Climate Companions: Designing a Live Action Role-playing (LARP) Game that Helps in Thinking Through Climate Actions

To feel motivated to address climate change, people need to engage with it cognitively, affectively and behaviourally. They also need to develop new skills for making climate-conscious decisions. Games that focus on climate change themes have been effectively achieving these goals, however, many of them underutilise social interactions, and overlook the player identities of climate-aware citizens. To improve our understanding of how social interaction-focused role-playing games can help players make pro-environmental choices, we designed 'Climate Companions', a live-action role-playing game (LARP) where players, role-playing as UK-based university students, collaboratively plan an eco-friendly holiday. Our qualitative exploratory study with 18 participants found that the realistic holiday planning scenario effectively highlighted climate change issues, encouraging players to explore sustainable living ideas while navigating practical constraints. Role-playing fostered experimentation with diverse perspectives and promoted positive engagement. However, framing the game as a problem-focused, time-limited activity hindered nuanced discussions. We present and discuss our findings as considerations for designing and using climate change games, particularly LARPs, to enhance public engagement and skill development in the context of climate change.