Greetings, Builders!
Our student team created Seeds of Tomorrow to teach sustainable decision-making and collaboration. Players take on the challenge of building a town in Evergreen, balancing resources and morale while protecting the environment.
Every choice matters. Will your team make the right ones to succeed?
Games have the power to shape thinking, behavior, and social skills through immersive and interactive experiences (Granic et al., 2014). Seeds of Tomorrow places players in the role of town builders, where each choice about resources and buildings produces real consequences. Players practice problem-solving, strategic thinking, and planning while learning how persistence and experimentation can lead to better outcomes (Gee, 2005; Granic et al., 2014; Plass et al., 2020). Collaborative play encourages empathy and communication, as players witness how their actions affect others and the town as a whole. The game provides a safe space to explore different strategies, recover from mistakes, and adapt, which all reinforce the habits and skills that can carry over into real-world decisions about sustainability and teamwork. This game is designed for players of all ages, though it is aimed at adolescents because of the influence interactive experiences can have during this state of development (Blumberg et al., 2013; Granic et al., 2014).
Sustainable behaviors should be practiced in your day-to-day, and everyone has heard that millions of times throughout their lives. Choosing to act in a sustainable manner takes work and determination. Normally, when we are told to be more sustainable, it feels more like an accusation or is presented in a way that makes the prospect of not performing threatening. That framing drives people away from practicing resource conservation and other sustainable behaviors. However, we want to draw people into these behaviors, even allowing people to begin these behaviors with less conscious effort. We will be doing this through our game, Seeds of Tomorrow
Our game is about building a new town in an untouched newly discovered area. You harvest resource cubes from the environment to use with cards to build new buildings and boost the morale of the people living in your new town. the buildings have different effects and will boost morale, assist you in harvesting resources, or help you to retrieve resources from the waste pile after they have been used to build. after everyone has had one turn, that is the end of one season and the weather will change and everyone may draw a build card. If you last for 9 full seasons and end with a morale higher than 6 that is how you win!
Solar Spire, one example of a build card that returns resources from the waste
Sun, one of the normal weather cards that appears in the course of game play
Rain, Another normal weather card that appears in the weather deck
One example of a build card, showing the cost to build it, and the effect that the built item has
Wise Interventions are repeatable immersive scenarios that seek to change a thought or behavior around specific issues (Walton & Wilson, 2018). They are only effective if the context around you is changing as well, though.
Serious games are games designed to promote learning or convey a specific message or theme through their art and content (Blumberg et al., 2013). Serious games can therefore be wise interventions; they touch on pathways of influence, such as time spent playing or the repetition portion of wise interventions, and the content is well conveyed through the formal features of the game, such as the art or the physical pieces (Subrahmanyam & Renukarya, 2015). Touching on these pathways makes them effective interventions that are also engaging and fun.
Our game is meant to be a Wise intervention, and includes many features that are meant to activate schemas around sustainability and stimulate the message through its nature-themed art and the procedural story of the game itself . As you work to build a town with only the resources of the land around you, without running out, you are immersed in the scenario of resource conservation that hits the pathways of influence, time, and formal features (Subrahmanyam & Renukarya, 2015).
Meet the Authors!
I never really played board games growing up, as I mostly played video games instead. I've spent a lot of time in the worlds of The Legend of Zelda and now enjoy games like Valheim, and that aesthetic definitely influenced our project. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I enjoy both playing the board game itself and the process of creating one, and I hope to see Seeds of Tomorrow hit the shelves one day!
This project is very exciting for me. I care deeply about sustainability, and I love the idea of inviting people into a space to practice it in a way that is more approachable than the tactics usually used. I hope that this project and game also inspire some of you to take action on the behaviors you practice, or even to spread this game and sentiment further in your lives. I would like for this game to become bigger and more widespread to hopefully affect as many people as possible.
We additionally acknowledge Trystan Abdill, who inspired the initiation of this project and contributed significantly to the concept and early iterations of it.
Blumberg, F. C., Almonte, D. E., Anthony, J. S., & Hashimoto, N. (2013). Serious games: What are they? What do they do? Why should we play them?. The Oxford handbook of media psychology, 334-351. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195398809.013.0019
Gee, J. P. (2005). Good video games and good learning. Phi Kappa Phi Forum, 85(2), 33-37
Granic, I. Lobel, A., Engels, R.C.M.E. (2014). The benefits of playing video games. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034857
Plass, J. L., Homer, B. D., Mayer, R. E., & Kinzer, C. K. (2020). Theoretical foundations of game-based and playful learning. In J. L. Plass, R. E. Mayer, & B. D. Homer (Eds.), Handbook of game-based learning (pp. 3–24). The MIT Press.
Subrahmanyam, K., & Renukarya, B. (2015). Digital games and learning: Identifying pathways of influence. Educational Psychologist, 50(4), 335-348. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1080/00461520.2015.1122532
Walton, G. M., & Wilson, T. D. (2018). Wise interventions: Psychological remedies for social and personal problems. Psychological Review, 125(5), 617–655. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000115