diptych of agency, even when you feel powerless.
When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chödrön
Whereas José wanted to live the futurity into being in the present, Pema is like, “listen. let’s just recognize the present first.” Besides my textbooks from an undergrad class—like What the Buddha Taught—this was the first book I choose to read 19 years ago.
The knee-jerk reaction to the first noble truth of suffering tends to be something like, “ugh that’s so NEGATIVE.” Here, Chödrön emphasizes a kind equanimity I haven't mastered and keep practicing anyway. Common Ground tries to hold both moves at once: face what is, and imagine forward.
Anything ever done by Mary Stancavage, such as her podcast Undefended Dharma.
Mary manages to be direct, gentle, incisive, and supportive. This is the register I want this whole thing to live in.
If you do not know my mentor: she believes in practicing living with an undefended heart. By allowing ourselves to feel, touch, and name what we need, “We become willing to turn toward whatever our experience is, without preference and with equanimity.”
I hope Common Ground encourages a great (or “good enough”) turning toward experience.
If you happen to be in Los Angeles, I have two more scheduled playtests (one is the 13th with two open seats), and a waitlist for a yet-to-be-scheduled third. Message me or leave a comment if you’re interested.
But here’s the real ask.
If you've read this far: what would you call a “climate world-building choose your own adventure game and discussion experience”?
(TTRPG people: the science advisor says I can’t call it anything related to “tabletop” because that means something specific and very different. She also advised against “ritual,” but I’m leaving it on the tabletop.)
I would like to thank Mary Anne, Lynn, and Debbie for their phenomenal feedback today. Your input will make this experience 1000x more meaningful and resonant. I’m so excited to implement.
I have also literally never been told to “go significantly darker,” let alone by someone who works with kids and schools on climate communication, so I’m just thrilled.
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Collaborative climate imagination game, featuring real feels? That's kinda long... but gathers these bits I really loved:
"Common Ground lets a group face and feel grief, anxiety, and frustration about climate issues without tipping into despair or going numb."
"Emotions and imagination come together with prompts for action."
"It gives a group a structured way to transform conflict into generative imagining, with each other and with place. What people leave with is a time-bound artifact: an unfinished map. They also leave having said hard things out loud in a room that held them, and finding they could imagine forward anyway." --oof, ALLLL the yes to "imagining forward anyway."