Inappropriately Joyous: Climate Games and River Rights with Meghna Jayanth and Joost Vervoort
Summary
All Will Rise is a narrative deck-building video game in which you play a climate lawyer prosecuting a billionaire for the murder of a river. Meghna Jayanth is a narrative designer and co-founder of Speculative Agency, the studio behind the game. Joost Vervoort is Associate Professor of Transformative Imagination at Utrecht University and the game's impact director.
What I love is how they've taken inspiration from the real rights of nature movement (the one that's given rivers in New Zealand and India legal personhood) and turned it into a vibrant, playable world full of psychological strategy and fun. In this episode of Earthworks:
Joy is a strategy, not a guilty pleasure. Joost and Meghna argue that the most powerful climate work holds the deep, structural, painful stuff and genuine playfulness at the same time. Most projects only manage one or the other.
Who gets to be the protagonist is a design choice, and a political one. Meghna's concept of "white protagonism" describes how mainstream games default to a very specific idea of who has agency in the world: the conqueror, the lone hero, the only person in a world of objects. Kuyili, a South Indian climate lawyer surrounded by a living, animist world, is a direct answer to that default.
A game can be a rehearsal space: practice the hard conversations, try on different tactics, fail safely, then go outside and do it for real.
Plus emotion cards called "Trauma Dump" and "Bullsh--” and why we should all want to liive in a world where civil society is “terrifyingly powerful”.
Get Connected
All Will Rise: allwillrise.com
Meghna Jayanth: @betterthemask across socials
Joost Vervoort: @Vervoort_Joost across socials
Takeaways
Three ideas that are still chasing each other around in my head:
Joost's vision of civil society as a terrifying force, not a fringe hobby: "I think citizens and the people have incredible power if we work together and understand how much of the system depends on us."
Meghna's observation that the default game protagonist is "the only person in a world of objects," which mirrors exactly how we've treated nature, and how All Will Rise tries to build the opposite: a world that's alive, where you're part of a movement rather than a lone savior.
A game can be a rehearsal space: practice the hard conversations, try on different tactics, fail safely, then go outside and do it for real.
Resources and fun stuff related to this episode
Rights of nature, for real: In 2017, New Zealand granted the Whanganui River legal personhood; days later, India did the same for the Ganges and Yamuna (later reversed). Marketplace's Rights of Rivers follows the New Zealand case and its ripple effects, including an attempt to do the same for the Colorado River. Naturebang's Rivers and the Rights of Nature covers New Zealand and India together.
ANTICIPLAY: Joost's research project at Utrecht University, studying how games shape the futures we're willing to imagine.
80 Days: Meghna's earlier game. BAFTA-nominated, TIME Game of the Year 2014, 750,000 words, anti-colonial retelling of Jules Verne. Pure awesome.
Terzij de Horde: Joost's black metal band, which also happens to make music about ecological crises.
