The 2026 Arcade

After 3 years since its release, the serious board game Climate Cooldown and its curricula all developed through the game studio Clean Earth Future has been taught in schools from elementary to college levels with great success. What makes a serious game effective for science and climate literacy when such a topic as climate change can be potentially heavy and traumatic for students? How can we achieve a balance between competencies from CASEL for social and emotional learning and science standards like the NGSS at the same time? In this presentation I will explore how Climate Cooldown is accomplishing this challenge to improve science literacy and combat doom bias all through GBL (game-based learning) (Yount 2023).   The SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) have become well known across the globe since their adoption by the UN in 2015 and have been used in schools as a means to cover essential grounds teaching science with intersections from many other subjects such as art and history. Although not as well-known, the IDGs (Inner Development Goals) cover the grounds for SEL (Social Emotional Learning) competencies as informed by CASEL which are: Self-awareness, Self-management, Social Awareness, Relationship skills, and Responsible decision-making (Bentley 2026). The IDGs even go even further, breaking these 5 competencies into 5 dimensions with greater detail which educators can find useful to the social and emotional development of their students. But why should we care about SEL when it comes to teaching science? And how could GBL with serious games focused on climate and sustainability help to provide a platform for this learning?   I will be answering these questions and more as I illustrate the efficacy of teaching with a curriculum that uses serious games as a focal point for climate literacy.

“Step into 19th Century Saint John, a bustling port city on Canada’s east coast. Unravel the remarkable secrets hidden beneath their city’s stony hills and jagged coastline. In this board game, you and your friends will acquire knowledge and collect fossils while exploring the world-famous geology of the Bay of Fundy. Race to collect sets of cards to publish scientific papers before your opponents. Befriend renowned Canadian and international scientists, and help the museum build a complete collection of the fossil record from the Pre-Cambrian to the end of the Jurassic period”.  Steinhammer: Dawn of Geoscience on Canada’s East Coast is a board game being developed by Resolve, the UNB’s applied game design research group led by Dr. Scott Preston. It’s a light-strategy game aimed at older teens and young adults focused on Earth sciences literacy. As our hook to draw in gamers, we use the incredible story of the real-life Steinhammer Club - a group of young citizen-scientists based in Saint John in the 19th century who helped pioneer geology and paleontology in Canada. Through strategic play, players become more familiar with core concepts that are foundational to science literacy, such as biological taxonomy and geological time. In turn, this knowledge can provide a stronger foundation for engaging with public information about climate science, biodiversity, and sustainability.

‘Whale Fall’ is an immersive project in Virtual Reality that addresses and informs on the issue of marine plastic pollution and its effect on whales. Using the intriguing whale fall phenomenon, this experience engages the audience in learning about the fate of the whales in our oceans. It is the pilot project for 'DeepDive XR' collective.

Luni (working title) is a systems-based tabletop game for adults that invites players into the lived realities of ecological decline. Rooted in a 150 km nomadic river walk along a disappearing desert river in India, this game translates embodied fieldwork into a playable experience of uncertainty, trade-offs, and consequences.   The game explores how systems of human life (livelihood, gender, community, governance) are entangled with ecological systems, and what happens when ecological systems begin to crack. The game is not an awareness piece. It does not tell players that rivers are important. Instead, it creates a situation in which players experience the texture of these realities: the uncertainty, the trade-offs, the feeling of a home changing beyond recognition.  I have just started developing this game at the Quest Learning Observatory, a living laboratory advancing regenerative and circular design through the act of making. I’m aiming to get the first prototype for the game ready by June so that I can present it at the conference. 

Prismatic utilizes strategic foresight and lived experiences to ground the development of a futures game that engages interested individuals, communities and groups in generating visions of the future. Game players will engage with Indigenous and Afro ways of being and knowing and learn how to use futures in climate action planning. This project is an explicit opportunity to ground climate solutions in the experiences of Indigenous and Black communities, some of the most marginalized in so-called Canada, providing a concrete process to rethink our society and the systems that operate in it. Prismatic will:    1. Create more of a voice and a space for Indigenous and Black leaders within the climate movement in order to advance social justice, equity, diversity and inclusion in the arts.     2. Create a National Climate Futures Dataset – First of its kind (in this country and possibly in the World). Incorporate Racial Justice and Reconciliation as foundational aspects of the dataset.     3. Connect arts, science, and policy, the Prismatic Project will demonstrate true cross-sectoral collaboration by allowing art and storytelling to shape and inform strategy.     4. Promote the work of Indigenous and Black artists by exclusively engaging Indigenous and Black artists to interpret the futures data and create artwork, contributing to the decolonization of the arts.     5. Scale up the use of futures, strategic foresight, arts-based work, and storytelling as a tools in climate action planning and strategy development across so-called Canada supporting the fund’s objective of building networks and partnerships to strengthen the arts ecosystem and the role of arts in society.

While risks in artificial intelligence (AI) software are often identified through bias and error, risks in AI hardware remain largely obscured within global systems of design, extraction, and production. Valued at $8.9 billion CAD in 2019, the AI hardware market is projected to reach $950 billion by 2033. As demand for AI accelerates, especially with the widespread adoption of large language models, so too does its reliance on resource-intensive infrastructures that are unseen by everyday users. Our game, Resource Rush, aims to create public awareness of the political, environmental, and labour conditions that underpin now-ubiquitous AI technologies. The rapid growth of the AI hardware market intensifies these concerns, exacerbating existing global inequalities, including exploitative labour practices and uneven distributions of energy and natural resources. AI hardware production also carries significant environmental costs: 2025–2026 reports note that ChatGPT produces over 260,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide every month—equal to approximately 260 transatlantic flights. Resource Rush informs and educates citizens and policymakers on the importance of enhancing transparency in device supply chains, strengthening consumer protections, and addressing unethical labour practices. We aim to inspire more mindful uses of AI and to support policies that enhance transparency in technological supply chains. To increase accessibility, we offer an immersive VR experience—built in Unity for Oculus Quest headsets—that traces AI hardware components from personal computers to their global origins and endpoints, a prime example of “edutainment.” Approximately 15 minutes in length and designed for public installations, the experience uses visual and embodied interaction to communicate complex systems without requiring prior expertise. The prototype was developed through collaborative storyboarding on FigJam, HTML-based testing with 20 participants in 2025, and subsequent Unity development. The demonstration includes discussion of AI hardware contexts, project goals, methodology, and a walkthrough.

The Points of Order is a text-based democracy simulator and video game for three or more players that interrogates the fragile boundary between cooperative and competitive mental frameworks. Set against the contemporary rise in far-right ideologies and systemic disillusionment with North American governance, the project functions as both a social gathering and an inquiry into the pressure of distributed decision-making architectures. Drawing from research into "Theatres of Calculation", the game investigates how anonymous voting structures—common in both direct and delegative democracies—alter the perception of agency. By abstracting votes into numeric value, The Points of Order articulates the "gamification of responsibility," questioning whether the desire for individual victory inherently overrides collective outcomes. A central tension in this work is the "Shadow of the Future": the psychological influence of anticipated interactions on present-moment choices. Players must navigate asymmetrical access to information, deciding how to delegate their agency or consolidate power to form a majority. This research-creation project explores when and how digital governance more closely resembles either a shared social contract or a zero-sum game, creating the context for players to reconsider how political intervention might manifest within an increasingly algorithmic and gamified society. This version of the game will be tuned to the subjects of the Serious Games Conference using referendum questions about environmental sustainability as a thematic subject. How do players make hard decisions about climate change when put through the lens of democratic voting processes?  This project is in early development.

Most contemporary board and card games set in Puerto Rico depict the island during the European colonialist era. The narrative of European colonialism is told over and over again in a whitewashed and even romanticized manner. Meanwhile, people in the United States have a very limited understanding of the hopes and struggles of present-day Puerto Ricans. The objective of this project is to amplify these voices through game design and create a board game that challenges narratives of colonialism and foregrounds Puerto Rican voices and lived experiences. Designed and developed through a series of workshops, Promesa is a cooperative board game for all ages about the debt crisis in Puerto Rico. One to six players take on the role of the local government in Puerto Rico with the task of getting rid of the debt before the archipelago succumbs to natural disasters. Players make strategic and tactical choices about investments in infrastructure, education, and social services while trying to keep the debt from spiraling out of control.

REtreeRS is a Tetris-like about connecting trees across a globe. Each tree type has a unique rhythmic pattern that can be rotated and placed strategically. The goal is to encourage players to consider how unchecked growth affects our world. Each tree you place in a highly compatible climate affects the adjacent climates, potentially altering what can be planted there. As players attempt to connect trees to as many of their neighbors as possible, they have to take into account the viability of the climates and the ripple effects of their actions. An important aspect of sustainability is the sheer timescale involved, which moves at an imperceptible rate for a human’s normal attention span. This makes truly comprehending these seismic changes very difficult. In the game, I represent this in part by how the trees connect: two trees may only be active together a fraction of the time, but on their rhythmic timescale that space between connections is inconsequential. We see these ongoing larger-scale patterns represented in the game at the same time as the full, flowing mosaic of minute changes.  Using music, we can also play with our sense of time. How you place trees onto the planet will influence the soundscape / music; in a sense you are composing as you play in collaboration with the game, with me, the developer. REtreeRS is cyclical, with different variations of planets, at different scales, with more or less hostile time periods. There may be an end to our own story (with the game, with the universe), but the evolving cycles continue on after us. A potential way I plan on experimenting with this is by tracking the progress of individuals in the game and unlocking new cycles as the community progresses through together. How we live our lives should reflect our values and come through in our labor. REtreeRS is being made part-time, with support from long-time collaborators, under a flexible work exchange system. We flow back and forth between projects and take on contract work, so that we can live and create sustainably.  There is a harmony to the world, and even without knowing it we are intricately tied together. If we can work together to connect, to contribute to the everchanging beauty of this composition, we can make small changes that matter. REtreeRS asks: what does the world sound like for those with the sense of scale and time needed to listen?

SunBlock is a research-creation project to build a solar powered modded Minecraft server with custom mods that give access to real time data about the energy production and consumption of the system as a condition of possibility for playing the game. The goal of our project is to blend the actual material conditions of gameplay (the computer hardware, networking and energy infrastructure) with the production of the gameworld itself. Rather than just playing a game with thematics or a message around energy transition, we are endeavoring to provide a direct, tangible and playable experience of the energy infrastructures which make that experience possible. The installation consists of a sunblock server demo using a custom modded Minecraft modpack on a custom designed PC client (son of sunblock).  Participants can either watch the live demo or play a demo minecraft game to experience the system

Nature has long been a central theme in video and board games, but saving the planet from environmental collapse has become an increasingly common game objective in recent years (op de Beke et al., 2024). This surge coincides with the growing openness of governments, mass media, and corporations to discuss climate change—so long as the foundations of our socio-economic system and its “let-the-market-decide” ideology remain unchallenged (Lordon, 2021). Indeed, most discourses surrounding the ecological – including those of video and board games – crisis focus on the transition to green energy and decarbonization technologies, rather than critically examining capitalism’s imperative of perpetual growth (Homo Ludens, 2023a; op de Beke, 2020: 241, 257; anonymised, upcoming).  Detritus is a non-commercial cooperative board game that we designed to subvert prevailing discourses about the climate crisis and propose tangible socio-economic solutions that depart from neoliberal principles. In the pursuit of these goals, the design team tried to break free from: expansionist goals that perpetuate the instrumentalization of nature; solutions focused on technologies instead of socioeconomic reforms; complete information about the costs and benefits of each solution that prompt players to base their decisions on calculations; conventional game balance with multiple paths to victory; ineffective modes of persuasion based on rational considerations; rule systems that allow individual decisions instead of encouraging debates among players; complex simulations that depict climate change as a managerial issue; agency-limited procedural rhetorics that do not allow players to reflect on the consequences of their choices; tech trees that require industrialization and dominance over nature; cartoon-like aesthetics that do not reflect the gravity of the situation; and conventional modes of distribution that generate pollution.  To compensate the lack of studies on the “insights and affordances” of board games’ material components (op de Beke et al. 2024: 55) and demonstrate that board games’ materiality is not neutral but can support, reinforce, or contradict the designers’ intended message, we designed two versions of the game that were used during an experimental reception study. While the eco-friendly version is made of minimalist, recycled, and handcrafted materials, the polluting version is made of 3D-printed plastic components and glossy paper filled with AI-generated images.

 Participants will take on the roles of the governments of fictional countries based on real states and attempt to address climate change while navigating conflicting priorities such as cost calculations, self-interest and global solidarity.  The countries must decide on actions to respond to or counteract climate change. The groups are equipped with different resources and opportunities and have different goals. All simulation materials are provided in analog form and accompanied by interpretation aids, advance explanations, and support. The countries' decisions are also presented in analog and visual form.  The focus is on haptic methods and an action-oriented approach that relies less on abstract thinking and more on concrete experiences and active participation.  Reduced emissions are displayed on our “carbonometer”. When the blue balls are reached, the blue box may be opened for the next round; otherwise, the game continues with a red box. This makes different emission paths apparent. Each box contains a cube with QR codes. Each code leads to an event for one of the six fictional countries. The consequences of climate change depend not only on the emission path, but also on random circumstances. In addition, the boxes provide the countries with further decision-making options and a budget in play money.  Our goal is to raise awareness of the causes and consequences of climate change among a group of people who have largely been overlooked until now, but who are crucial to achieving a successful transformation.

Build conspiracies, sow outrage, or maybe post cute pics. From influencers, to trolls, and agents of chaos, The Feed has you grow communities, share posts, and manipulate your opponents communities. Gain likes, leverage followers, and complete objectives so you control The Feed and come out on top.

The Feed was designed by a team of researchers and educators to build a game that models how social media shifts information. While playable for all audiences, this game comes with lesson plans and additional resources, all of which can be found on thefeedgame.com.