Decreasing psychological distance to climate adaptation through serious gaming: Minions of Disruptions

Abstract

A gap between knowledge and adaptive action remains and psychological distancing has been proposed to explain peoples’ inaction. This presents a challenge to climate change communication and particularly to the conventional ways of providing scientific information. Serious games have proliferated in the last ten years with a focus on improving the way in which climate change is communicated with different types of audiences. However, empirical evidence for whether serious games focusing on the local understanding of barriers to action offers an opportunity to reduce the psychological distancing from climate change is lacking. This paper presents a case study of Minions of Disruptions, a collaborative board game developed by the Dutch NGO Day of Adaptation, which gamifies climate action by letting the players choose their own adaptation strategy and co-create their organizational story that is based on their local knowledge. The results of this paper show that the game experience succeeds in reducing psychological distance and cultivates agency. This finding provides a pathway toward communication strategies that provide a safe and fun environment in which participants interact to identify organizational and community-based issue areas where more resilience can be built.

Keywords

• Climate change adaptation
• Serious games
• Gamification
• Construal level theory
• Distancing