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IJC Launches "Choose Your Great Lakes Future" Game
The International Joint Commission’s (IJC) Great Lakes Water Quality Board held a webinar last Thursday on their newly-released online game, “Choose Your Great Lakes Future,” that you can play here. In the game, players build the world they want to see by picking responses to scenarios, each categorized under one of 13 “system drivers” such as infrastructure, water demand, or climate hydrology. These choices, in aggregate, lead to one of four outcomes in which the Great Lakes are either moderately or significantly better off than they are today, or moderately or significantly worse off. After the game, players can see how many other players also reached their same outcome, and how their choices contributed to that outcome.
Jon Allan, Senior Adviser and Academic Program Officer at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) and member of the IJC’s Great Lakes Water Quality Board, recognized that developing the game was a departure from the work the Board usually does. The Board is tasked with advising the IJC on improving Great Lakes water quality, and Allan said that “this project is an innovative way to achieve the Board’s goals.” The game is part of the IJC’s Great Lakes Horizons project, launched with their 2023 report, “On the Great Lakes Horizons,” that Allan described as an attempt to “scan beyond the visible horizon to develop a set of tools to better equip ourselves to look ahead to the future.”
The game’s release is only the beginning of the project. On the call, Board members expressed a desire to further develop the game to allow players to “weight” the Great Lakes system drivers that they think are most important. Additionally, the IJC will analyze data on what percentages of players reach each of the four outcomes, as well as what percent choose each response to each of the scenarios, which they hope will allow them to “understand how the public is thinking and engaging, and how they see that future play out,” Allan said. “Is there hopefulness? Is there lack of hopefulness? And within those drivers, which of those drivers do they see are going to be the hard ones,” he continued. The Board is also conducting focus groups with teachers with the hope of eventually using the game as an educational tool in classrooms.
Play Choosing Your Great Lakes Future here.
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