Serious Games: A Safe Place to Practise Real-World Climate Decisions

How Earth Sciences NZ (NIWA) Approaches Serious Games

Climate change and natural hazards are hard topics to think about. Most people understand the risks in theory, but that doesn’t mean they know what they’d actually do when those risks arrive on their doorstep.

That’s why Earth Sciences NZ uses serious games in its climate-adaptation work. The idea is simple: people learn best when they can safely try things out. As Earth Sciences NZ explains, “we learn many things by playing games both as individuals and groups.”

Players step into a simplified version of reality. They face the same constraints real decision-makers face, like limited budgets, competing priorities, changing conditions, and no perfect answers. They quickly discover that every option has trade-offs, and delays can have consequences, but without the stress or cost of real-world mistakes.

By carefully integrating scientific understanding into realistic storylines, ESNZ serious games capture critical decision-making and credibility portray the different outcomes of these decisions

Learning by doing

One of the key ideas in Earth Sciences NZ approach is “action learning”, which is simply learning by doing. Earth Sciences NZ notes that “participants bring their own knowledge and values into any learning experience,” and that the cycle of testing, choosing, and adjusting helps people build clearer strategies. In gameplay, this plays out as a natural decision loop.

 

Action learning cycle embedded in the serious game

Planning for multiple possible futures

Earth Sciences NZ also uses a method called “Dynamic Adaptive Pathways Planning”. Instead of predicting exact years, it focuses on conditions such as sea-level height or flood frequency. Each adaptation option has a point where it stops being effective. Earth Sciences NZ describes this as an “adaptation threshold”, a moment that “should be avoided” because the impacts become unacceptable.

In a game, players can explore different sequences of actions and see which pathways hold up as conditions change.

A generic pathway (adapted from Haasnoot et al. (2013)

Why this matters

Serious games translate real science into experiences people can understand and remember. In a fast-changing world, that kind of rehearsal makes communities stronger and faster.