PICO
Games can also inspire innovative and fun approaches to learning. Gamification and game-based approaches add an extra spark of engagement and interaction with a topic. Gaming technology (e.g. virtual reality) can transport and immerse people into new worlds providing fascinating and otherwise impossible experiences for learners.
In this session we welcome contributions from anyone who has used games, gaming technology, and/or game-based approaches in their research, their teaching, or public engagement activities.
Visit www.games4geoscience.wordpress.com to learn more about the session.
PICO: Wed, 6 May, 16:15–18:00 | PICO spot 4
Older adults represent a rapidly growing segment of the European population and are among those most exposed to the impacts of climate change and natural hazards (Prina et al., 2024). However, they are still rarely at the center of science communication and environmental outreach initiatives and are often portrayed primarily as vulnerable subjects. This perspective risks overlooking their valuable lived knowledge, experience with past environmental events, and potential contributions to collective resilience (Okudan, 2025). At the same time, research shows that recreational activities such as board and card games can provide cognitive, emotional, and social benefits for older adults, particularly in community-based contexts (Guardabassi et al., 2024).
Building on these insights, the card game “Playback to the Future” was designed to create an inclusive, engaging, and educational experience focused on environmental hazards and resilience, tailored specifically for older adults. In the game, players represent local communities facing hazards such as floods, landslides, or droughts. To respond, they play “Solution Cards” representing green, grey, or policy-based interventions, each tagged with visual indicators for cost, effectiveness, and long-term resilience. The deck also includes “Satellite Cards”, which act as wildcards inspired by Earth observation data and provide players with an advantage. A defining feature of the game is the co-creation of “Memory Cards”, in which participants share personal experiences or traditional practices related to environmental challenges. These stories are transformed into new cards for an expansion deck, turning individual memory into collective environmental knowledge.
The game design prioritizes accessibility by adopting large fonts, high-contrast graphics, and simplified symbols. Gameplay follows a familiar “highest card wins” dynamic to reduce cognitive load and support participation. Five community centres and lifelong learning programmes in Italy and Spain serve as pilot sites. Materials, including a downloadable version of the cards, facilitator’s guide and an expansion deck of Memory Cards, are freely available online in multiple languages.
The game “Playback to the Future” enhances understanding of natural hazards and mitigation strategies, promotes awareness of Earth observation data, fosters peer interaction, and gives voice to communities often left out of science communication.
How to cite: Mannucci, N., Azzari, M., and Caporali, E.: Playback to the Future: a card game for inclusive engagement with environmental hazards, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-1195, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-1195, 2026.
For this panel, I introduce the role-playing card game Model Fatigue, which invites participants to assume different socio-political perspectives to reimagine stories and visual representations (cosmograms) of climate futures. The game's goal is to build collective cosmograms that reimagine the infrastructure that organises how knowledge about climate is produced and represented. This speculative climate infrastructure is developed under conditions determined by the different types of cards that each player's team draws at the beginning of the game (belief systems, features, entities).If many games about climate from the fields of geosciences or the arts focus on raising awareness or representation of imaginaries, the game Model Fatigue opens a conversational and transdisciplinary space among climate practitioners—people who inquire into Earth’s climate—to critically reimagine climate infrastructure. With the game, I argue that developing tools about the representation and communication of climate change are no longer sufficient to enable climate actions; rather, the modalities through which we produce, interpret, and represent climate knowledge need to be reconfigured and reimagined. Model Fatigue aims to collectively reimagine the entanglement of technical systems with the politics and cosmological imaginaries of climate infrastructure.In this panel, I will introduce the game's modalities and draw cards from Model Fatigue to build climate cosmograms of other possible imaginaries of climate infrastructure.
How to cite: Legrand, G.: Model Fatigue: role-playing climate infrastructural imaginaries, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-21831, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-21831, 2026.
It is essential that all citizens understand where our water comes from and how we use our limited groundwater resources so that we might efficiently and sustainably manage them. This is especially true in the western half of Kansas in the United States, which is reliant on groundwater from the Ogallala aquifer as a primary source of freshwater. To better support educators across the state, we developed an original educational game, Ogallala, as a supplement to Kansan school curricula to encourage enhanced public literacy in groundwater resource management and possible geoscience careers. The game is designed to teach seconday school level students about aquifers, agriculture, and collaborative groundwater management within their community. Players assume the role of farmers who respond to fluctuating economic and precipitation conditions that influence both their income and the availability of water in the aquifer. Players win by running the most lucrative farm without depleting the aquifer. The game has several learning objectives: (a) define the concept of a shared, depletable resource, also known as a common pool resource, (b) recognize how relative water consumption and profit differ between common crop and animal stocks, (c) describe the impact of technology in sustainable water use, and (d) practice inter-player cooperative action in resource management. These learning goals align with ESS2 ("Earth's Systems") and ESS3 ("Earth and Human Activity") of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) that the Kansas Department of Education has adopted.
Playtesting and player feedback has demonstrated that Ogallala is both educational and enjoyable, with participants often taking the initiative to replay the game to improve their previous scores and exhibiting an improved understanding of groundwater’s role in Kansas agriculture. The next steps of this project are to evaluate the effectiveness of the game in secondary schools within the state of Kansas. The study involves participating educators to integrate the Kansas Geological Survey's "Aquifers of Kansas" instructional package (consisting of videos, worksheets, and activities focused on groundwater quantity and management) into their ESS2 and ESS3-focused curricula. The project team will then join the schools for gameplay sessions. Participating students will be quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated on their understanding of groundwater concepts both before and after gameplay. This presentation will highlight the results from ten schools that are participating in this project between November 2025 - February 2026. Evaluating Ogallala will not only expand on current studies exploring how we can better communicate geoscience, but it will also provide insight into the potential of game learning as an educational mechanism––a venture that transcends disciplines and communities.
How to cite: Schneider, B., Siomades, S., and Connolly, A.: Ogallala: A New Educational Geoscience Game Designed to Teach Groundwater Resource Management in Agriculture, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-15345, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-15345, 2026.
Climate change, combined with other pressures, threatens the habitability of human settlements and makes long-term decision-making more uncertain. The Habi(Li)ter research project, funded by the “Initiative d’Excellence Lorraine ”, aims to investigate how climate risks affect the habitability of human settlements in the mid-mountain Vosges Massif in France. Using a transdisciplinary approach, the project integrates values, knowledge, and expertise from both academic and non-academic actors to develop a conceptual framework for analyzing climate risk dynamics and their impacts on the habitability of local communities.
To help the general public understand these dynamics, we developed Habit’Action, a serious game that simulates the management of a mid-mountain community facing climate risks and socio-economic challenges. In the game, players are tasked with maintaining and improving the community’s habitability across multiple dimensions, including economy, connectivity, environmental resilience, basic needs, and social inclusion. While designed for high school students, the game is also well-suited for adult audiences, offering an interactive way to explore how cooperation across sectors and actors can support successful adaptation to climate change and ensure the long-term habitability of communities.
In the game, players assume diverse roles, such as policymakers, farmers, or scientists. Each role comes with unique abilities, budgets, and influence on specific aspects of habitability. For example, farmers can implement sustainable agricultural practices, and scientists can mitigate environmental risks. Across multiple rounds and turns, players confront climate-related crises, including droughts, floods, and pest outbreaks. To respond, they implement adaptation options and make strategic choices that simulate real-world trade-offs. Adaptations allow players to enhance resilience and reduce vulnerability to specific hazards, such as promoting summer tourism to offset snowmelt, or greening city centers with trees and parks to adapt to heatwaves. Strategic choices might include rehabilitating an abandoned industrial site into a park or social housing, or managing a forested area as a nature reserve. Special bonus and malus cards introduce unexpected events, reflecting the uncertainty of real-world decision-making. Players collaboratively vote on key decisions, negotiate trade-offs, and observe how their actions influence the different dimensions of community habitability. Scoring tracks both successes in adaptation and losses from crises, with failure triggered if any dimension drops to zero, encouraging holistic thinking and anticipation of cascading effects.
By providing an interactive and educational experience, Habit’Action allows players to explore trade-offs, practice collaborative decision-making, and develop critical thinking about sustaining human habitability under uncertainty, offering a practical tool for learning about the complexities of climate adaptation in mid-mountain communities.
How to cite: De Angeli, S., Fulcrand, A., and Devin, S.: Habit’Action: a serious game approach to exploring human habitability under Climate Change in mid-mountain communities, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-5286, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-5286, 2026.
High mountain regions are highly susceptible to landslides and cascading hazards that threaten infrastructure and human life. As populations in mountainous areas are growing and climate change increases these risks worldwide, effective risk communication becomes more important. However, conveying the complexity of landslide processes and risk management strategies to the public remains a major challenge. Here we present a board game as an innovative approach for risk communication, focusing on young adults as the main target group.
In “Moving Mountains” the players manage their own village. As the village economy grows, new inhabitants arrive, allowing players to expand their settlement and earn points. However, the mountains bear a continuous hazard of landslides that threaten to destroy progress. Each decision the player takes, can directly influence slope stability and population exposure, resulting in an increased or diminished risk for their village. Players must carefully decide whether it is better trying to prevent the hazard from happening or prepare people and infrastructure to avoid tragic consequences.
The game includes four distinct valleys. Each exposes the player to different risk contexts with unique game mechanics based on real or realistic hazard scenarios. These scenarios enable players to explore the consequences of their decisions in a controlled environment, while making scientific concepts tangible. To support deeper understanding, a scientific handbook that explains the rationale behind key mechanics and provides background information on the real events that inspired the individual gameplay of the valleys, will be developed in a future step. By combining experiential learning with scientifically informed design, “Moving Mountains” aims to enhance public awareness, foster engagement with preventive measures, and improve understanding of landslide-related risks in high mountain regions.
How to cite: Kmetyko, S. and Mergili, M.: Moving Mountains: A Board Game to Communicate the Risks of Landslides in High Mountain Terrain, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-1081, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-1081, 2026.
Dangers & Dwellers (Da&Dw) is a strategic board game focused on the sustainable management of geological hazards (earthquakes, landslides, and floods). It is designed to allow players to simulate and experience the complex, multifaceted, and interconnected causal pathways that lead to natural disasters. This level of complexity underlining risk management is often challenging to explain, teach, and comprehend through traditional pedagogical approaches. However, data from pilot sessions has indicated that the game-based learning experience achieves these educational objectives with high efficacy.
The game serves as the foundation for a project selected under the European Union’s Erasmus+ 2025 program (Call KA220-SCH - Cooperation partnerships in school education) titled “Da&Dw Earthvism - Dangers and Dwellers: an Earth sciences game for teachers and students to promote civic engagement and climate action” (Code KA220-SCH-0E3E8994). The project aims to:
- Digitize Da&Dw to enhance accessibility, offering a free-to-play remote version and expanding dissemination worldwide.
- Translate the game into several languages, supplementing the existing Italian and English versions.
- Deploy the tool primarily within high schools across different Countries to foster awareness of natural hazards and climate change, while promoting interest in STEM disciplines.
- Provide educators with a game-based learning instrument to integrate into future curricula.
- Stimulate civic engagement and trust in democratic processes by equipping users with cognitive tools to identify and resist anti-scientific disinformation and misinformation.
- Conduct research on the long-term educational impact of the game.
Through Da&Dw, participants discover that there is no ultimate solution to natural risk mitigation. Conversely, building resilience requires the implementation of complex, well-designed sets of multisectoral actions. These require a synergy of scientific knowledge, a balance of socio-economic interests, and active civic participation. While achieving this equilibrium is challenging, it is attainable within a mature democratic society. In recent years, game-based learning has established itself as an effective methodology for achieving these outcomes.
As part of the project scope, a series of actions are planned to gather feedback essential for the iterative improvement of the game and to maximize its dissemination among high schools, associations, and relevant stakeholders.
The project also aims at reaching new stakeholders (including but not limited to schools, research groups, educators, civil protection actors, groups active in environmental topics) to further improve the dissemination of risk awareness and resilience strategies through innovative game-based learning.
How to cite: Intrieri, E., Cardi, F., Nardini, O., Gatto, A., and Segoni, S.: Earthvism - Dangers and Dwellers: a project to promote civic engagement through a board game on geological hazards, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-12314, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-12314, 2026.
Developed in the framework of the LIFE ARTISAN project led by the French Biodiversity Agency, the serious game called “Récré'Action” is now available to play. Created as a complement to the Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) module developed by ENPC (freely available here: https://zenodo.org/records/12188484), this board game engages Master’s students—while remaining adaptable to other audiences—in a collective redesign of an elementary school playground to make it more inclusive, sustainable, and climate-resilient.
Participants assume the roles of various stakeholders (child, parent, teacher, technical services, architect, municipality…) working together to choose new designs and surface materials for the playground. Their objective is to meet shared resilience goals—such as improving rainwater infiltration, reducing the urban heat island (UHI) effect, and enhancing biodiversity—while staying within a limited budget and responding to unexpected events.
Through gameplay, the exercise illustrates the complexity of decision-making processes, stakeholder interactions, and the trade-offs required between environmental, social, technical, and regulatory considerations in greening projects. The current version exists only in French for now, but it is intended to be translated into English.
How to cite: Versini, P.-A., Delpont, A., and Guerrin, J.: From Play to Planning: Récré'Action, a Serious Game for Climate-Resilient Schoolyards, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-13032, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-13032, 2026.
Simulation/games come in all imaginable shapes and sizes. One shape and size that you may not have encountered is SIMPLEX, developed by Drew Mackie. The term means from the simple to the complex.
Simulations using this format start with only essential components: people and a theme. In our example, the people are you; the theme is SIDS – Small Island Developing States.
SIDS are facing immense challenges caused by global heating, particularly rising sea levels (SLR). Vulnerable stakeholders facing these challenges, as well as scientists, policymakers and other interested parties, can benefit from the use of co-created, participatory policy simulation using the SIMPLEX format.
Our presentation is actually an invitation to fellow geogamers to join us during the geogames evening to help co-build a simulation/game together. It is more a simulation than a game, unless you decide otherwise! In our presentation, we will do the following:
- Outline the content objective (develop a policy for SLR on SIDS);
- Outline the procedure that we will follow at the start of the simulation;
- Say a few words about some of the simulation elements (e.g., time);
- Emphasise the importance of the debriefing;
- Answer any questions.
On previous occasions, colleagues and DC have used the SIMPLEX format to examine or develop policy in regard, for example, to the three-day working week in the UK, the outcome of Dutch elections, an ideal education system and climate-ocean change policy. When used in anticipation of events, the simulation can have powerful and uncannily predictive power. The simulation format is adaptable to a variety of geo-situations.
How to cite: Crookall, D. and Promduangsri, P.: A policy simulation on sea level rise in the SIDSs: Come help build it!, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-390, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-390, 2026.
Geothermal energy might play a key component in the energy transition. Compared to other renewable energies such as wind and solar power, it is readily available, independent of weather conditions. In Germany, geothermal power is underdeveloped, partly as a result of unclear policies which hinder exploration. General knowledge in the public is minimal and often biased by media reports on failed projects, especially in conjunction with induced seismicity. To overcome this knowledge gap and work towards a higher acceptance of geothermal energy, we want to target the young generation. In current study plans in schools, geothermal energy is underrepresented and changes in those plans are generally slow.
Gamification offers a great tool as an alternative to classic frontal teaching and offers the possibility of self-motivated learning. Escape rooms have experienced a rise in popularity in the last decade, and naturally foster team work to overcome challenges. Some escape rooms in science centers or museums already web scientific content into a game, where application of, for example physical principles are used to find solutions.
At the University of Mainz, the “Future Institute” was developed, a fictious institute focused on mitigating the climate crisis. But the scientists were kidnapped and most of the data is hidden. Students can visit the institute, where each room is an office of a scientist. Clues can be found in the room to reconstruct data, convey experiments and finally “escape”.
Our room focusses on geothermal energy and the inherited risk of seismic events related to production. Physical principles like heat flow, porosity and permeability and geological faults are worked into the story line and puzzles.
How to cite: Götsch, M., Hawemann, F., Schäfer, F., Graffe, T., and Toy, V.: Escape the Quake – an educational escape room on geothermal energy and associated risk of induced seismicity, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-9192, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-9192, 2026.
Effectively implementing climate solutions requires wide societal support and openness towards systemic change. Spreading knowledge about both the need to act and valid solutions is a fundamental basis for this. Video games have been identified as a versatile medium with great potential regarding this task. They can convey factual knowledge about risks and solutions, serve as accessible experimentation and simulation tools, motivate by fostering feelings of agency and self-efficacy, and create connections to people and narratives outside the players' own experience. Even more, they can reach people who rarely engage with other forms of media and science communication.
However, despite these various strengths and potentials, few video games feature the climate crisis, and most games with strong climate themes fall into a narrow genre spectrum, primarily strategy, management, and simulation. To explore the reach and impact of climate-themed games beyond these genres, we are developing Hotspot Earth, an action-heavy 2D top-down horde-survival game fused with light management and climate simulation elements.
In Hotspot Earth, players lead a growing climate movement and are tasked to survive until the end of the century while increasingly powerful hordes of monsters, symbolizing climate hazards, try to overwhelm them. Additionally, in each round, they visit a different country and support local relief efforts when points of cultural interest are under threat. To make this task easier, players can expand their climate movement by collecting activists who fight alongside them and empower each other if smartly matched.
Between rounds of this action gameplay, players can spend limited collected resources to activate various options related to global political, industrial, and societal changes. The benefits and trade-offs of these options are purposely kept simple, limited to impacts on 1) global heating and thus the monsters' strength, 2) resilience, increasing the defenses of the points of interest, and 3) electricity supply and demand as expression of societal needs.
Hotspot Earth combines these core mechanics to transport several fundamental messages about the climate crisis and its solution space, such as global and local impacts of the climate crisis and thus the need to act everywhere; ways to act as individuals, groups and society, including relative effectivity and synergies of measures; and the importance of community.
How to cite: Steinhauser, J., Vollgruber, D., Fritz, S., McCallum, I., Mayer, M., and Rieder, H.: Hotspot Earth: a climate action game , EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-11239, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-11239, 2026.
Climat Tic-Tac Ocean is a digital serious game developed from a board game originally designed by climate scientists and science communicators for middle and high-school students (https://climatictac.ipsl.fr), its commercial adaptation for the broad public (https://www.bioviva.com/fr/bioviva-famille/169-climat-tic-tac.html), and its digital version, available in French and English, better suited for the higher education sector (https://ikigai.games/games/gameDetails/climattictac) (Dulac et al., 2024).
The game’s ambition is simple but urgent: to help people better understand the impacts of human-induced climate, and explore how we could cooperate and act both to mitigate CO2 emissions and adapt a selection of world cities at risk to preserve a good inhabitability of the planet. The Climat Tic-Tac Ocean version focuses on coastal cities and small islands, which concentrate multiple, interacting climate risks while also being territories where adaptation and mitigation strategies are deeply intertwined. Processes, selected locations, hazards, mitigation and adaptation actions are all based on current knowledge (Dulac et al., 2023).
Up to five connected players cooperate over six rounds, each representing 15 years: nearly a century of collective decisions. Together, they must reduce CO2 emissions while protecting vulnerable coastal territories through adaptation and mitigation strategies by playing Action cards from a limited set they receive individually. Throughout the game, players face random Hazard cards which cause either climate-related damage to one or more locations, or increase CO2 emissions. The damages fall into categories: infrastructure, food systems, and human health. These risks reflect the most pressing and already observed impacts of climate change on the selected cities and islands.
Winning the game requires achieving a double objective: keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations below a critical threshold to limit global warming, while also preventing too many coastal cities and islands from becoming uninhabitable due to the local accumulation of damages. Two difficulty levels are proposed, which adjust these two thresholds.
To strengthen their actions, players are invited to take on time-limited challenges: quizzes, fill-in-the-blank exercises, and ranking tasks, focusing on climate- or maritime-related topics. These moments of play serve a deeper purpose: improving climate literacy, encouraging collective problem-solving, and helping players transform eco-anxiety into informed action. Players quickly realize that there is no perfect solution: every decision involves trade-offs, like in real life. By playing, participants experience the complexity of climate decisions instead of just hearing about them. The game is also adapted to a collective animation by a teacher or mediator, either on-line or through a screen projection.
Contact: francois.dulac@cea.fr
Acknowledgements: This Ocean version is part of the FORTEIM project aiming at building an e-training educative platform called “B-Sea”, dedicated to supporting the eco-energy transition of maritime professions. FORTEIM is supported through the ANR funding agency as part of the “France-2030” governmental investment plan. Authors acknowledge feedbacks from members of LSCE and FORTEIM’s partners, and the technical contribution from developers of Game for Citizens-Ikigai. The Climat Tic-Tac Team has been awarded the Scientific Mediation Medal by CNRS.
References:
Dulac F. et al., p.599-601, https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04209935, 2023.
Dulac F. et al., https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU24/EGU24-12424.html, 2024.
How to cite: Le Mézo, P., Dulac, F., and Planques, T.: Climat Tic Tac (Climate Tick-Tock) Ocean: playing together to save our oceans and coasts, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-16995, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-16995, 2026.
Soil processes get very little attention in early education environments, in spite of the fact that soil is very important in food, water control, biodiversity, and climate change. Soil Guardians aims to fill that gap and assist in understanding soil processes in such a way that it can develop and launch a digital game that teaches soil processes in an easy-to-grasp manner for children.
The game is structured around short scenarios that illustrate what may be considered typical circumstances in which soil may be expected to improve or deteriorate. Interaction between players and the game is achieved through specific actions represented by icons, and the players can immediately see what happens in the scenario. In this case, development is expected to be device independent and suited for environments in multilingual or low-resource educational environments.
Currently, the project is refining its conceptual and visual language and its first level of interactive features. Priorities of development include the translation of soil functionality into engaging gameplay that is suitable for the classroom and other environments. Later on, as the game develops, it will be shaped by feedback from teaching and research professionals in terms of which scenarios and practices are reflected in real-world soil situations and teaching directions.
Acknowledgement
The project is funded through the EGU Special Activity Fund 2026.
How to cite: Miranda Moral, I., Guzmán, G., Cárceles, B., Pareja-Serrano, E., and Benavente-Ferraces, I.: Soil Guardians: A visual and accessible digital game for learning soil functions, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-1271, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-1271, 2026.
The communication of landslide processes calls for innovative strategies that bridge scientific simulation and public understanding. Game engines are powerful tools for creating science communication experiences that appeal to audiences accustomed to the high-quality visuals of movies and computer games. Yet, geoscientists have limited access to such tools due to their technical complexity and the lack of specialised training. To address this challenge, we present domain-specific workflows and templates in Unreal Engine 5 (UE5). They are specifically dedicated to the creation of virtual reality and desktop applications supporting science communication and simulation.
MassMoVR is a modular, reusable Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) project template created to transform simulation outputs from the open-source tool r.avaflow, along with geospatial data, into interactive virtual reality (VR) and desktop experiences. It includes demonstration levels showcasing components and their use for simulation import, player setup, user interface setup, and environment and level design, including interactive objects, visual effects, and sounds. UnRealRocks is an experimental approach to the simulation of generic and real-world rockfall scenarios, utilising Unreal Engine 5’s native physics system and mesh-destruction capabilities. The experiments explore different modes of fragmentation and parameter configurations for the underlying physics and rock-mass geometries. In both cases, data preprocessing is a crucial step for aligning input datasets with game engine requirements and therefore a core component of the documentation and workflow guidelines.
Our work demonstrates that game engines can serve not only as tools for science communication but also as sources of inspiration and innovation in research. This perspective opens the way for communication and simulation to evolve as mutually reinforcing dimensions of landslide studies.
How to cite: Pfeffer, H., Schuller, J., Wolfschwenger, D., and Mergili, M.: (Un)Real Landslides: Game Engine Technologies for Process Simulation and Communication, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-1664, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-1664, 2026.
Climate change is a complex problem that spans multiple disciplines, including natural science, socioeconomics, ethics, and politics. This complexity makes it challenging to make well-informed decisions about climate change. We therefore introduce The Climate Casino, an educational game that offers a fun and engaging way to learn about climate change and mitigation.
At the start of the game, participants are divided into groups representing different geographic regions. They are given two goals: a primary, shared goal to keep global warming below 1.5°C and a secondary, competitive goal to maximise their own region’s economic development. These competing goals create a tricky balance between cooperation and self-interest, introducing challenges such as the free-riding problem.
The groups’ assigned regions differ in economic and climatic conditions, and are responsible for various amounts of greenhouse gas emissions—reflecting real-world inequalities. Each group makes decisions for its region by setting a carbon tax. Higher carbon taxes increase production costs, leading to reduced economic output and, consequently, lower emissions. Thus, the carbon tax influences the economy through two competing mechanisms: reduced productivity, which negatively impacts economic output, and reduced climate change, which can have positive or negative economic effects depending on the region.
The consequences of the participants’ decisions are calculated using the coupled climate–economy model NorESM2-DIAM, which provides both climatic and economic outcomes. While necessarily simplified, this approach introduces participants to key concepts in climate modelling and highlights the role of uncertainty and regional differences in climate–economy interactions.
Through surveys before and after playing the game, we see that participants change how they think about climate change and mitigation. This demonstrates the potential of The Climate Casino as an engaging educational tool that can promote greater climate literacy.
How to cite: Bjordal, J., Storelvmo, T., Smith, Jr., A. A., and Pedersen, P. A.: The Climate Casino: Teaching Climate Change and Mitigation Through Play, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-4474, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-4474, 2026.
Minecraft is currently the most played video game of all time, being especially popular amongst children. In Minecraft, players enter worlds composed of cubic blocks and engage in activities such as exploring, mining, and building. The cubic geometry of Minecraft worlds is similar to that of models used in geoscience. Using the connection between Minecraft worlds and geoscience models, we use Minecraft to create educational materials focused on geoscience directed towards younger students. The goal of creating these materials is to generate interest in geoscience by using Minecraft as a tool, and creating a connection between a game that students already know and understand to the world of geoscience. Geologic and geographic data are used to build geologic maps of Newfoundland, Canada, and additional smaller regions in Minecraft. These maps are filled in with information regarding the geology of key sites on the maps. These Minecraft worlds can be used as simple introductions to different geologic concepts which students can freely explore. Code has also been written to generate gravitational maps from Minecraft worlds. This code is being used to design lab exercises for grade school students to teach them about density, gravity, and geophysics. These labs involve using the gravity maps to locate gravitational anomalies, and use these anomalies to find and mine ore in Minecraft. This work can easily be expanded to create Minecraft worlds of new areas, and to teach many more geologic concepts.
How to cite: Johnson, A., Malcolm, A., and Farquharson, C.: Building Geologic Maps and Models in Minecraft for Use in Early Education, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-5283, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-5283, 2026.
