Sustainability Game

Basel Meeting Highlights Digital Game for Ethics Education

• Monday 12 May: 16:30-19:30
• Wednesday 14 May: 16:30-18:00

Meeting room: Boston 1

The cross-cultural and multidisciplinary challenge of sustainability requires a different approach to understanding and teaching ethics than currently dominate classroom and corporate training.  While the ethics of the industrial revolution focused on self-examination at the scale of the individual, sustainability emphasizes interdependence, empathy, and collective responsibility at the larger scale of society.  The unique, game-based approach adopted in this workshop will allow participants to experience several of the salient ethical questions germane to sustainability, including: moral luck vs moral hazard, inter- and intra-generational equity, and weak vs strong sustainability perspectives.

These questions are examined through the lens of the classic environmental dilemma called the Tragedy of the Commons, where individuals acting independently and rationally deplete a common resource, despite their understanding that it is not in the group’s long term best interest to do so.  This problem describes the overexploitation of ‘common pool resources’ such as fisheries, national parks, and global warming. Attendees at SETAC Basel will have the opportunity to personally experience a virtual Tragedy of the Commons by taking part in The Sustainability Games Workshop and playing the Pisces Game.

The Pisces Game at SETAC Basel will organize participants into ‘fishing villages’ that share a common lake for survival. Players fish from the shared lake and make decisions related to fish conservation, consumption, capital investment, trading, or other transfers.  The Pisces Game encourages communication between players, both in person and via Twitter. By tweeting short messages, players will obtain critically important information, bargain and trade, enter commands, and otherwise coordinate actions to avoid collapse of the supporting ‘ecosystem’. The group that performs the best at the end of the game will win a prize!

The game begins Monday, May 12th (4:30 – 7:30 PM in Boston 1) when the game Instructors, Drs. Thomas P Seager and Susan Spierre Clark, will introduce participants to Twitter, the game interface, and the basic game problem. Players will participate on a continuous basis for the next two days of the conference. On Wednesday, May 14th (4:30 – 6:00 PM in Boston 1) players will reconvene for a reflective discussion, prize distribution, and closing remarks. If experience is any guide, the discussion after the game promises to be fascinating, educational, challenging and probably just as much fun as the game itself. 

To indicate your interest in participating in The Pisces Game, please join The Sustainability Games Working Group and click on ‘Join Group’ at the top of the page (you must be logged in to the SETAC site to join).

If you have any questions, please get in touch with Susan Clark.

Hope to see you in Basel!