Faculty Fellows: Designing a Game to Talk About the Climate Crisis with Professor Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
In the second of eight Faculty Fellow “jam sessions,” Professor Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò of Georgetown’s Philosophy Department led a conversation around migration and its impact on the climate crisis. As part of the session, Táíwò guided the group through imagining a simulation game that challenged players to make decisions regarding the climate crisis.
“Traditionally in philosophy, we have paper workshops, where I read a paper, then you read a paper, and then we discuss. There’s both benefits and drawbacks to that approach, but I think there are other ways we can combine different sources of knowledge and different research focuses,” Táíwò observes. “I was interested in seeing whether or not this particular method would work out in the wild. And I think it went well.”’
Participants discussed, first in small groups and then collectively, how to best design a game that challenges players to engage meaningfully with the ethical issues of migration and the climate crisis. How do you establish the stakes of the game? Should it be collaborative or competitive? What would it mean to win “better,” to come out of the game with a clearer understanding of the issues at hand?
Together, the Faculty Fellows and Ethics Lab team members considered these questions; how could installing external pressures, like shortened timelines and quicker actions, be used to create a sense of moral urgency and simulate real-world constraints? They also discussed built-in disadvantages; not everyone starts on an equal playing field in the climate change debate. How could the design of the game best reflect this power dynamic?
“We might take games seriously pedagogically, but have maybe taken them less seriously in terms of how senior faculty researchers relate to each other. I think that’s a mistake; we can get something out of expanding the range of things we do together as researchers.”
Táíwò notes that while we often think of games as purely fun, they can also be a tool for understanding, confronting, and working through serious issues: “We might take games seriously pedagogically, but have maybe taken them less seriously in terms of how senior faculty researchers relate to each other. I think that’s a mistake; we can get something out of expanding the range of things we do together as researchers.”
Together, participants established game rules and objectives that they collectively felt would push players to consider the climate crisis in new, challenging ways. Having a range of diverse personal and academic perspectives in the room enriched the conversation.
“It takes a lot of work to try out different styles of collaborative research, but it’s work worth doing,” Táíwò says. “There aren’t many things happening in the philosophy field that resemble what Ethics Lab does. It’s one of the few areas of philosophical inquiry outside of straightforward, applied philosophy that is meaningfully engaging with practitioners of various relevant fields.”
The Faculty Fellows pilot program was made possible through the generous support ofMonica Lopez and Sameer Gandhi.