Ecosystem: Aotearoa is a card game designed to explore the intersection between games and sustainability education.
Ecosystem: Aotearoa models New Zealand's unique ecosystem in a fun and interactive way. By engaging the players with these hidden natural systems, I aim to create and foster a better understanding of our impacts on the environment among young New Zealanders.
By creating an interactive abstraction of this complex system, this project aims to make the complicated intricacies of its subject matter more tangible and real for its players. By outlining the unique dependencies and interactions between different species (and humans) in our ecological backyard, the game will reinforce and teach systems thinking, emphasising players’ influence on the systems they create in the game and their influence in the real world. Different strategies and play-styles will also cause the players that gravitate towards these strategies to create positive bonds and foster empathy with the species depicted in the associated cards.
In Ecosystem: Aotearoa, players create their own ecosystem with cards that represent New Zealand's unique species. Each card plays a role in generating or transferring 'Mouri' tokens between cards or expending mouri to perform special actions based on the animal or plants' real-world behaviour.
Throughout the game, players may have Pests forcibly enter their ecosystem and begin to disrupt the systems they have built.
Human Influence cards can be boons or banes, depending on the card drawn. Some may augment another card to produce more mouri or become more resilient, and some cards might help you with your pest problems. Other Human Influence cards might pollute or destroy your ecosystem.
