Why Climate Games Need to Challenge Capitalism, not Just Simulate It
This two-part blog post is Shue-kei Joanna Mok’s reflection on their attendance at a two-day climate conference hosted by the largest youth climate justice advocacy group in Hong Kong in summer 2025. This group put tremendous effort into raising the young generation’s awareness of the climate crisis locally and globally, training and sponsoring youth leaders for advocacy work and entrepreneurship. Both entries focus on the first day of the conference. The blogpost is part of NORRAG’s “Provocations for Education from Youth Climate Activism” blog series.
On just another sunny and humid day with the temperature at around 30℃ (86℉) in early June in Hong Kong, around 250 climate pioneers, youth leaders, and advocates gathered passionately to discuss pressing issues around climate justice and critical hope at a climate conference hosted by the largest local youth climate justice advocacy group.
Since the conference was held on the top of a small hill with limited direct public transportation access, the short yet uncomfortable climb to the venue exhausted a lot of participants. With rampant urbanization, land reclamation, and dense building structures, Hong Kong — a subtropical high-density city — experiences significant urban heat island effect. In turn, outdoor workers including trash divers and street sweepers, construction and delivery workers are highly vulnerable. The short climb reminded most conference participants that many members of society have been working under extreme weather conditions without sufficient attention and support.
With this awareness in mind, the first day began with a few speeches, a panel discussion, and a youth project showcase, followed by two separate youth-led workshop sessions – one of which featured a climate change board game. Below, I describe how, despite its aims to spur dialogue about climate action, the board game reproduced current global economic development models that rely on uneven relationships between countries. While games have transformative potential, without actively challenging problematic norms, i.e. colonialism and capitalism in this case, game designers, players, and facilitators can only simulate our current situation.
Board Game Reflections: Every Win Masks a Loss
Climate Emergency is a board game designed by a Taiwanese environmental education game company. In a nutshell, players act as country leaders and develop industrial or green cities to earn income from taxation. Each type of city has its respective greenhouse gas emissions, expenses, and profit levels. When natural disasters occur, destroying cities or causing financial losses, players can address those challenges by adopting adaptation measures and mitigation policies. The game ends when the greenhouse gas concentration in the fictional world reaches the point of no return (beyond 435 parts per million [ppm]) or after three rounds. If the world survives after three rounds, the country with the most cash on hand wins; if not, everyone loses regardless of their wealth. The room was divided into three tables/groups and each had three playing countries.
At my table, all countries pursued relentless development enthusiastically. As a result, greenhouse gas concentrations reached 435 ppm by the second round, even before any mitigation cards were used. Despite the purchase and use of numerous mitigation cards by all countries, which brought the ppm down to the moderate range before the start of the third round, all players knew our fictional world was doomed.
Two interesting observations warrant attention. First, when our game master announced the beginning of the second round, we immediately pointed out that city revenue generated in the first round had not been calculated and distributed. However, when the game master included the ppm generated by cities built in the first round into the second round’s total ppm, we all suddenly realized that ppm accumulates. We took for granted the sustained, accumulating economic benefits of large-scale construction projects, but we overlooked cumulative pollution. Rather than confronting this reality and taking responsibility for their actions, many players instead argued that the rules were not clearly explained.
Second, disparities emerged that were not addressed. Two tables met an early demise due to excessive greenhouse gas concentrations resulting from the quick development of all countries. While one table survived another round, it was not an exemplar for climate action. Rather, a highly developed country that held the vast proportion of wealth could still survive only because another country purposefully chose to be minimally developed, minimizing its greenhouse gas emissions. The game, however, did not draw attention to the inequality that fueled this table’s seeming success. I wondered: how effective can an educational climate-related game be if the fundamental inequality between the Global North and South is not acknowledged and addressed?
As all players shared their game experiences, criticisms of capitalism emerged: one player directly equated the United States with capitalism, arguing that the United States was unfit to lead in addressing climate change; a player who deliberately underdeveloped their country expressed a desire for a framework that encouraged countries to view success beyond a GDP-driven economy; and another player expressed a sense of helplessness of having to go with the flow under a neoliberal system. Rather than unpacking these viewpoints and making links to the real world, the facilitator and other observers focused on which groups ended the game due to exceeding greenhouse gas concentration limits without discussing how the only surviving group managed to do so.
Dodging the Elephant in the Room
Indeed, I have yet to participate in an open event about climate change in Hong Kong that challenges neoliberalism or capitalism. Hong Kong effectively benefited from the Bretton Wood system and the market-based economic model prescribed to the world by the U.S.-led Western hegemony. However, public discourse follows the colonial narrative, romanticizing and simplifying these “miracles” as exemplary cases of neoliberalism, export-oriented industrializing policies, and strong development policies supported by Confucian work ethics under globalization. Exploitation was justified and normalized as necessary to provide social mobility, given such mobility was virtually nonexistent for ethnic Chinese before WWII.
The surge of the middle-class in the 1970s deeply ingrained the bootstrap mentality into the sociopolitical imaginaries. In the 1980s, the stock market’s immense popularity further shaped how people in Hong Kong perceive the world. Furthermore, political events, civic education, media portrayal, and cultural imagination started essentializing the differences between Hong Kong and the Mainland: capitalism meant freedom, while socialism meant authoritarianism. With Hong Kong Basic Law Article 5 stating that the previous capitalist system and way of life shall remain unchanged until 2047, neoliberalism and capitalism have become the core ideology and identity of Hong Kong. As a city with a 20.2% poverty rate, where most resources are manipulated by a few family conglomerates, asking Hong Kong people to situate themselves within the Global North/South dynamics and challenge the oppressive nature of neoliberalism and capitalism inflicts serious multilayered identity crises.
Beyond the Games: Simulations or Imaginations
Games and critical reflections do have immense potential to help players understand complexities and repercussions, induce compassion, and spark creativity and imagination, but how often are they carefully designed and implemented, spurring potentially uncomfortable critique of dominant systems? Instead, are they being devised simply because of their “more engaging” nature? Youth know the world is in crisis — but are climate games and discussions allowing them to imagine and teaching them how to resist, or simply reenacting the current oppressive structure? If our games can’t imagine a world beyond profit, perhaps it’s not the climate that’s in crisis, but our imagination. The next post discusses how failing to discuss and challenge capitalism adds to youth activists’ emotional toll.
The Author:
Shue-kei Joanna Mok is a PhD Candidate in International Education Policy at University of Maryland, College Park.