Interview with Miqdad Asaria: “Board games can help us think differently about climate change”

Board games offer an accessible method for engaging with the complex concepts of climate change by shifting the focus from abstract mathematical models to tangible social and systemic considerations. The article suggests that addressing climate change requires not just individual actions, but a fundamental reorganization of societal structures and values. Games, particularly those whose rules can be altered, provide a space to explore alternative ways of organizing decisions, moving beyond an inevitability mindset that often leads to despair. The interviewee posits that the crisis is fundamentally social—a reflection of how societies organize economies and value production—rather than purely technological. Furthermore, the experience of climate change is experienced differently based on social position, highlighting deep inequalities within the same environmental reality. The text contrasts individual actions with the necessity of fixing societal systems, questioning whether technological fixes like geoengineering can resolve a problem rooted in social organization.

The narrative establishes a powerful tension between individual, incremental action and systemic, structural change in addressing climate change. The introduction of games serves as an epistemic tool to challenge established, often despairing, narratives about inevitability by demonstrating that social structures—specifically economic organization—are mutable. This aligns with a pattern where complex, large-scale crises are often framed as purely scientific or technological problems, thereby obscuring the underlying political and social dimensions. The critique of solutions like geoengineering reveals an embedded skepticism regarding centralized, high-risk technological fixes managed by powerful entities, suggesting a latent mistrust in techno-solutionism when structural reorganization is avoided. The distinction drawn between individual virtue (recycling) and societal restructuring implies that moral agency requires changing the rules of the game itself. This challenges the assumption that solving environmental problems only requires optimizing current systems; instead, it demands confronting the historical social decisions that created those systems.