Background/Objectives

“Are You Future Ready?” is a digital game developed by a graduate student at the School of Informatics at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in partnership with climate, resilience and sustainability experts at WSP USA, an infrastructure advisory services firm, that aims to help organizations better define their own journey to achieve their sustainable development goals while expanding awareness about the impact of climate change. The game is inspired by the key messages within the book co-authored by Alastair MacGregor and Tom Lewis, Future Ready: Your Organization’s Guide to Rethinking Climate, Resilience, and Sustainability, published in 2023. The challenge is designed to add an interactive and dynamic dimension to how organizations become “Future Ready.” Teams choose a scenario and build their game plan to achieve Future Ready status in each of the three target areas: resiliency, decarbonization, and societal benefit. Along the way, teams select and deploy a mix of four types of strategies: climate, society, resources, and technology. Each strategy has a specific cost and provides varying contributions to each of the Future Ready goals. The game is played across three stages, representing a 12-year time horizon, acknowledging that achieving goals overnight is often not an option. To achieve Future Ready status, participants need to score 100+ points in each of the target areas by the end of stage three.

Approach/Activities

The game was developed through the consultation of infrastructure resilience experts from WSP USA. Eleven project scenarios were identified to sample the diverse challenges faced by stakeholders in the built environment. Fifty-seven strategies were developed drawing from project experience in a wide range of sectors. Ten each of black swan events and community initiatives were selected based on the externalities seen in case studies reviewed by the game creators. Together, these elements make up the cards used throughout the challenge. Each card was then assigned scores for each of the Future Ready goals, reflecting the effects (positive or negative) of that card as it relates to each goal. In each game, all scenario cards are available to the user. However, only random subsets of strategy, black swan event and community initiative cards are available to the user, adding variability to gameplay. To achieve the desired level of difficulty and variability, a simulator (bot) was developed to model gameplay. The bot was trained to maximize the game score across possible combinations of scenarios, strategies, black swan events, and community initiatives. In each iteration, 10,000 games were simulated, and the results were used to tune the card scores for “decarbonization”, “resilience” and “society” until the game was sufficiently difficult and variable.

Results/Lessons Learned

The game was launched in December 2023 and has since been played by hundreds of infrastructure professionals around the world. The game has been popular with industry organizations: WTS International (originally named Women’s Transportation Seminar) and the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), for two. The digital format is adaptable to the stage, as a keynote presentation, and to the breakout room, as a competitive exercise with multiple teams. As the response to the game has shown, “Are You Future Ready?” is a cutting-edge digital challenge that provides a fun and engaging way for players to learn about the impact of climate change and how to become Future Ready organizations.