'Nature' games in a time of climate crisis

Germaine, Chloe ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5187-8815 (2023) 'Nature' games in a time of climate crisis. In: Material Game Studies: A Philosophy of Analogue Play. Bloomsbury, pp. 143-162. ISBN 9781350202719 (hardback); 9781350202757 (online)

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Abstract

Climate educator Bill McKibben (2015) argues that the science on climate change has been clear for over twenty years: environmentalists have already won the argument. Moreover, as poll after poll demonstrates, citizens across the globe would like their governments to take action on the climate (UNDP 2021). Climate action has not stalled, then, because of a lack of awareness and because people are not educated in the facts. Rather, there has been a widespread political and imaginative failure to confront the crisis. Philosophers suggest that this failure is in part due to the way in which we conceptualize ‘nature’ (Haraway 2016; Latour 2017; Morton 2016; Vetlesen 2019). The social, scientific and moral paradigms that dominate current environmental and economic thinking make it difficult to build solidarity between humans and the more-than-human world. In this context, this chapter considers the role of board games in a time of climate crisis and identifies the conceptual problem of ‘nature’ as a call for imaginative as well as practical and political responses.