Forecasting game for brainstorming Antarctic futures

Abstract

There is relatively little published work in Antarctic future studies. While future studies is a well-established field, its expansion to include polar research has been more limited, and with most of that focused on the Arctic rather than Antarctica. However, Antarctic future studies is a growing field, and there are increasing attempts to take established tools and methods from general future studies and apply them to Antarctic outlooks.

One of the approaches that has been successful in general future studies revolves around gameplay exercises. Gaming has had a rich history in foresight and future studies and has been used for idea generation, idea evaluation and scenario simulation among other purposes. That said, tools and methods around gaming have not yet been brought to bear on Antarctic future studies.

This project brings gameplay tools and methods to the subject. It applies game design ideas to modify game frameworks previously applied to both regional and generic foresight projects and put them into more gamified structure. Then it adapts a proposed Antarctic foresight framework into the game’s content structure and posits how this could potentially build futures literacy in the Antarctic research and policy community.