This is the fourth in our series of blog posts showcasing work presented at ESD Exchange. Lynda’s talk takes place on day one of the ESD Exchange conference on April 16th 2026
Article 12 of the Paris Agreement, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, commits to empowering all members of society to engage in climate action, including through education. How do we do this in a joyful way when facing climate and ecological crises? One potential way is through games – and as reflected in the ESD Exchange programme – there is growing interest in game and play as an approach to education.
People play games for a variety of reasons including to be together, to share experiences and get to know each other (Cès, Duflos, and Giraudeau 2025) and games with environmental themes have a range of purposes including learning, simulating problem solving, envisioning consequences over time, urban planning and policy making, exploring complexity, critiquing systems, providing space to build community and experience pleasure (e.g. Gerber et al., 2021; Wu and Lee 2015). In an effort to bring together games designers, researchers and educators, a team at the University of York created an interdisciplinary ‘Play for the Planet’ network for sharing ideas, practice and building community through environmental game play and research. The network has enabled us to experience joy and togetherness whilst grappling with what action on climate and ecological crises might look like, as the three examples below highlight:
Daybreak
The network has hosted games nights where we meet to play Daybreak, a co-operative game about stopping climate change, designed by Matteo Menapace and Matt Leacock. Even when we lose, we have fun, and have the opportunity to reflect on climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, and how we can protect communities.
Socialudo
The Play for the Planet network hosts visitors, for example, the social enterprise Socialudo which designs serious games such as Hope Town to support planning across housing, health and social care. Learning how games can be used to create more resilient systems – and how to sustain games design has helped connect similar activities in different places.
Birds in the City
Playtesting new and emerging games such as Birds in the City and Catastrophic gives the network insight into game design decisions and enables game designers to obtain early feedback on prototypes, and brings people together to explore different aspects of biodiversity and ecology.
The network has grown over the three years it has been in existence and has generated new games and new research as well as providing a forum for sharing practice. For example, some members of the network collaborated to produce Urban Labor-a-tree, a prototype board game which encourages dialogue around urban treescapes and the diverse social, cultural and ecological values of trees, and others have investigated the explicit and implicit narratives (re)produced in climate change board games (Dunlop et al., 2025), with a view to developing playful debrief practices. With the annual conference on Earth Day approaching, this year we will be supporting the production of a collaborative zine to expand explorations of questions of interest to the community, for example: ‘what makes a ‘good’ game?’, how are game worlds and real worlds linked?’ and ‘what does it mean to ‘win’ in climate change games?’ Through dialogue and investigation with and through playful materials – card and board games, digital games, interactive narratives, simulations, and more – we have found pleasure and community in climate change education.
This is based on my presentation of the same name to be given at ESD Exchange on 16th April 2026. Find out more about the network at https://www.york.ac.uk/yesi/networks/play-for-the-planet-network/ – all welcome!
Lynda Dunlop
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynda-dunlop-516a22240
References
Cès, P., M. Duflos, and C. Giraudeau. (2025). ‘I Can’t Wait to Play with You Again!’: Intergenerational Board Games within Families. Family Relations 74 (1): 378–394. https://doi.org/10.1111/Fare.13117.
Dunlop, L., Joucoski, E., & Sandbhor, P. (2025). Learning through play? What board games reveal and conceal about climate change. Environmental Education Research, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2025.2581112
Gerber, A., M. Ulrich, F. X. Wäger, M. Roca-Puigròs, J. S. Gonçalves, and P. Wäger. (2021). Games on Climate Change: Identifying Development Potentials through Advanced Classification and Game Characteristics Mapping. Sustainability 13 (4): 1997. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13041997.
Wu, J. S., & Lee, J. J. (2015). Climate change games as tools for education and engagement. Nature Climate Change, 5(5), 413-418. https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2566
