Community resilience is as easy as ABCD… Asset Based Community Development, that is. By Mel Frances
Developed in collaboration with Agile Rabbit for their project Blue Heart, Stronger Together is a short, sweet experience looking at climate impacts at the scale of a single UK street.
Over the course of the game, the residents of High Street (the most common street name in the UK - there are 2086), face a monster attack. The monsters they face are elemental
Crystal - a monster of ice and snow
Inferno - a monster of heat and fire
Gale - a monster of wind
Drench - a monster of water
At the start of the game, with monsters on the horizon and a forecast that is foggy, players have some choices to make - they can take a limited number of actions, some practical preparations - from flood defences to prepping a to go bag - while others are focussed on connecting - to buildings, to resources, to people on the rest of the street.
Once the monster has passed - and the street are left to face the consequences - residents need to pull on their own skills, resources and talents - their assets - to start the road to recovery.
Over the course of the game design process, there was an interesting balancing act in deciding how much ‘winning’ the game relied on practical preparations, how much on connections, and how much on the assets that the residents had. Community resilience when facing any climate event is partly about how well you are able to prepare, which shapes how badly you are impacted, but also partly about how you are able to respond to the impacts you face.
The game matches these two types of response with two quite different styles of game play. As the monster is arriving, you have one clear choice to make - with a couple of constraints: how many cards you can choose and some added time pressure! Here, some cards are more valuable than others. The game gives you a score for how well you do. This game play is strategic and practical - there are better and worse things to do.
In the aftermath, players have to tell a story about how they use their skills and resources to recover - from a street party, to sandwiches delivered to those worst affected, from first aid support to carpentry skills to rebuild damaged furniture. The game play in this moment is much free-er and more open. There is no right answer, and players are encouraged to be creative and find connections, links and opportunities that they might not have identified otherwise. Importantly too, this moment is often silly and fun.
Working on Stronger Together has made me think about the range of skills and approaches we need to combine and balance to face our current moment. There is a need to weigh possibilities and make strategic decisions, but also to embrace joy and play and to celebrate the skills and assets we have, which often can give us surprising and unexpected solutions.
If you want to play Stronger Together, just get in touch with Agile Rabbit here, and they’ll send you a free pack.
Let us know what you think!
Stronger Together was made for Blue Heart with Agile Rabbit, with funding from DEFRA’s £150m Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation Programme. It was originally developed at Coney.
