The prototype aims to make heat inequality tangible by placing players inside different social roles and asking them to navigate daily life under extreme heat stress.

It gestures toward a future where urban cooling is treated as shared infrastructure rather than a private privilege, and where collective action becomes necessary to keep everyone alive in the city.

The prototype emerged through a futures process that worked with urban heat signals, unpacked their direct and indirect consequences, and used world-building to explore how these shifts could reorganise everyday life, access, and survival in the city.

The prototype engages with emerging claims around a right to cooling, where thermal comfort is no longer seen as a luxury but as a condition for survival. In Bengaluru, this right is unevenly realised. Gated, air-conditioned enclaves sit in sharp contrast to tin-roof settlements and outdoor labour environments, making cooling a deeply contested resource. The game anticipates a future of intensified heat segregation, where neighbourhoods shaped by older planning decisions, tree cover, and caste and class histories remain cooler, while peripheral and informal areas bear disproportionate heat risk. As temperatures rise, these inherited spatial inequalities harden, forcing difficult questions about entitlement, responsibility, and collective urban care.

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How the game works

Players are randomly assigned personas such as gig workers, sanitation staff, corporate employees, school children, or elderly residents. Each begins with a fixed amount of “cool coins,” representing the degrees of cooling needed to survive a 40°C city. As players move across a heat-zone map of Bengaluru, they gain or lose coins based on their role, location, and action cards drawn.

The game is played individually, but cannot continue if any one player loses all their cooling. This creates a built-in tension between self-preservation and collective responsibility. Players can choose to act alone, or pool resources through collective action cards to build shared cooling infrastructure like shelters or shaded spaces.

It is best used in workshops, classrooms, or public engagements to surface lived differences in heat exposure and to prompt discussion on urban design, labour, and climate justice. A key tension emerges between luck and agency. Players are born into unequal conditions, yet their choices still shape outcomes for others, mirroring how heat futures are both inherited and actively produced.