behind the scenes

Flip the Future – Your World Your Choices

Flip the Future is a strategy, card game that focuses on building a world with one’s own choices. Creators Manisha Kumari, Connor McMullen, and Ivanna Laka used the game to ask the critical question: Can you flip the future and keep the global temperature down while building a better tomorrow?

The game uses the concept of flipping in a very literal sense to ignite a climate justice and climate change conversation. “The game intends to expose different climate justice experiences to a broader audience,” Manisha says, “and to give that space to share their own experiences and stories on climate change and climate justice”.

The game also doesn’t need much for someone to start playing it. You can simply print out the rule book and some key game sheets on paper and use a standard card deck for playing the game. In the card deck, each suit represents something different – as well as the number and face cards. For example, the Jack is the Justice Transformation tiles and the Queen is the Urban Transformation tiles. The ingenious use of a standard card deck makes the game accessible to everyone.

For Connor, this project was a much-needed step in his journey in climate change, “It is the first climate justice project I’ve worked on in a long time, mostly because I was turned off by the situation of climate change and climate justice globally. The Mzansi Climate Justice Game Jam got me excited about stepping back into climate justice and climate action”.

The Flip the Future team doing some paper prototyping

In the game, players take on the role of powerful decision-makers in their community. At each turn, the players are faced with a seemingly simple choice to explore, develop, or transform their little corner of the world. The players find themselves trying to balance the increasing global temperature and the polarising debate on their shared future, against the personal and community problems. To explore their options and choices, players must buy a permit, at the cost of a single resource, from the community. This lets the player flip over a face-down card in the play area. Developing and transforming are more powerful and expensive; they also need the player to call a vote with other players and reach a consensus before continuing.

The game draws a lot on the global events and lived experiences of its creators. Manisha recalled in the first week that the team started working together, how vastly different their climate realities were! “I shared how growing up, I would find seasonal fruits and vegetables in my region. But now with globalisation and industrialisation, it has changed so much and you don’t remember the taste and the smell of the food which we eat, and it shows in a way how climate change has affected farming or food production”.

The collaboration of different people is one of the strong points of the Mzansi Climate Justice Game Jam. This was not only present in the diversity of participants but also in the game development, were participants had to forcibly take their original concepts and flip them in the game development process. “Subversive agents are something we talked a lot about in our design process,” says Connor, “And especially when we got to the critical play and started play testing with a lot of people. We found that by having these conversations about subversive agents and talking about the reasons why people make choices in games that might be different than choices they make in real life, this allowed us to add a lot of depth to the characters. It was no longer a situation where the socialists and the green people are the good guys and the capitalists and the government are the bad guys. Actually, the subversive agent allowed us to build a lot more nuance and a lot more humanity into the game by making it less black and white”.

The game uses standard playing cards as accessible game tokens

Flip the Future has core themes, namely climate colonialism, equitable rebuilding, and ecological agency, intended to get players thinking radically differently about climate change, mitigation, and adaptation. The game is also about pressing upon players that we can all learn from each other, and it’s not too late to fix the climate justice and climate change problem.

You can download, print, and play Flip the Future here for free.