Simbioasi
Finalist as Best Applied Game 2022 at the Italian Video Game Awards, Simbioasi is a puzzle/arcade game on the limits to the growth and management of renewable resources.
The game developed as an educational activity within the UniCoop Firenze citizenship program targeting K12 students.The game stages an archetype of system thinking about the management of resources in bounded rationality and guides players to discover the dynamics and traps of a complex system based on renewable resources.
The Challenge
The project briefing involved the development of a game that would create awareness of issues related to environmental sustainability.
With the client, we wanted to address the issue of sustainable growth and the protection of biodiversity with a non-didascalic approach, based on knowledge building more than education.
We didn’t want to just tell players that protecting the environment is important; we wanted to provide them with effective tools for deconstructing and understanding ecological issues.
Our Solution
We decided that the goal of the game would be to provide players with a vivid understanding of the unpredictability of complex systems that lead in many cases to ecological disasters due to the unintentional action of actors who do not correctly frame the system on which they operate.
We also set out to trick players to apply the diffuse bias we should always grow at the highest rate possible.
The result is the players, proceeding by trial and error in an attempt to beat the game, achieve an intuitive understanding of the rules and limits of systems with renewable resources and the clear evidence that, to use Latouche’s words “infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet”.
Impact
Simbioasi was brought by Unicoop to around 60 secondary school classes and was played by around 2000 students.
The game’s appreciation was very high, also in terms of a pure entertainment product.
For more information: cittadinanzaconsapevole.it
Gameplay
In Simbioasi, the player controls a small flying insect intent on building its own shelter: a sort of hive where it can lay eggs and grow its colony. The game world is an imaginary micro-ecosystem populated by strange flowers and funny insects that feed on pollen, a renewable resource that the player can collect and use to build the hive cells.
While the first levels may seem all too easy, the player will soon discover the long-term consequences of their actions and will be forced to backtrack to minimize waste and regulate the flow of resource exploitation. Environmental themes are communicated through direct confrontation with the issues of a simplified ecosystem that is nonetheless consistent with reality.
Pollen is a renewable resource, limited in flow, and endangered by waste and dynamics of limited rationality. The other insects, disadvantaged in the competition for the same resources, represent the biodiversity that the player learns to protect.
The player must acquire a complete understanding of the system model to anticipate the consequences related to vicious cycles and ecological collapse.
About Simbioasi
Tommaso Perrulli
School and social projects manager – Unicoop Firenze
The work of Whitesock on the Prosperia, Chef Adventure and Simbioasi projects has been very important because it has allowed us to successfully use the language of gaming in schools. Whitesock has been able to interpret the briefing and transform our content into original and engaging games that successfully explain value-based content, encouraging children to make conscious choices from a young age. Whitesock has proven to be a reliable and competent partner in creating effective, inclusive educational projects with a significant media impact.
