Simulation v01. Drawing down in digital space.

Drawdown Maxout. All solutions on deck!



Hybrid Game Dashboard. The game currently exists in analog form as the table-board encourages in-person collaboration, strategy-making, and thought-provoking deliberation regarding collective action on the climate. However, the design team is interested in exploring web-based game mechanics to deliver the same learning outcomes.

The Drawdown Game was conceived as an anolog “table-top” game, but there was always the understanding that digital modalities would introduce greater affordances. In speculating on digital forms of Drawdown, we start to move away from abstraction and the blank slate, limitations built into our earlier references of tabletop games such as Settlers of Catan. Video games allow designers to work through environmental simulation beyond a top-down approach.

After all, climate change is not something that passively happens to us, nor is it something we can mitigate at a distance. We are actively entangled in managing it’s implications on a day-to-day level. Video games present a life-sized model of grappling with these conditions. 

The digital version of the Drawdown project is also invested in a process of accumulating practicality that overwhelms to the point of the euphoria. Operating speculatively, the digital format embraces futuristic, scenario-based thinking embodied in Holly Jean Buck’s After Geoengineering which asks players to earnestly take on the ethos of climate maintenance in our near-future world.