S2E08 - Daybreak (Climate Change)

#Daybreak #CMYKGames #Climatechange #ClimateScience #BoardGames #ScienceCommunication #SciComm 

Things are warming up in this episode as we talk with Dr. Jacquelyn Gill about Daybreak, a cooperative game about combatting climate change while keeping society intact. We cover tipping points, carbon drawdown, ocean acidification, the clean energy transition, what fossil fuels actually are, and some actually good news about climate change.

Timestamps

• 00:00 - Introductions
• 01:31 - Baby pterosaurs and frog saunas
• 06:11 - Playing Daybreak
• 22:53 - Designer choices
• 27:50 - Sense of urgency
• 32:45 - Tipping points
• 40:44 - Ocean acidification
• 47:05 - Clean energy as the focus
• 52:53 - RCP and climate projections
• 58:50 - What are fossil fuels?
• 1:02:00 - Niggling nitpicks
• 1:07:12 - Final grades

Links

• Daybreak Official Site (CYMK Games)
  • Designer diary
• FSC Certification (sustainable components)
• Matteo Menapace site 
• Warm Regards (Jacquelyn's podcast) 

Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net 

This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Full Transcript

(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )

Jason  0:06  
Hello and welcome to the gaming with Science Podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.

Brian  0:11  
Today, we're going to discuss Daybreak by CMYK. Welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian. 

Jason  0:20  
This is Jason

Brian  0:21  
and we're joined today by a special guest, Jacquelyn Gill. Jacquelyn, can you please introduce yourself?

Jacquelyn  0:26  
Hi, I'm Jacquelyn. I'm a paleoecologist from the University of Maine, and I am also a science communicator, and I focus on climate change.

Brian  0:34  
That's cool. And then you also said that you are, in fact, a board gamer yourself. What games do you enjoy playing?

Jacquelyn  0:41  
Oh gosh, I have been a gamer of many stripes for a long time, everything from video games to tabletop RPGs to board games. And these days, I've been getting really into two player games because we haven't really found our gaming community. So I get really excited when I have a new two player game, and I think my husband's just going to be really excited to play daybreak, because we've been playing a lot of twilight struggle, which is a cold war game where one of you plays the Soviet Union and the other plays the United States. 

Brian  1:14  
Oh, man. 

Jacquelyn  1:14  
And you know, that's starting to feel a little too close to home these days. So yeah, and it also takes a million years to get through. 

Brian  1:21  
Well, I don't think this game takes a million years to get through, but I would say that this is not a light game either from that perspective. But you know, you can when you win. Man, does it feel good, though. Before we get into the game, we'll do our science banter, some kind of story or topic or something from the world of science that we want to discuss. We usually let the guest host go first. Jacquelyn, do you have something you like to share?

Jacquelyn  1:42  
I do. And, you know, the folks might have seen those T shirts or mugs that have a dinosaur on them that say all my friends are dead. As a paleoecologist, I feel this, you know, this is my life. So this is not a this is not a happy story. You know, when we talk about a highly productive fossil site, we're talking about a death trap. So, I mean, on September 5, there was this really cool study that came out in the journal Current Biology, and it's all about baby pterosaurs. So these were these, yeah, these 

Brian  2:13  
dead baby pterosaurs. 

Jacquelyn  2:14  
Dead baby pterosaurs. I know, and we know. So the fossils themselves are, I would classify them as cute. They're pretty small and but it turns out that this, this particular location, does have a tendency to have a lot of young pterosaurs in it. The fossils that are kind of coming out of this location tend to be on the young side, and these particular baby pterosaurs had evidence in their bones of there's like twisting and breakages, and it's thought that they were basically killed in a severe windstorm. And and pterosaur fossils in general are very rare because they have really fragile bones, and so the fact that we have juveniles with direct evidence of trauma is pretty unique and exciting. These kinds of fossils for from animals from a young age help us to understand more about the biomechanics or the ability of these animals to fly. But also, there are of the hundreds of pterosaur fossils that have been found, A lot of them are very small and very young, and it just suggests that, you know, this was a really rough life for these animals to be flyers when the when the storms were, you know, maybe even more intense than some of the ones that we might see now because of the climate conditions at the time.

Brian  3:30  
Yeah, I know we've had will and David on from common descent. And they always say the best paleontology starts with tragedy. 

Jacquelyn  3:35  
It really does. It's true.

Jason  3:38  
Well, I have something a little bit more upbeat for my science fact. So this was one I ran across a month or two ago, and it talks about frog saunas. This is one of those things that sounds silly until you actually dig into it, because here's the thing. So some people listening may know that a lot of amphibians worldwide are suffering. They're having problems, and that frogs especially are having issues with various fungal infections. And there was a group in Australia that took this one fact people knows, like, oh, the fungus does better at lower temperatures, and that in like this, one particular part of their study area that had a bunch of rocks, the frogs were doing better around the rocks. And they hypothesized that, okay, these rocks could be storing heat during the day and helping the frogs keep their body temperature up in order to fight off this fungus better. And so they built these little frog saunas, which are essentially just bricks with with holes that are the right size for frogs to go in them. And they just stuck them out where they get plenty of sun. I think they may have put some little greenhouses over them, and they actually found that, yes, like when they put these out, they would then go and they'd capture frogs and put them near the saunas. And this frogs apparently did a good job, like getting inside on their own. It actually helped them fight off the fungus better. And this is actually a really nice thing, because it's a very low cost, easy thing to do. You put some bricks around that have the right size holes in them, and you can help these frogs fight off this infection. And so this is one of those. I love it. When science can take something cheap and easy and make a meaningful impact. And so I loved when I ran across as like, Oh, this is great. And it has the nice headlining thing of building frog saunas to try to save the to save the species.

Brian  5:14  
So Jason's encouraging everybody to throw bricks at frogs, yes?

Jason  5:18  
Not at frogs. Just deposit them near frogs. It's like, you don't throw a sauna at a person. Just build a sauna near a person. 

Brian  5:26  
Yeah, that's true. You can throw a person into a sauna, I suppose. But this is going to have the cutest little things in the show notes. It's going to be little frogs sitting inside of bricks and Little Baby pterosaurs, right?

Jacquelyn  5:38  
 With with little like broken arms, 

Brian  5:40  
like little pterosaurs with their arms in slings. This, when you first said frog sauna, I was thinking, I don't even know, do we call this an idiom about the frog sitting in the pot of water that is slowly heating up? Is that also a good transition?

Jacquelyn  5:51  
Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. It's like, well, we talk about the frog in a in a pot, metaphor for climate change, and you just crank the heat up a little bit, a little bit. And the idea is, you don't know you're being boiled until it's, you know, too warm to do anything about it.

Brian  6:03  
Okay? Thank you very much. Both really good things. Should we hop into discussing this game? 

Jason  6:09  
Oh, that was a bad one. 

Brian  6:11  
Oh, what do you mean? Oh, oh, hop into it. Man, I didn't even catch that. So Daybreak was designed by Matt Leacock and Matteo manapace and published by CMYK in 2023 it's for one to four players. Plays in about 60 to 90 minutes, and it's suggested for ages 10 and up in the game, you're going to play one of four global powers, and you're working collaboratively to transition to green energy and build social resilience, ecological resilience and infrastructure resilience, all while dealing with crises and planetary effects of all of this carbon being pumped into the atmosphere and raising the global temperature. And you win the game by getting to the point where you are producing less carbon than the planet can absorb, and getting through a round of the crisis phase without failing. Everything in the game has a very distinct color block art style. The center of the board is a world map with a giant thermometer running down one side a couple little tracks that are scattered on the world that are tracking different things like loss of global sea ice, desertification, ocean acidification, things like that. I believe, if our memory serves. There are six tracks. We'll get into them in more detail later.

Jason  7:23  
Basically all the bad things that happen due to climate change. 

Brian  7:26  
Yeah, at a at a global, planetary level, there are also, you'll have a place where you can put these little wooden tree tokens representing the forests and their ability to absorb carbon, as well as some spots on the ocean that can absorb carbon as well. That's pretty much everything that's going to happen on that main board. The actual the board is really could be smaller and sort of fit everything, but it's not. It's this big, chunky, you know, a completely global map. Now, most of the working part of the game is actually happening in front of the individual players. So you're going to have sort of just a regular set of playing card sized cards. You have to have five of them in front of you, and then you also have a player board in front of you that helps to track sort of other things. It's cardboard with a little inset, and it will track how much energy demand does your community have. There are four different places that you can play in the game, United States, China, Europe and majority world, which is just everybody else, really. This is meant to represent the developing world. They went with majority world instead. I'm sure there was a lot of conversation about the best thing to call this. On that little board in front of you, you'll be tracking with a little token. What is your energy demand for your region? How much dirty energy are you using? Basically how much energy you're using that is putting carbon into the atmosphere. How much clean energy are you using, and then all of these other sources of emissions. And there's, it actually looks quite intimidating, because there's a huge diversity of these. But you know, it's your vehicles, your industry, buildings, agriculture, energy extraction, waste, every one of those is something that's going to be generating carbon, putting it into the atmosphere. The last things that you track are your resilience that comes in three flavors, social resilience, ecological resilience and infrastructure resilience. So those will your little tokens. Think that they each have little icons. So it'll look like a the infrastructure of, I think it's a series of cross railroads, for instance, whereas the social one is sort of a, you know, a raised fist in solidarity. And ecological, ecology, of course, is a leaf. Ecology is always a leaf. And then the other thing you'll be tracking is your communities in crisis. That is actually a very pretty little icon for what it represents. It's little figures in rainbow colors holding hands that is representing a community that is in trouble from something that is happening in your region globally, related to climate change, you can accumulate up to 12 of those, and that's it. If you get more than 12, that's one of the loss states that we're going to talk about in the game. The only other thing to discuss is the in terms of cards, you have oversized cards that will sit to the left and right of the main Global Map board. One represents global projects. This is things that everybody gets to work on together and that can benefit everybody. And on the other side are crises, things that are very bad that everybody has to work together to try to avoid. under normal states, you get to see what one of those will be. It's called the forecasted crisis, and then you'll have more that you don't get to see. So there's always some surprises that are coming up. when you're playing the game. It happens in multiple rounds. The first round is you get to choose one of these global projects, right? Oh, well, which one of these do we want to focus on? Right? So this is that first opportunity to as a group. Let's decide what we want to work on together. This game very, very, very much encourages communication, being open, planning together. What you're going to do, really, with that idea of like, this is how this problem must be solved, is with communication and cooperation. So you're literally are starting with a global summit of some kind. What should we focus on as a planet to try to fix these problems? After that, you'll move to the local phase. You'll draw five cards from your hands, and you'll get to lay them down. And those can do different things for you. So for instance, you may have a card that says, discard one card to remove a dirty energy token, right? Just take it off the board. Or, you know, oh, you could stack this one up on top of another stack. It can allow you to gain more ecological resilience. Now, you only have five places to put these local project cards down. Whichever card is on top is deciding what the power is. But you could also tuck cards underneath. There's 12 different tags, but like, for instance, a card may say you can add one clean energy for every solar energy tag that you have tucked into this stack, right? So this is how you can use your cards. You can play them on top to gain a new power. You can play them underneath to power up what that other ability is. You can discard them to use abilities. Or you can use them to help with those global projects or those crises cards. You want to hold on to a few just in case, because usually you need to protect yourselves.

Jason  12:06  
Yeah, these cards are basically the core resource of the game. They're really what makes it go around. They're what gives you power. And not surprisingly, there are effects in the game that reduce how many cards you draw or that you have, which is a pretty severe cost, because that's what you use to literally do everything in the game,

Brian  12:21  
yet, that's one of the things that happens, is I mentioned those communities in crisis. As those build up, basically, as you have more communities in crisis on hand, you get to do less. You can't do as much because more of your people are unable to contribute. So instead of being able to choose five cards, you can only choose four, and then only three, and then you just lose.

Jason  12:41  
Yes, being a co op game, there are many, many ways to lose, and only one way to win.

Brian  12:45  
There is only one way to win, and it is complicated and difficult to achieve. The other thing that's nice about this is it really encourages it's like, everybody look at everything together, discuss what you want to do. What is the best strategy to use these cards? It's like, oh, well, I have this, well, I have this ability over here that lets me give you a card. Do you need that card? Oh, well, should I do this? Like, what should we consider? How can we work towards all of these global objectives together? There are no rounds when you're in this phase, everybody can do things at the same time. Everybody can play as many cards as they want, use as many abilities as they want, until everyone decides they're done or can't do anything else,

Jason  13:19  
which is really good for gameplay speed, because otherwise this game would literally take like, three to four times as long to get through. So it is nice that everyone can resolve stuff simultaneously, or kind of do independently, if you want. So I think it helps avoid the Alpha gamer situation where one person is telling everyone else what they should do.

Brian  13:34  
That's one of the things I really do enjoy about cooperative games, is it gives this opportunity. It's like, well, what's your opinion? We get to sort of work as a team. What is a good strategy? If we do this, then what about that? Have we considered this route that that thing that you really only get, you really only get most effectively in a cooperative game, is that joint strategy, that feeling like you're working together to try to achieve goal. After everybody's done all of their actions. The next thing is your emission stage. Now, everybody's going to produce all of that carbon from their dirty energy plants and all of their waste and buildings and agriculture and everything else. So on the little track, it's got, it's they try to make it as easy as possible. There's a number that runs across the top, all of your your black tokens, your dark gray tokens, you just add up the total amount of carbon, and that goes onto that central board as emissions, as the new global carbon. Everybody has to do it together and oh, man, it feels bad when you first start. You're putting just tons of carbon into the atmosphere. There's actually really clever design on the carbon tokens. They've got the little cubes like Jason likes, although these are wooden instead of acrylic, they made specific choices about using sustainable materials in the packaging. So sorry, Jason, no acrylic cubes this time only wooden.

Jason  14:51  
Oh, well, they're representing carbon. So I think it's appropriate.

Brian  14:55  
They have a tile that represents five which actually, if you look at it. Looks like you'd had a stack of five of these little cubes, and you mush them down into a square. So like, in terms of graphics, it represents it quite well. You take the carbon from the emissions, and you're able to sequester as much of that as you can, right? Like every tree can hold one carbon, every wave in the ocean can hold one carbon. Anything that doesn't get sequestered goes onto the thermometer, and based on the number of players you have, there are spots where every five carbon fills up a little spot. When you've filled up across the thermometer, you take that carbon, you replace it with the temperature band. The global temperature just went up 0.2 degrees. And that's when things potentially start getting bad. You start having to add more crisis cards. You those planetary effects, those start amplifying and magnifying after the emissions have been dealt with, you adjust the thermometer. The next thing is, you have to roll the planetary die to see okay. What went bad? Did we lose sea ice this year? Did we have desertification this year? Did we have ocean acidification or whatever? So you roll a six sided die, whatever symbol it is, you move the little token up one and each of those tracks has tipping points on it, and they're differentially spaced across different ones. If you hit one of those tipping points, something bad happens. You add more carbon, or you take away trees, or something like that. I know this probably sounds super complicated. It's actually all explained very well on the card. Then you have to go through all your crises cards. It's like, hey, one, actually one of the best crisis cards in this game is pandemic.

Jason  16:33  
Appropriate, given that it was Matt Leacock who made it. Yeah, for sure. Crises are basically more things that go wrong which cause further problems on your board, or the global board, or just mucking things up, making the game harder. Basically, 

Brian  16:47  
yeah, things that can screw up your resilience, things that can add carbon, things that can make you discard cards. So hey, you had a great turn. You used all your cards. Well, now a crisis came up, and oh, man, I wish I'd held on to one card so that I could help deal with this crisis. After all, that's done, the interesting thing is, the next step is, did you win? There is a did you win step where you check to see so to win the game we already mentioned, there's only one way to win. You have to reach draw down. You have to be at a point where the planet can absorb more carbon than you are collectively producing. If that happens, and you can get through all those crises, then you have won the game. The next thing you do is you move your energy demand up one and you start the whole process over. I think I've covered all the mechanics. I know that was a lot of time talking about little moving bits and pieces. It's a complicated game in terms of its moving parts, but honestly, if you just follow the steps from beginning to end, it's well designed. You shouldn't have a problem getting through it. Is there anything you feel like I missed? 

Jason  17:48  
There's a few little things like the the resilience bits are important for crises, because basically the more resilience you have, the more you're able to ignore the crises. And that worked out well for me, because when Brian and I were playing this, I basically got a resilience engine going for two out of my three resiliences, and so I was just able to ignore a lot of things, and then a hurricane hit, and I didn't have much ecological resilience, and my entire country got destroyed.

Brian  18:12  
Jason and I won when we played, but it was definitely a but at what cost? Because it's it felt like if we had a round seven things would have immediately gone over the tipping point and there wouldn't have been any recovery. On the other hand, I played last night with my wife and our friend and we we did great. We got really good, powerful abilities set up early. You know, we actually played by the rules this time. Because the first time my wife and I played, we used the entire thermometer. It's set by the number of players. If you've got four players, you can fill up all four slots. You got two players. You only get to fill up two slots. It's like a balancing mechanic. But no, we played legit. We won in round three. 

Jason  18:48  
Holy cow

Brian  18:49  
yeah, it was great. It felt really good. Of course, we did play on the easiest suggested setup for three players. But I feel like I'm getting a handle on it. I'm enjoying learning how to play daybreak. So Jacquelyn, you said you didn't get a chance to play, but you looked at people playing the game, is that right?

Jacquelyn  19:02  
I did and I bought the game, I did the unboxing, and read through the instructions, watched a couple of videos, and I'm actually really excited not just to play this for myself, but also to bring it into the classroom, because I think it does a really nice job of conveying in a short time the same urgency and trade offs that humanity is currently facing and will face over years to decades. And it's nice to be able to really experience and internalize that and in within the time span of a game. And I know I read it, actually read an article The Associated Press followed an event at the COP 29 meetings in last year, last November, where they actually had world leaders play this game, and some of them just lost within 20 minutes. So, I mean, it is, you know, compared to some games, it's a little bit of a less of a steep learning curve to jump in you're not committing to, you know, the next four hours of your life.

Brian  19:59  
Yeah. Yeah, that's true. You could definitely lose this game fast if you were doing it wrong.

Jason  20:03  
Oh, I did think of one thing more, Brian, the QR codes. So like, every, almost every little card has this tiny, little QR code you can scan, and it takes you to a website that gives you a lot more information about what that card is talking about. And by a lot more. I don't mean to just mean, like, Oh, here's a few lines of flavor text. I mean, the what the few I checked out, there's like a full page, like, someone's essentially essay with research and background about here's what this means, here's how it's in play. Here's how this affects, like, the game and everything, but also here's how it is in real life. Like, there's a lot of information that you don't see about the game that's hidden behind those QR codes. But for an educational setting, like, I could definitely see using this in a classroom, just like, Hey, everyone, take a card scan the QR code. Your job is to report on this thing to the rest of the class.

Jacquelyn  20:49  
Oh, yeah

Brian  20:50  
Easily. And that's a huge deck, and, and you're right. Most cards just have that one line of flavor text right in holotype, it's the name, who discovered it and when. But in these ones, it's, your it's, it's, it's an article. It's also answers questions about how you use that card, connects to other cards and to external resources. It also has a picture of the illustration. It's, it's actually quite clever. The one thing that I worry a little bit about stuff like this, because there's been a lot more internet and web integration. We've played a couple games with apps. There's these websites and stuff like that, is the what happens when that website isn't maintained anymore for something like this, it's probably fine, because the Internet Archive is still a thing, right?

Jason  21:30  
Yeah, I haven't checked. Hopefully they have, like, a PDF you can just download that has all of those things on it for later look up. But if they don't, they should

Brian  21:38  
I. don't think they do. And you're right, that is a good idea. Would just be to have a full downloadable, I mean, booklet, basically a booklet, book. It would be about it would be about two inches thick if they had everything in there for every single card. And every card has a QR code on it, every crisis, every global program, every local project card, every single one of them, ton of work to write and put together all the stuff for this game.

Jason  22:03  
 Oh yeah, lots of work went in there, and a lot of it, that part's not going to be seen by most people, but it's definitely they did their homework really well.

Jacquelyn  22:10  
I was just going to add, I like, I do like that. It's sort of, it's not buried, but it's not required, so it doesn't have this preachy, textbooky feel to it when you play it, but it's there. If you want it, you can go and find more information. It's well referenced and resourced, but it's not sort of in your face. It doesn't when you sit down to play it, you don't feel like you're doing homework.

Brian  22:31  
And actually, I made use of that. There were plenty of times where, like, some cards are like, well, I don't even know what this is. What is this? And I could just scan the QR code and it take me right to it and explain, you know, what kind of social or economic policy this was because, I gotta be honest, economics is not Jason, and I's strong suit. But it was great to be able to have that resource there to look at. The materials also were specifically and implicitly designed to be used with all sustainable materials.

Jason  22:59  
Well, I know, when I first picked this up from the game store, I noticed, oh, there's no shrink wrap on this. Instead, it has four little stickers covering the edge that says, Hey, these are an eco friendly shrink wrap alternative, yeah.

Jacquelyn  23:09  
And mine came in the mail, and it was not in any external packaging. It was not shrink wrapped. It just had the four stickers I needed a little you know, goo be gone to get those off. If, you know, if those of you who are fastidious about your game packaging, but the mailing label was just slapped right on top of the box that peeled right off. And so it definitely gave me a moment of pause to think about all of the packaging that normally comes with the things that we get in the mail. I live in a really, a really rural place, and so we can't always get things from our local game stores, and so I did appreciate them kind of walking the walk, because I know that for a lot of people, those the delivery mechanism matters, because it lends credibility to all of the messaging that comes afterwards. And I could see people really thinking if they had to unpack every single thing from a little plastic baggie and generated a whole bunch of trash just just to play the game. I think that that would set people off on the wrong foot to start

Brian  24:08  
with, in the designer diary, they actually had a sustainability consultant. So one of the things, for instance, was the choice not to use a drawstring bag when they package things. Instead of using Ziploc bags, they use fiberboard boxes, and still, it's a very high quality product.

Jason  24:26  
Yeah, maybe we should now transition with that whole walking the walk. Let's transition from the game itself to the science it's showing. Because there's a lot of science in here. They definitely did a lot of research,

Brian  24:37  
actually, if it's okay, before we get into that, I would actually like to talk about the designers a little bit, because I actually read their designer diary. One of the things that's great there is, how is the science being represented? Where did they have to make choices of what to put in and what to leave out? Usually we would talk about the designers a little bit, and I think these designers are worth talking about. So one of these designers is Matt Leacock, who is the. Lead designer of pandemic, which we have already done an episode on, arguably one of the most popular collaborative games that have ever been released, and the his co designer is Matteo Menapace, who seems to specialize in co-designing cooperative games. He's only done a few games, one of his on memory loss. He's got one on food politics. And then he did this, this game in particular. And he basically specializes in co-designing socially aware games, cooperative games to help deal with societal problems, kind of a very unique niche that he has decided to make for himself. when they were choosing to make this game, and that actually started with a conversation on Twitter. By the way, funny enough. They started talking about this because, actually, Matt Leacock said that during the pandemic was when he started thinking about all of the things that Pandemic didn't quite get right, and wanting to do a game that actually put more effort into because I think we've already talked about Pandemic. The board game is a pandemic on easy mode, right? Yes, yeah. So let's deal with this other problem of climate change. And they had four goals in how they wanted to design this game. One was they wanted to create a game about systemic solutions, this idea that you can't solve climate change through individual action, that it actually takes collaborative, collective action. Yes, they wanted a game that was cooperative, but where people still got to make their own choices, individual autonomy. They wanted the game to feel empowering. I have had that experience. I have also had the scary experience of all that carbon filling up on the thermometer right away, but when you start getting under control. It does feel empowering. And then there's the last thing, which I actually do want to talk about. They wanted a game that was realistic, but not quote, unquote, and that's actually by them educational they were, is as explicit goal. Right at the beginning, they don't want to make an educational game. Actually, there was the thing of, they don't want chocolate-dipped broccoli? 

Jacquelyn  27:00  
Nice. Yeah.

Brian  27:01  
And that makes me kind of sad, if I'm honest. 

Jason  27:05  
Well, we've talked about how educational is a dirty word in the game industry,

Brian  27:09  
and I think that's why it's in quotation marks, right? They like, they don't, they don't. They want to make a game where the science is accurate. It's realistic to what's actually happening. It's communicating the feel it's showing people how to work together to solve problems. But oh no, no, no, no, it's not educational. Of course, it's not educational. 

Jason  27:28  
I wonder if that's just the perception that an educational game must have education as its primary goal 

Jacquelyn  27:33  
rather than entertainment. Yeah, 

Jason  27:35  
yeah. Maybe this is a secondary or tertiary goal. 

Brian  27:38  
Jason, you said you want to talk about some of the science in here. Did you have something specifically you wanted to bring up? Or Jacquelyn? Did you have something that you wanted to bring up? I have a bulleted list, of course, but if one of you would like to lead a topic that is totally fine.

Jacquelyn  27:50  
I was just impressed, in general, with the thoughtfulness that went into the way that the game mechanics leveraged the science to create a sense of urgency, rather than trying to gloss over the science for the sake of game mechanics, I think, I think oftentimes, you know, I'm a big science fiction fan, for example, and oftentimes people think that if we are true to the science, that's going to come at some sort of sacrifice to the storytelling or the characters. But I often find that if you approach the problem with the idea that the science can actually enhance the story or the entertainment value of the game, or whatever it is you're looking at, these two ideas don't have to be in opposition to each other. And so Daybreak starts really difficult. There's not a slow ramp up. It doesn't the game doesn't start in 1900 right? It starts right now where we've already experienced at least 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming. And so, which was the case when the game came out in 2023, and so it's it very much drops you in the middle of the problem, which then creates the sense of urgency. It's not something like, oh, I have, I have five or six rounds before the temperature gage starts to crank up. And we can, you know, put our resources on the board, we have some time to really think about how we're going to do this, which would be nice. It would be nice, from a gameplay perspective, to have a few freebies where we can just set things up the way that we want, with the with this eye towards towards creating a better world. Our world leaders had that opportunity, and they chose not to make those choices. And so now the game that we are playing in real life is one where we have to make decisions based on the conditions as they are and and so one thing that I really appreciate about daybreak is that it drops you right into the action, not into some hypothetical future, but into the current reality. And so I really appreciated that. The other thing I really appreciate is just from the get go, it is a cooperative game. The reason that I that I like that very much, is that climate change is kind of the ultimate cooperative game. You know, we are going to ultimately win or lose together. We talk about winners and losers in the near term, and certainly, the effects of climate change are not shared equally, at least initially, but now. Now, as we've been progressing along our little turn tracker in the real world, we're starting to see those impacts happening everywhere. You know, when they those crisis cards that you mentioned, I really appreciate that they reflect real world, recognizable processes, right? Well, the kinds of events you know, things like storm surges, wildfires, drought, sea level rise, that get triggered each round and intensify with the temperature, which is exactly what we see in the science, that those kinds of events become, you know, more frequent, more intense as warming goes on. And also that there's a there's a planetary effects die that's rolled based on the temperature bands, as you warm, you know, increase your warming. And the fact that you can trigger a set of environmental tipping points like desertification, which will cause you to remove tree tokens, or Amazon die back, which is an even bigger event where you add carbon remove trees, you can trigger Arctic sea ice loss. You can trigger permafrost thaw or ocean acidification. And so we have both these sort of short term events, these individual climate induced disasters, as well as these larger scale planetary effects that happen. You know, there's also these linkages back to human society, right? You decrease your infrastructure, you decrease your resilience, you increase the number of communities in crisis, right? And it shows the interconnectedness of how these individual events, when they start to happen more frequently, can then start to undermine our ability to deal with them on a planetary scale. And so they're considering how complicated climate change is in terms of, you know, we say it's an everything problem. I feel like the game manages to capture that in a way that's, as you said, really easy to convey. It doesn't take a lot to learn. You can play around and lose in 20 minutes. But also, you know, from everything that I'm seeing and the way that people are describing the game, the designers really want you to understand the sense of urgency, and it is intentionally challenging in the beginning, as opposed to having this sort of gradual ramp up that then, you know, increases in difficulty over time.

Brian  32:17  
So it starts, you're right, it starts hard, and if you're not careful, it can accelerate and get even worse at a cracker level, actually, let's talk about from a scientific perspective, this idea of the tipping point. Yeah. So funny enough, this reminds me very specifically about something similar that we had in Terraforming Mars, which Funny enough, these are both terraforming games.

Jacquelyn  32:41  
I mean, we are literally terraforming Earth right now. Yeah.

Jason  32:43  
I was just gonna say we talked even back then about how if we had the technology to terraform Mars, then we also have the technology to terraform Earth, which is exactly what this game is showing, for better or worse.

Brian  32:54  
But let's talk about so what is this idea of a tipping point? The melting permafrost might be one of the best and easiest ways to kind of look at first. So actually, Jacquelyn, can you tell us about melting permafrost and sort of how that affects the climate? 

Jacquelyn  33:06  
Yeah. So a large amount of the carbon that is in our sort of global carbon budget is stored frozen in the ground in the in the Arctic, where you have the cold temperatures that keep most of the ground frozen for most of the year, there's an active layer at the top that warms up. And when that active layer warms up, you get increases in microbial activity, and those microbes will release, will it start to decompose the organic matter that's in the upper layers of that soil, and they'll release carbon, including via methane. And so Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas that that warms the planet on a per unit basis, more than CO2. And so, you know, another form of carbon. And so, you know, this is one of the greenhouse gasses that we really keep an eye on. And because so much of the Arctic has a lot of old organic material that's been frozen in this soil for 1000s of years or hundreds of 1000s of years. In some cases, it's basically just like a bank, a bank of carbon that's just been stored. And if the soil starts to warm up, then you get more of that decomposition and microbial activity, and you start to get more carbon released into the atmosphere, which then warms the planet, which then thaws more soil, which then releases more carbon. And you can see how this could start to spin up like a like just a big runaway snowball effect, 

Brian  34:34  
and get, like, a positive feedback loop. Yes, tipping points, 

Jacquelyn  34:38  
exactly. And so a tipping point or a critical transition. You know the we talk about these as what we call non linear effects, meaning they don't. You just don't. If you, if you crank up the temperature a little bit and the or you crank up the CO2 a little bit, and the temperature increases by a predictable amount, and you crank up the temperature, or the. The CO2 a little bit, the temperature increases by a predictable amount, right? And that creates a straight line going upwards in your sort of mental graph. That's what we would call linear, right? It's a straight line where, as a tipping point, you can suddenly see a very fast change in the rate of the response that is not necessarily predictable. And the tricky part about a tipping point. When we think about these kinds of events, we use the term, what's called hysteresis, which, if you imagine yourself, and if any of you have ever been in a canoe before, you know that canoes are a little wiggly. They are a little tippy, but you also know that you have a little bit of wiggle room on either side. You can kind of shift to the right or to the left, and then at a certain point, if you push the boundaries of what that canoe can tolerate, it will flip over. And if you've ever flipped a canoe before, which I hope you haven't, but if you ever have, you know it's a lot harder to flip it back than it was to tip it over the first time. And so in these sort of, you know, hysteresis responses, these two states, upright canoe and flipped over canoe are both possible, but once you flip from one to the other, it's a lot harder to go back. And so in these tipping point scenarios, when we talk about things like the collapse of of, of, you know, certain ice shelves in the Antarctic, or the you know, permafrost thaw, what happens is that it's easier. It can be easier to release that carbon from the permafrost than it is to to return it to its original state. And in some cases, it might be impossible, at least on the time scales that are relevant to us as humans, right? You know, it might take 1000s or millions of years to reverse those effects, and we want to avoid them, because they often come with big jumps in the conditions that we're experiencing. Right? If we were to release all, if we were to warm all of that permafrost to the extent that all of that carbon that's been trapped for 1000s and 1000s of years was suddenly released, then we're going to see a big jump in the amount of carbon that's in our atmosphere, and that's going to drive a big jump in our temperature. So again, a non linear response can be really hard to predict, and this is where tipping points become really challenging. You'll often hear about them in the media, or we're about to reach a tipping point when it comes to this Antarctic ice shelf, or about to reach a tipping point when it comes to ocean currents. But the problem is that there's been a lot of different attempts to try to predict a tipping point that's coming based on these early warning detection systems, which, in our case, we don't have little red lights that go off. We have statistical processes that we can use to try to identify a tipping point before it comes. But I often say, you know, based on what we know from the from the Paleo record, we've The Earth has experienced things like climate change & extinction before we know a lot about how the Earth system responds to those kinds of processes. We're not walking into the future with a blindfold on, but with tipping points. We kind of are, to an extent, because we don't necessarily know exactly when they will happen. And you might say, oh, plus or minus 10 years that that's a big deal for human societies that rely on a certain set of conditions in order to operate, like our agricultural systems or our transportation systems, or, you know, our ability to make sure that all of the people who live along the coasts still have places to live and aren't going to be impacted by, you know, major sea level rises.

Brian  38:43  
I think a lot of our when we talk about infrastructural resilience, or all these types of resilience, we were talking about this recently, it's really based on flexibility, like, if your assumption is that tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that are going to be exactly like this, and your system only functions. If that's true, you have no flexibility, right?

Jason  39:01  
That? Yeah, that's what resilience means, the ability to take a hit and keep on going, yeah.

Jacquelyn  39:06  
And so if those hits push you out of the range that you're prepared for, and that's, you know, tipping points often, like I said, involve these big jumps in your conditions, if an ice shelf collapses and melts really quickly, that is going to rise sea level much more quickly than the sort of slower, more gradual process of a little bit of melt every year. And so when you can see, okay, we're seeing sea levels rising by this many millimeters per year. We have these coastal communities where we need to start to prepare for that sea level rise, as we're also working on the problem of drawdown, right? We want to reduce our emissions through mitigation, but we also need adaptation, because the impacts of climate change are already with us. But when you start to talk about these non linear responses, these large jumps in our conditions to a new state, or we sort of crank up the dial really quickly. That becomes really difficult if you say, live in a coastal community where you have to get to and from work every day by crossing over a low lying bridge, or your home is near the ocean, or your clean water is being infiltrated by sea water, or all of the other impacts that sea level rise is having.

Brian  40:16  
So you've mentioned another one, this loss of Arctic sea ice, a couple of these tracks, actually, I think, will be familiar to most people. More severe weather. Loss of sea ice is a thing that we hear about routinely when it comes to climate change, desertification. I think this idea of the change of rainfall makes sense that we've been hearing about the die back of the Amazon for a very long time as well. Well, die back and also actively removal of the Amazon ocean acidification. Can we talk about ocean acidification a little bit?

Jacquelyn  40:46  
 Yeah, absolutely. So, as CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere, the oceans have a capacity to absorb some of that, but that is that actually changes the pH of the oceans, right? Because the CO2 is slightly more acidic. And so now you might think, Well, we know we're not talking about, you know, walking into a literal bath of acid here. If you, if you put your hand in an acidified ocean, you're not going to come out with a bunch of burns and pustules all over your hand, right? This isn't something that necessarily we would notice. These are very small changes in the pH of the oceans. But now imagine that you are an ocean dwelling creature that makes a shell. What are shells made out of calcium carbonate? What do you take when you have an acidic stomach, Tums? What are Tums made out of calcium carbonate? You can start to see now where this becomes a problem, where by just small changes in the chemistry of the oceans, making shells as a small, you know, plankton or other creature becomes really difficult. And you might think, Okay, well, so what? So some small shell creating creatures in the ocean have a harder time making their their physical structures. Well, what eats those creatures? Right? What you start to think about this from a whole food web perspective, and there are, if we look at the fossil record, for example, when we look at mass extinctions in the past, they typically are not necessarily, at least in the oceans, driven so much by warming temperatures as they are driven by ocean acidification. Now, those were on much larger scales of warming than what we're expected to see by the end of the century. But we're also, you know, we don't need to lose 97% of all genera in the oceans before we do something about climate change, right? Even small amounts of ocean acidification can start to cause, and are already starting to cause disruptions to our ocean based food webs, the oceans feed us, right? They also produce a lot of our oxygen. And so you can see how, as these connections among all living things, you know, mean that when you pull on one thread, the whole tapestry can start to unravel. And you know, Jason, you mentioned resilience, I like to think about ecosystems, if I can mix metaphors for like, the fourth time here as a Jenga tower, right? You can pull some blocks out and your Jenga tower will be okay, but at a certain point, you just reach that tipping point where pulling one one more piece out causes the whole tower to collapse. And we don't want to get anywhere near that. 

Brian  43:14  
Jason likes to say that ecosystems are held together with duct tape and spit. So, oh yeah, whether you're paraphrasing someone, right?

Jason  43:21  
I'd say that they're basically, they're they're not in harmony. They're everything pulling against everything else as hard as they can. And so if you start losing members, then suddenly the balance gets lost,

Brian  43:32  
not enough people on one side. Then everything gets pulled in the wrong direction, and everybody falls Yeah.

Jacquelyn  43:37  
And there is, you know, I people often think of these ecosystems as having as being extremely sensitive that just like a sneeze, will cause everything to collapse. And no, I mean, we we've seen a large amount of climate swings, and, you know, species changes and extinctions over the last, you know, millennia to millions of years, there is some resilience built into the system, and we see that in Paleo records, but we also see that extinction does happen, and extinction is forever, and a lot of that extinction is has been driven by climate change and and so, you know, to me, this just reminds us that we do have a little bit of wiggle room. We have some buffer space, you know, but that doesn't mean that we that we don't have to act urgently, because, again, these tipping points can surprise us, and I would rather not figure out where they are by crossing over them.

Brian  44:33  
I guess in the case of the ocean, we literally have buffer space, right?

Jacquelyn  44:36  
Yeah, yeah, right. From an ocean acidification perspective, yeah, yeah. 

Jason  44:40  
And I was like, I'm glad we talked about it, because I was going to mention the two ways that carbon gets drawn down to the system, the trees and the ocean waves. The trees I think most people would get because people understand trees suck in carbon dioxide. The ocean waves, I think, are less obvious, and so it's basically this process of the ocean sucking it down. But there's a cost, that there's a limit to. Its capacity to do so without causing other problems, is that, basically the summary,

Jacquelyn  45:04  
yeah, at least on shorter timescales. I mean, the other way you can there's another way that nature draws down carbon from the atmosphere, which is just through, you know, CO2 dissolved in rain, which can then dissolve rock as the rain hits that rock, and then it basically gets washed out to sea and buried at the bottom of the ocean. That's how, that's sort of Earth's carbon removal process that plays out over millions of years. It's how, you know, it's one of the reasons why we don't have the same levels of CO2 naturally that we did during the Cretaceous, right the time of the dinosaurs. So these natural processes of carbon burial, but they happen over really long timescales. But some people are talking about leveraging that process to to actually, you know, capture carbon, bury it in these massive blocks, and just, you know, sink them down into the bottom of the ocean, and just do, do it in an artificial way.

Brian  45:59  
I have actually not managed to play a game of Daybreak. Yet where it's I've gotten into effect direct air capture.

Jacquelyn  46:04  
Yeah, yeah. That's what? Yeah. That's the sort of thing I was just mentioning. Is this idea of right now, this is still science fiction. So we don't have technological solutions to the climate crisis, other than green the green energy transition. We don't have this. There is no real ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere using technology, unless you want to call a plant technology, yeah. So people often say, oh, yeah, well, we'll just sort of techno solve our way out of this problem that currently remains science fiction at this point. It does not that technology does not exist. There have been attempts to try it, but so far, the plants that have been attempting to do this have taken more energy than they have pulled out of the atmosphere in terms of their carbon budgets. So they actually create more emissions than they've reduced.

Brian  46:57  
That's kind of what I would assume like. If you're not using clean energy to do that, then how are you making the problem any better?

Jacquelyn  47:03  
Yeah

Jason  47:05  
which actually is another question I had so Brian and I noticed that in the game, there's like seven or eight different sources of carbon that go into the atmosphere. He mentioned, like industry, agriculture, waste, transportation and then just plain energy. And we noticed that the game very much skews in favor of switching energy generation from dirty to clean, and it's actually very hard to switch any of these other things over. There's a few cards that hit a few of them. There's one or two, though, I don't think we found any cards that targeted them specifically. You just got, like, one or two cards that would let you hit any type. But some of them are very hard.

Brian  47:42  
Having gone through the whole deck, there is nothing specifically that lets you get rid of energy extraction or waste.

Jacquelyn  47:48  
Interesting.

Jason  47:48  
My question is, the game has it so that the easiest way of going from emitting carbon to not emitting carbon, to basically reduce your carbon input, is to 

Brian  47:56  
is changing the energy economy? 

Jason  47:58  
Yes, yeah, going from dirty energy to clean energy, and it's very hard to change other our other sources of carbon emissions. Does that is that the case in reality is that our best bet of changing how much carbon dioxide we produce,

Brian  48:11  
because this might be a nitpick, if it's not, because this is definitely how Daybreak says this is the only way you're going to win, is by doing this.

Jacquelyn  48:18  
So at scale, maybe it's there's a lot of focus on energy consumption there. I guess you could, they could have gotten into other approaches, like changing diets, right? Because if you think about one of the biggest sources of emissions is actually the food that we eat. People often spend a lot of time on transportation, but globally, I believe flying is something like 2.5% of global emissions, whereas beef consumption is actually much higher than flying. And so the biggest thing that you can do, if you if we want to focus at individual actions that scale up as collective actions, one of the biggest things that you can do is just eat less meat. Not not eat no meat, even, you know, I know people will freak out, but you can eat less meat, and that makes a huge difference. My guess is they didn't want to get into the mechanics of emissions in that sense, because then you start to have to deal with all kinds of, you know, it's like, well, what are they going to eat instead? Right? And then there's, there's an energy budget that's associated with with each of those things. Because, in the case of beef, it's, you know, the methane the cows themselves physically release. But it's also the deforestation that goes into, you know, creating land for pasture to meet global demand. It's also the, you know, the transportation budget of driving or flying cows and beef around, right? And so there's all these sort of add ons, you know, it's not, it's not just the the methane associated with them, with the animals themselves. So I think. Like, the simplest and most clean way is to think about energy transition, and that is honestly the way that makes the most sense. I think, as long as we're also factoring in transportation, which is globally really important. But then there's also things like cement. Like global cement production is actually a huge source of emissions. You know, where does that fall like there? There are direct emissions that are not coming from the burning of fossil fuels for electricity or combust internal combustion engines for for propulsion. You know that that do matter. But I think once you start to open that can of worms, the game becomes like Terraforming Mars and and then it becomes like its own hobby is just that is the game itself. And so I do think maybe they wanted to avoid some of the those basics and really focus on green energy, and not to knock the green energy transition. It's been when I started grad school, the likeliest climate scenario for our future was warmer than what is turning out to be the likeliest scenario now, and we have bent the arc of our climate future downwards, and a large part of that is a faster than predicted increase in green Energy, especially in places like China, and a faster than predicted collapse of the coal industry, and so that has actually made a like a multi degree difference in terms of the climate future. The worst case scenarios of you know, even 15-20, years ago are no longer on the table. Neither are the best case scenarios, but we're sort of in the middle right, which I'll take it compared to the worst case scenarios, right? RCP-8.5 which is an emissions scenario that people have talked about and often was sort of seen as the likeliest scenario, is now considered a highly unlikely scenario because, again, of this clean energy transition. And so I think the game is right in a way to focus on that, because at these global scales, with policy initiatives, that's a really nice lever, right that you can focus on from for the purposes of a game. In reality, it's a little more complicated, which is why we say, you know, climate change is an everything problem, because there's really no aspect of our lives that that is that doesn't touch on climate change in some way. But, you know, it becomes, I think, more complicated if you're going to start talking about diets and and manufacturing materials that you know, like concrete emits carbon just by existing, right? And so then you start to think about, well, what is that? How do we even start to tap into that as from a, from a game mechanics question? And I can, I can understand that, that the reluctance to go down thatathway,

Brian  52:53  
p can I ask you to follow up on one thing you mentioned, you said, RCP, could you tell me what that means when

Jacquelyn  52:58  
I said RCP-8.5 that's referring to what we call a representative concentration pathway. So that is a human scenario that climate scientists then use to model potential futures. And the number 8.5 actually refers to how much what we call radiative forcing in the year 2100 so that's how much extra energy in watts per square meter that are trapped in Earth's atmosphere compared to our pre industrial baseline. So people have probably heard of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And every seven or so years, the world scientists and policy makers get together, and they basically take a snapshot of the current best science on climate change, both in terms of emission sources as well as emissions impacts. And as part of those reports that come out, the IPCC, reports that come out every seven ish years or so, there are projections of what we're looking at in terms of our future climate scenarios. What is, what is our climate future going to be? Well, it's uncertain, and it's well, I talked about some uncertainties in terms of things like tipping points or how the Earth system is going to respond to a certain amount of warming or a certain amount of emissions. It turns out that the biggest source of uncertainty when it comes to climate change, is actually not how the Earth system itself will respond. It's what people are going to do. Are we going to share technology? Are we going to treat this as a cooperative board game and not a competitive one? Are we going to invest in certain types of infrastructure or or technologies are what's the pop human population going to do? How are we going to eat? What is our fingerprint like globally going to look like at different in different parts of the world? Those that human question means that predicting or projecting into the future any one particular climate future becomes really challenging. So if you were. Say, what is it going to look like in 100 years? I can say, well, if we have a lot of war and people don't get along very well, and, you know, we have a bunch of countries who start these initiatives to increase our fossil fuel use, and we decide that green energy is, you know, not politically expedient, etc, then and human population trajectories in different parts of the world look like this, then we're going to follow this emissions pathway. And if, and if we have a collaborative world community where we share new emerging technologies, we have a very involved public that starts protesting or demanding action from world leaders and votes in certain ways. And we see this kind of leadership. We see this kind of growth in technology. I mean, these are the social scientists map all of these likely trajectories out. Then we're going to follow this slope in terms of our emissions pathways. 

Brian  56:03  
That's fascinating. So basically, the best models of climate change are not by climate scientists. They're by social scientists.

Jacquelyn  56:11  
Well, it starts with the social scientists. So the social scientists say this is what we think will happen. And then the climate modelers all get together and they run what we call ensemble models. So there's maybe 10-14, different models that get used. And because some models are better at some things, some models are really good at clouds, some models are really good at the oceans, right? And so they all have different strengths. We run them all together, we look at sort of what the error is, and we take those different emissions scenarios, and we run them through the model, and we allow the model to tell us how warm things will get based on those emission scenarios. And then we say, Okay, with this particular scenario, we are going to predict 4.5 degrees Celsius. With this particular scenario, we're going to predict two to four degrees Celsius. And so for a while, RCP 8.5 was called business as usual. That was the pathway that we thought we were on, or that was maybe most likely, and that was associated with about four to five degrees Celsius. Global average temperature increases by 2100 higher in the Arctic, which again starts to raise the specter of tipping points. If the Arctic is warming faster, you get more CO2 and then maybe we get even warmer. 

Brian  57:26  
Yeah, you get your feedback loops. 

Jacquelyn  57:28  
Yeah. So it was once nicknamed the business as usual scenario, but now most experts see it as an unlikely worst case. Coal has not grown as fast as once assumed, and it's often still used as a benchmark. People might have heard of, heard of this term, but we don't think it's a likely future anymore. It is a useful warning in terms of what happens if we slam our foot on the gas and never hit the brakes. But you know what I like to remind people of, because this is daybreak. This is a game where we're trying to solve this crisis. The reason that RCP 8.5 ended up being an unlikely scenario. Is not because we got the science wrong. It's just because humans, our human society, followed a different trajectory, one where we saw an unprecedented rise in a Global Youth Climate movement, one where we saw a faster than predicted growth in green energy and a faster than predicted collapse in coal.

Brian  58:24  
Thay's hope. That's hopeful. That sounds 

Jacquelyn  58:26  
it is hopeful. Yeah, it's not just that. Oh, we kind of guessed, and we guessed wrong. The models were wrong. It's no we are literally bending the arc of our climate future downwards. We're not warming as we're not on that ski slope up.

Brian  58:39  
There's, there's a bunch of other things that I wish we could talk about. We are running out of time just a little bit. But I did want to ask you one more very dumb question, if that's okay, 

Jacquelyn  58:49  
please. Yeah. 

Brian  58:50  
Okay. So what is a fossil fuel and where do they come from?

Jacquelyn  58:54  
Oh, such a great question, 

Brian  58:56  
because, because the number of coffee mugs that have a dinosaur turning into gasoline. And I know it's it. So we're going to take this opportunity, because, as Jason says, it's times like this that we get to talk about things I don't know another game that's going to let us talk about this topic. So, what is a fossil fuel? Where did they come from?

Jacquelyn  59:14  
 It's great. It I mean, and they are fossils. They're just not the animal, the vertebrate, the dinosaur fossils that that we often like to think. People think, Oh, I'm burning dinosaurs in my gas tank. Actually, in some ways, I think it's even cooler if I can say that they're even older. And so these are basically typically ancient plants, algae or even other microorganisms that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. So most of our oil and coal and gas deposits formed during the Carboniferous. So like it says on the tin right, carboniferous is very carbony period, and that was about 360 to 300 million years ago. And there was just a really, there were these large scale swamps which were really. Really perfect for preserving organic matter. There were, like, massive wetlands all over the large part, parts of the planet. And so you're really burning like ancient ferns, ancient early plants and algae. And so that's where those deposits are coming from, long before, you know, hundreds, hundreds of millions of years before the time of the dinosaurs, you know. So you are burning fossils, but they're mostly fossil plants and algae. But really, if you think about it, you're burning ancient light, right, ancient sunlight. So, the sun, you know, these plants are photosynthesizing, these algae are photosynthesizing, and they're, using that sunlight to create sugars and build their bodies. And so really, what we're doing is we're taking sunlight that took so that solar energy that took hundreds of millions of years to accumulate, and we're releasing it in decades or centuries. So that's an incredible amount of carbon that took a very long time to build up, and then we're just letting it all out in a very short period of time. And sometimes, you know, in the past, volcanoes have done things like this, and they've had disastrous consequences, you know, for mass extinctions. And now we are the force, the geologic force, that is sort of burping all of this carbon into the atmosphere.

Brian  1:01:22  
So listeners, listen to season one, episode one, our very first episode on photosynthesis, all that sunlight you're using to grow trees, and then it gets buried and just stays as a tree. So the next time you see somebody saying you're putting old dinosaurs into your gas tank, just you're not, Nope, okay. And you could tell them that they're wrong, and Jacquelyn and explained it for you, well,

Jacquelyn  1:01:43  
actually, they're old tree ferns. Yeah,

Jason  1:01:47  
all those Sinclair gas stations are just wrong.

Brian  1:01:50  
Yeah, I actually think it's their fault. I really do. 

Jason  1:01:54  
They just need to replace their mascot from a was a sauropod to be a tree fern.

Jacquelyn  1:01:58  
Yep, yep. I'm on board

Brian  1:02:00  
nitpick corner. I'm happy to go first in terms of the nitpick with the science. I think that this game really tries to represent a lot a lot of those things, plant based diets, alternate concrete, they're all there. They're little bonus activities that you can do that help but but really the thing that this is not even a game nitpick. This is just the thing that bothers me. If you go to the daybreak website, if you scroll down to the bottom, they have resources for educators, right? And if you click on that tab, all it says is website under development, and it doesn't have anything. And to be honest, this is not the first time I've seen this. These things just never seem to quite materialize. That you know, there's always the best intentions, and then they just never seem to get over that last step. So that's because kind of sad. The game is great, but like, the fact that they had to put educational in quotation marks just really troubles me.

Jacquelyn  1:02:54  
Missed opportunity. Yeah,

Jason  1:02:56  
yeah, I'd say mine is something we already alluded to. Is the like, the fact that Brian and I won, but we were pretty sure that global civilization was going to collapse next turn.

Brian  1:03:06  
 When you were rolling the planet dice, the planetary effects dice four times or something every round.

Jason  1:03:12  
Yeah, it's just this case like, well, if I won, I'd like to feel like I not only won, but the human society would be okay, not that I have 11 communities in crisis, and all the tipping points have been hit, and like, as soon as next society, next turn happens, like just things are going to completely fall apart. So I guess I'd like that, but I also understand that could make it a much, much longer game or a much, much harder game. I mean, they have to balance the co op. And I will say my take home from this is that real solving climate change is going to be very hard because the game is purely Co Op. We were working together. When I look around the global political scheme, I don't see international cooperation on the scale I would like to see in which I'm actually glad Jacquelyn, that you mentioned that bending the curve down, because that actually gives me some hope that, yes, things can happen. It's not just doom and gloom, as is reported so often in newspapers. So 

Brian  1:04:06  
I still like to think that there's an opportunity for a better future. Here. We're seeing populations sort of reaching stabilizing. People are trying. Things are at least moving in the direction we'd hoped they would. Just needs to be more and faster. Jacquelyn, what do you think?

Jacquelyn  1:04:19  
Yeah, I would say, for me, I think the biggest nitpick, if I, if I can, if I have to say something critical,

Brian  1:04:26  
you don't have to, 

Jacquelyn  1:04:26  
oh no, no, no, I, I've got it is, is that, you know, it does a beautiful job of showing that climate, climate change is a global cooperation problem, but you know, it does have to simplify. And I think one of the ways in which one of the important aspects of the climate crisis that don't come through the game because of some choices to simplify, which I understand it would be a totally different game, is that, you know, the like the global South, the, you know, the, what was the phrase that they used in the game, the majority world? Yeah, it's far more. More, you know, diverse than one player card can capture. And also, you know, it in a lot of ways, it's not, it's not equal in terms of power or in terms of its contribution to the climate crisis that other other, these other components, you know, North America, Europe, etc, have and and so one thing that I feel is sort of missing from this, this vision of this game, which is understandable because it's focused on solutions, is that this idea that the communities that have contributed the least to climate change will suffer, or are suffering the first and the most, and so the countries that have emitted the least are experiencing the impacts first and and I think that gets glossed over a little bit in this kind of cooperative model, and also just the fact that, you know, there's almost a part of me, as I was kind of reading through this that wanted to, yes, the fossil fuel industry is portrayed negatively throughout the game, but it almost feels like it's this, like Silent antagonist, like it's, it's, I almost wanted someone, no one would want to play the fossil fuel industry right, like you would, but they don't play fair

Jason  1:06:09  
Traitor  mechanic!

Jacquelyn  1:06:10  
They don't play by the rules, right? And so I almost thought to myself, like, what would it be like if somebody played as a fossil fuel industry deliberately trying to undermine every single thing that all these interesting doing throughout the whole process, because that's what's happening. They are paying lobbyists, you know? They are undermining climate science, and they are responsive, right? They are. They are responsive to what everyone else is doing to sort of as we each try to respond to what the fossil fuel industry has enabled. The fossil fuel industry also adapts and changes, and so that is kind of missing. They're, they're, they're ever present, but somewhat almost passive in a way, and I but again, like you'd be, you'd spend like half an hour fighting over who had to play the fossil fuel industry. That would be like the game, like you have to just draw a random card. Or maybe it could be one of those, like, silent, you know, the games where you have, like, a secret identity,

Brian  1:07:05  
I can imagine people who would be anxious to play the antagonist.

Jacquelyn  1:07:08  
Yeah, that's fair. I think I've got one of those in my gaming group too.

Brian  1:07:12  
Okay, well, let's do grades. I'm happy to start. And actually, I think I know we usually do these separately, but let's just do the science and the fun grades together. If that's okay, if you want to kind of justify, I'm actually comfortable with both an A on science for intentionality. Yes, there's always simplifications, and yet they've tried to really robustly represent the system. Again, it's they, I think that they met their goal of being where realism was the target. I know that they really shot for that. In terms of fun, Jason and I are going to be going to a gaming con, running some games. I switched my game that I was going to play to this game. I wanted to play Daybreak with people. I wanted to teach people how to play daybreak. I I've enjoyed it, and I am excited to play it more. So I'm going to be double A,

Jason  1:07:59  
I'd say, probably A to A minus range for fun, and I just have to play another time or two to figure out which one of those two it is, because first time is always fairly challenging. But overall it seemed, it seemed entertaining and good. There was lots of moving parts that I could try to figure out how to make work for science A plus. This is, this is possibly one of the few games I've seen that has more science in it than wingspan, and a lot of that is hidden behind the QR codes, but it's there, and I want to acknowledge that they did the work to get the science down and to get it right and to put a lot of it there and accessible in the game, for those who want to look for it,

Brian  1:08:36  
pretty good for a game that was explicit about not wanting it to be educational.

Jacquelyn  1:08:40  
Yeah, I would, I mean, I still, I would say A in terms of want to play, because I haven't had a chance to actually, I've watched other people play it, but it's a game where, when I when you have to confess, when you first invited me to talk about it, I was initially like, oh my gosh, this sounds so cool. I love pandemic. This sounds like right up my alley. And then immediately thought, oh my God, no one's ever going to want to play this with me. It's going to feel, well, just thinking like it's going to feel

Jason  1:09:07  
Preachy?

Jacquelyn  1:09:08  
like, like the, I mean, just like a downer, or it's going to be difficult, or it's going to be too sciencey, or too too nerdy, like, I can't get anyone to play Terraforming Mars with me, right? And and then when I actually got a chance to unbox it and watch some videos, I realized, oh no, no, this, this will not be a hard game to sell to other people, to in terms of come and hang out with me and play daybreak, or bringing it in the classroom and actually being able to get through it in a session. And so I would say A in terms of, you know, just ease of an excitement about playing, and everything that I've seen and read about and just explored on my own. I would definitely say A plus for science.

Brian  1:09:46  
Do you think this will be a good match for the classroom?

Jacquelyn  1:09:48  
I do. I bring board games into my field, Natural History class towards the end of the semester, when everything's kind of cold and dark and dead and there's not a whole. A lot of field to do and and a lot of times, some of those games have not translated very well into the classroom. We've needed, like game ambassadors who need to learn the rules and then teach them in the class, and they get so bogged down in the details and in the gameplay mechanics that it becomes difficult, unless you have someone who's like, oh yeah, I know wingspan. Let me have let my table have that one. You really do kind of need someone to sort of convince everybody else how to play. Or we get through, we get through the end of the hour. And I think this is going to be a I think this is worth trying.

Brian  1:10:37  
Are you going to have to buy multiple copies? How do you do that?

Jacquelyn  1:10:40  
usually What I've done is I've had a collection of games that students have them kind of pulled from. I just did this for the first time last year, because it turns out, I have so many natural history related games that became finally doable, but now I'm sort of scheming about potentially doing something like that, where I get a whole bunch of copies and then disperse them throughout the room and have this be its own exercise.

Brian  1:11:04  
This sounds occasionally they're those little pockets of money that can come up at a university. And this seems like one of those things you might be able to convince somebody that this is worthwhile, yeah.

Jacquelyn  1:11:14  
Or maybe if Matt hears this podcast and the fact that I was reluctant to say anything too negative about it, he'll be like, hey,

Jason  1:11:23  
 well, I will say I clicked on the link that Brian mentioned for educators. It still says it's under construction, but it says that if you're an educator and you want discounted copies for use in the classroom, it tells you how to contact them.

Brian  1:11:35  
Oh, Jason canceled out my nitpick. Never mind. I mean, 

Jason  1:11:38  
well, that's all it has. It says, Oh, we also want to put up here, like lesson plans and letters for requesting budget stuff. Those aren't there yet, but at least there's the way to contact the company.

Brian  1:11:46  
I mean, the game released in 2023 so it's, I think it's probably not comeing at this point. But anyway, you know the hope springs eternal. Okay, fantastic. Well, I think, unfortunately, we were gonna have to cut it there. I really appreciate you, Jacquelyn, coming on. I We don't move in the same scientific circles, but knowing that you're a board gamer, maybe, maybe someday we'll be in the same space and we can play a game together with that would be really fun. 

Jacquelyn  1:12:12  
That would be great. I would love that. Yeah. 

Jason  1:12:13  
So where can people find you?

Jacquelyn  1:12:15  
Well, you can find me on blue sky, just with my name. Jacquelyn Gill, j, A, C, Q, U, E, L, y n, I'm one of the L, y n, Jacquelyns and I also have a climate podcast. It wrapped up a couple of years ago, but it was called warmer guards. It was one of the earliest climate podcasts. All of our episodes are still out there. Our last season focused around data, and it's my favorite season. We didn't talk about games. We should have and but we also have a new podcast that I'm working on right now with Phoebe Cohen from Williams, called Jacs and Phoebe make a planet where we're going to take you through the entire process of how the Earth became habitable, everything from its formation all the way to the first land plants, the sort of evolution of modern day animals. And the sort of frame for the podcast is that two science friends are going to make an apple pie. And as Carl Sagan says, if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. So we're going to build the whole planet so we can make our apple pie.

Brian  1:13:22  
That's fantastic. Please let us know when the podcast goes live. We'll make sure that we give you a shout out. Thank you, dear listeners. Please go live. Give a listen to Jacquelyn's podcast. When the time comes, we're going to call it there. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you have a great month and great games.

Jason  1:13:39  
And as always, have fun playing dice with the universe, see ya, 

Brian  1:13:44  
this has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.

Jacquelyn  1:14:08  
Sorry, my speaking of Energy Transition, lights just went off in my office.

Brian  1:14:15  
Yeah, I've seen people do this dance before.

Jason  1:14:19  
Anyone remember the old movie. Gremlins 2, where they talked about they were in this super futuristic building, and the lights got turned off because the guy didn't move. And then I realized in my postdoc, that was the reality I was living in. 

Jacquelyn  1:14:31  
Yeah, that's the future. We didn't get flying cars. We just had our lights randomly shut off. I'm so sorry, Jason, can you ask me your question again?

Transcribed by https://otter.ai