A serious game for a serious purpose
Climate change adaptation planning needs to understand what drives people's behaviour – but it is difficult to get good data, and there are limited sources of knowledge. NIWA has developed an adaptation simulation game – Future Coasts Aotearoa- created to discover people’s behaviours and preferences on sea-level rise adaptation.
For the optimal game experience, play the game on tablets, laptops and desktop computers (it is not mobile enabled). The game is best for people over sixteen years of age, however younger children can play with guidance.
About the game
Future Coasts Aotearoa is set in a typical coastal community in New Zealand. The small town, local farms and marae are at risk of flooding, storm surges, sea and groundwater rising, and these risks are increasing with climate change – meaning more frequency and severity. You have choices available to you that can be applied in the real world, and you will learn the different pathways you can take to experience living with changing risk.
As in real life while sea level and groundwater rise consistently, floods and storm surge events are unpredictable. You will face different climate events in each game, and you can choose to play as a single player or one of up to 5 players in a multi-player game.
Dara (a New Zealand dotterel and game facilitator) will guide you through the single or multiplayer game and help you to understand how you can work alone or together to protect or adapt your home and community from floods, sea-level rise, storms, and groundwater intrusion.
Dr. Scott Stephens
For some playing the game, they have an ‘aha’ moment when they become aware of the natural hazards and environmental changes, and the urgency to act. They really do ‘feel the squeeze’ - it is not just an intellectual exercise, but a real experience.
NIWA Chief Scientist Coasts and Estuaries
From serious game to multi-agent model
By showing how people would behave over time in a changing climate in response to a range of policies and resource constraints, the game generates data which will support a multi-agent behavioural model. Having people play as characters allows us to understand why people make the decisions they do, and how those decisions play out in rural coastal lowland areas in Aotearoa – New Zealand.
This data will be used to generate the 'agents' - the characters in the multi-agent model who are making these decisions. The model will simulate landowners, councils, farmers, and townspeople taking actions in an attempt to avoid the worst impacts of a changing climate. We will see how these decisions impact economies, ecosystems, and individuals in different ways.
The multi-agent model will allow better understanding of how decisions by councils and individuals impact their towns, farms, and livelihoods. It will be constructed, based on published literature, legislation governing human environment interactions, consultations with case study participants, and data from the Future Coasts Aotearoa game plays.
Science with us
By playing this game, you are helping us understand all the possible ways different people may react to a changing climate - the actions you might take, when you might take them and why you might take them. Having many people play this game will give us a big enough data set to create the agents in the model and will allow us to improve decision-making processes in rural coastal lowlands.
The Future Coasts Aotearoa game was developed by NIWA with design, programming and specialist support from Hum Interactive and GEO AR.
This work was undertaken under the Future Coasts Aotearoa programme Research Aim 3.
