Digital eco pedagogies: Producing videogames with children for playing and telling stories about future landscapes with trees

Abstract

This article discusses ideas emerging from our conversations as we designed and delivered a series of art-based workshops with primary school children in the North of England to include them in the design of a videogame we were developing about future treescapes. The initial aims for the videogame were defined by Mersey Forest, a project partner, in connection with tree scientists and were to teach children how to plant, care for and value trees, however, our work with children demonstrated how children took a more political ‘climate-justice’ response to the tasks we set them which we believe links closely to how their age is deeply affected by the climate crisis. Here, we reflect on this in relation to the methods we designed to hear their voices and collect their ideas.

Introduction

This article explores some of our discussions around jointly undertaking a series of workshops with late primary and early secondary school children in the North of England to gather their ideas and feed them into the development of a videogame about future treescapes. Broadly, the development of the videogame was to encourage children to engage with trees as a response to the importance of valuing and caring for various treescape types as one part of tackling the climate crisis (Steffen et al., 2015), as well as in recognition of the fact children are more adversely affected by the climate crisis (Sanson and Burke, 2020), and adults want them to be active participants in climate change (Bullard et al., 2016). Given formal (Children’s Media Foundation (CMC) and Dubit, 2022) and informal childhood education (Benevento, 2021) on climate issues have been found to be weak, there is a need to find additional ways to bring about knowledge and active engagement. This work forms part of a knowledge exchange project funded by a UKRI joint research councils programme the ‘Future of UK Treescapes’ called ‘Digital Voices of the Future’.

One of the project partners, Mersey Forest, was keen to find new ways of engaging children with establishing, caring for and using trees. To this end, the knowledge exchange project sought to understand if videogames could help this cause in light of the fact that as Dodgeon and Simons (2022) note:

People no longer just play videogames; they also play with videogames. Alongside the streaming of gameplay, live performance, content creation, modding and cosplay, games have become social destinations in their own right – including to access other cultural experiences such as music concerts and film screenings. (Dodgeon and Simons, 2022, n.p)

The advent of online social gaming like this shows videogames potential importance in relation to the more historic body of work about socialising in the physical world that illustrates how children become social beings and active society members by holding certain beliefs in relation to connections with family and institutions through social interactions (e.g. James, 2013; Lefebvre, 1991). The intention, therefore, was to see if online game play could encourage ‘real’ world action in relation to engagement and care for trees by adopting popular online social gaming spaces already used by children. However, as we discuss later, it has not escaped our attention that there is an irony in developing software to help with the climate crisis when the massive online gaming platform that is needed to play it is also contributing to the climate crisis.

Admittedly, the idea was initially adult and human-centric, despite the topic being about trees and the intended audience being children, with desires to produce a game that could model literal tree planting and care to illustrate how actual tree landscapes in the Mersey Forest region might change over time. Yet, our work with children has shown us that they more readily de-centre the human in the context of trees and the climate crisis more widely, and also neither make distinct binaries between digital and natural worlds, nor actual or fictional landscapes.

Therefore, this article reflects on how videogames, particularly when designed with children, can offer alternative eco-pedagogies from those they might be exposed to within formal education. It is structured firstly to discuss the climate crisis and eco-pedagogies within a context of political oppression and the impact this has on children. We then problematise digital solutions. This sets the context for outlining the workshops we designed and undertook with children to inform the design and development of a treescapes videogame in the areas of world building, character design and gaming mechanics.

The climate crisis, eco-pedagogies and oppression

Both the climate crisis and (eco-)pedagogies are political and entangled with one another and thus children are embroiled in both. Drawing on the work of Brady et al. (1995) and Schmid (2008), Holecz et al. (2022) we link children’s political engagement to ‘three socialising spheres: educational, recreational, and civic’ (p. 58). James (2013) describes how children’s opinions are shaped through processes of socialisation, that is, ‘how, through their socialising, they come to know and understand the world and their own place within it’ (p. 2).

Holecz et al. (2022) go on to describe how this highlights schools as the primary socialising sphere, because they provide the context for children’s first exposure to a social setting. Yet, drawing on the report by Dodgeon and Simons (2022) mentioned above, it could be argued that videogames also provide early exposure to social settings outside of formal education, in that their most favoured games such as Roblox and Minecraft are inherently social and allow friends to chat and play together online. This is particularly important in the context of the climate crisis where the UK National Curriculum offers at best a ‘patchy’ approach to climate education and ‘young people recognise that they don’t know everything they should. . .[with] some saying they want to know more. . .right now’ (CMC and Dubit, 2021, n.p). Outside of formal education there is also limited climate change literature for children, and analysis of picture books suggests that ‘children’s books about climate change lack informational material and overlook the human consequences’ (Benevento, 2021: 201).

For Crary (2022), like others, there is a direct relationship between neoliberal structures that include constant extraction from the Earth to feed technological progression and the climate crisis. Formal educational curricula are intrinsically neoliberal, and hence it could be argued are also fuelling the climate crisis through their lack of concern with high quality teaching or educational resources in this area. Crary (2022) is radical in his approach and argues that climate recovery cannot come about until the end of Capitalism, much of which he considers is driven by the advancement of technologies and digital forms of communication, and that to maintain natural ecology we must move to embrace more hybrid analogue and digital ways of living:

If we’re fortunate, a short-lived digital age will have been overtaken by a hybrid material culture based on both old and new ways of living and subsisting cooperatively. Now, amid intensifying social and environmental breakdown, there is a growing realization that daily life overshadowed on every level by the internet complex has crossed a threshold of irreparability and toxicity. (Crary, 2022: 1)

In one sense this highlights the hypocrisy of producing a videogame positioned within eco-pedagogies (and we write more about this in the next section), but as will be shown later, we explored the ways in which we could create literal crossovers between natural and digital worlds and even sought to engage children in critiquing digital aesthetics and the intentions of their creators through the deliberate inclusion of natural materials from treescapes into the videogame co-design process (see below).

One evening ahead of the research workshops, we got chatting about Freire’s (1967/2017) ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, our schools and how they philosophically mirror prisons.

Many of Freire’s (1967/2017) ideas around oppression in schools have stood the test of time, with one key point of divergence in that he considered students were not aware that pedagogy was oppressing them, whereas today children appear strongly conscious that schools are oppressive (one reflection of which is the numbers of children refusing to return to school since COVID closures ended (Lester and Michelson, 2024)). Indeed, several children during the workshops asked why they don’t usually have classes like the workshop or asked us not to leave as they did not want to return to lessons or even to get them out of the school, suggesting they do not want to be at school at all. A literal cry for help!

Simultaneously, we also know that children are much more likely than adults (of our generation and above) to suffer from climate anxiety (Leger-Goodes et al., 2022). Yet as mentioned above, the UK National Curriculum across primary and secondary education has a neglectful approach to teaching issues connected to the climate crisis as another form of oppression by refusing them access to knowledge most needed.

As a result, designing a videogame about treescapes while working with natural scientists and the Mersey Forest as well as educationalists and schools, suggests that we cannot ignore the messy politics that lie behind both formal education and the climate crisis and their entanglement with one another.

In relation to this, the ‘New Sociology of Childhood’ that emerged in the early 1990s (see Tisdall and Punch, 2012) and which continues to this day, has explored the relationship between children’s agency to adults, and the ways in which this is accepted, negotiated, and resisted (Alanen and Mayall, 2001). Given that young people are understood as contributors to the division of physical and mental labour in society (Qvortrup, 1985, 1994, 2009; Wintersberger, 1994), of which the climate crisis is a large mental and physical labour, it is important to understand their views.

Problematising digital ‘solutions’

The idea of digital technology as a vector for solutionist ‘democratization’ is highly contested and has been problematised specifically within the context of measures to try and mitigate everything from inequality to the climate crisis (see Morozov, 2014; Daub, 2020; Sætra, 2023; Benjamin, 2019a, 2019b). Milman (2023) has described corporate marketing strategies which present extractivist technologies as some kind of climate panacea as ‘magical tech innovation’ (n.p). Within the highly neoliberalised context of technology presented as a ‘solution’ to the climate crisis, it is a matter of urgency to create systems and processes which might enable children and adults to grasp the structural and systemic implications of extractivist logic. At the same time, we also have the remit to create conditions for children to understand the ways in which they have agency and efficacy, and via the Treescapes project, to support children in understanding and enacting care for trees and their complex, entangled habitats and networks.

Our methodology (outlined in the next section) was designed by us under the aegis of X||dinary Stories, and, as designers and researchers, is an ‘Onto-Ethico-Epistemology’ (Barad, 2007), in which our actions, processes and core ontological commitments are inseparable from our ethical imperatives. Our way of approaching design and research is therefore also inseparable from our values and in many ways our experiential knowledge as people also facing the ongoing impact of climate emergency.

In designing a digital game for children to play online, we are highly aware of the tensions and urgent problems associated with this context, not least in assuming a digital solution and in using Cloud-based technologies calling the Cloud a ‘carnivore’, Monserrate (2022) writes:

To get at the matter of the Cloud we must unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fiber optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers, and more. We must attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, minerals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives. In this way, the Cloud is not only material but is also an ecological force. As it continues to expand, its environmental impact increases, even as the engineers, technicians, and executives behind its infrastructures strive to balance profitability with sustainability. In my experience, nowhere is this dilemma more visible than in the walls of the infrastructures where the content of the Cloud lives: the factory-libraries where data is stored and computational power is pooled to keep our cloud applications afloat. (Monserrate, 2022, n.p.)

Gonzalez Monserrate’s attention to the materiality of digital technologies is highly relevant to our own methodology and to the specific materially engaged methods enacted via workshops for Treescapes and many other X||dinary Stories projects (such as The Future of Broadcast Media, 2022–2023, The Gipton Space Agency, 2023, and the Digital Good/Bad Project, 2023–2024). Benjamin (2019a) articulates the need to go beyond technological or scientific literacy, to seek ‘a more far-reaching sociotechnical imaginary that examines not only how the technical and social components of design are intertwined but also imagines how they might be configured differently’ (p. 5). To do this Benjamin (2019a) urges us to ‘free up our own thinking and question many of our starting assumptions’ (p. 5). Epistemically, the belief in data and symbolic representation as more truthful and valid than the world of materials, relationality, places, humans and other animals is also a highly problematic assumption (philosophically known as ‘Neo-Platonism’). In taking children’s play and embodied encounters with materials, places and other living beings and converting it to ‘data’ to be stored on digital and other symbolic devices, we enact one of the foremost tensions between colonial knowledge and that which might represent a break from and an alternative to epistemic and material extraction. Specific strategies and methods we have evolved over many years as researchers, artists and critical technologists include:

• A high degree of engagement with materials and materiality, bodies and embodiment

• Arts Based Research (see Finley, 2005, among many others, which argues for the importance of including arts-based methods within research)

• Design Justice (after Costanza-Chock, 2020) that argues that those that are being designed for must be included in the process

Via these combined approaches, we aspire to centre the knowledge, interests and processes of participants, often via processes of making, drawing, model-making storytelling and play, and to suspend our a priori understandings of what ‘useful’ knowledge, practice, games, stories and indeed, ‘data’ might be. We invite participants into that which is not sequestered in spreadsheets or databases but encountered in the flows of life, in keeping with Woodward (2019), who writes:

Perhaps music or trees are best not thought of as ‘objects’. Ingold, along with other writers, has suggested that the word object shouldn’t be used at all as it implies something closed off from and separate to the world. Objects stand in our way (Ingold, 2010) rather than being part of the flows of materials that make up our worlds. Instead, he suggests using the word thing, which he takes to mean a ‘gathering of the threads of life’ (2010: 4). A thing invites us in to participate, as it is part of the flows of life. (Woodward, 2019: 13)

Ingold and Woodward’s emphasis on embodiment and materiality is arguably at odds with the historical trajectory of computation as a dualist abstraction predicated on Neo-Platonic reductionism (see Varela et al., 1991). A pedagogy which is not predicated on dualist separation must arguably resolve or confront the dualism at the core of digital technologies. The connection between material and embodied engagement and arts-based research is a refusal of unsituated mind-body splits, but also a challenge to the construct of a clearly separable ‘environment’. Climate crisis has a material impact on all life, but as Whitmarsh (2022), states, the climate crisis is implicated in wider social injustices and impacts the economically poorest people in the Global South disproportionally. Whitmarsh (2022) writes of ‘the great emotional distance created between humans and the environment’ (p. 7) characterising such distance as a feature of Global North ontologies, making it epistemically challenging to ‘appreciate Indigenous ways of life which are fundamentally connected to the environment’ (p. 7). Whitmarsh writes of the importance of co-design in Environmental Education and of strategies to engage children in active, collaborative learning, but they do not address the nuance of critiques related to co-design and its idealised flattening of power relationships. As Costanza-Chock (2020) reminds us:

Well-meaning designers and technologists often agree that including “diverse” end users in the design process is the ideal. However, many feel that this is usually, sometimes, or mostly impossible to realize in practice. To mitigate the potential problems that come from having no one with lived experience of the design problem actually participate in the design team, researchers and designers have suggested several strategies. Unfortunately, most of these strategies involve creating abstractions about communities that are not really at the table in the design process. (Costanza-Chock, 2020: 81)

As X||dinary Stories designers, we are acutely aware of the hype and idealisation which can occlude on the ground realities, including participatory design and the idealisation of Critical Pedagogy, associated with rationalist dogma and an occlusion of racism and sexism, according to Ellsworth via their article entitled ‘Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy’ (Ellsworth, 1989). Design Justice seeks to ‘rethink extractive design processes and to replace them with approaches that produce community ownership, profit, credit, and visibility’ (Costanza-Chock, 2020: 90). Costanza-Chock (2020) writes:

Design justice does not focus on developing systems to abstract the knowledge, wisdom, and lived experience of community members who are supposed to be the end users of a product. Instead, design justice. . .flip the “problem” of how to ensure community participation in a design process on its head to ask instead how design can best be used as a tool to amplify, support, and extend existing community-based processes. This means a willingness to bring design skills to community-defined projects, rather than seeking community participation or buy-in to externally defined projects. (pp. 83–84)

In light of our complex interpretation of Design Justice, Critical Pedagogy and theories relating to labour, Environmental Education and games, we are also mindful of Nguyen’s (2021) reminder that ‘creativity’ and Late Capitalism are often entwined, a point that is made in relation to the videogame Minecraft, which is not dissimilar, in terms of ‘creativity’ from Roblox in terms of individual rather than collective progression and creativity as directly related to construction.

In many ways, our remit as designers for the Treescapes project implicitly confronts the neoliberal and extractivist tropes of mainstream gaming. Part of our brief was to show the non-human duration of tree growth, requiring us to slow down the in-game chronology via day and night cycles and changes in the mise-en-scène, to decelerate what is often a highly accelerated form of mediation. We eschewed constructs such as in-game ‘credits’, while also developing mechanisms for embodying cause and effect, such as collecting acorns and planting them in suitable environmental contexts which enable trees to grow healthily. These are important challenges for us as designers, not to inherit without question the pervasive modalities and ideologies of digital gaming, while also creating a game children will both enjoy and learn from.

In this vein we are now creating a game which is grounded in the imaginaries and artworks of the many children who gave the project their arts-based attention and creative energy, but it is also grounded in critical awareness of the political economy and neoliberal ontology of such an undertaking. Throughout the game, the characters they have made will ask children if they should stop playing and instead look at the sky, touch a leaf or find a tree to climb or draw. The game is just a starting point, and our greatest hope is that children might more often than not abandon it and instead encounter the treescapes all around them, beyond the flat abstracted content of computer screens. The next section describes in more detail the methods we used with children to garner their ideas and which later became entwined with ours.

Co-design workshops

Together we developed a series of workshops which were undertaken with children aged 8–12 in a Northern port town in the UK. The workshops were designed to allow school children to explore key elements involved in game development; namely, world building, character design and gaming mechanics.

World building workshop

In the world building workshop, children were asked to work individually or in pairs/small groups to make a physical model of a game world based on treescapes. ‘Treescapes’ was the term used to encourage children to think about the various ways in which trees exist in their lives, that is, in rural and urban environments, en masse or as a singular tree.

To produce the game world models we gave children a drawn and written prompt encouraging them to make (Figure 1) with a range of physical materials, an approach known as a ‘Cultural Probe’ (see e.g. Gaver et al., 1999; Wargo and Alvarado, 2020) where physical materials were carefully packaged into enticing bundles and offered as design prompts. To this end, children were given packs of craft materials containing coloured paper, pipe cleaners, googly eyes, coloured plasticine and modelling clay. Also, a range of natural materials: twigs, pinecones of various sizes, conkers, sticks and bits of lichen etc. Offering children natural materials also drew on ideas from Rautios’ (2013) work about how materials have agency that draw children to them, as well as responding to our desire not to completely separate digital and natural worlds but to facilitate crossovers. Finally, children were provided with a Minecraft LEGO Minifigure. This was given to provide a context for scale in building their worlds, but also it was intended as a reminder to children that the physical models they were making were part of digital game design that would feed into videogame development; Minecraft being a game many children are familiar with.

Figure 1.

Worldbuilding workshop prompt (Image by Yamada-Rice, 2023).

After making their game worlds, the children were shown how to scan their models using a photogrammetry app which provided a literal link into digital spaces by creating 3D assets that could be used directly in the videogame development. This was a method we had developed in prior research (Yamada-Rice and Dare, 2024) and found it to work well with children as it provides multiple entry points into the task to suit their individual interests.

Character design and gaming mechanics

Kress (2010) writes about how different modes of communication make it possible to gain or lose the ability to express information. For example, what can be conveyed in sound is not the same as in image, nor is it identical to what can be disseminated in writing. This is because English writing is a linear process that moves from left to right and is based on symbols that connect to phonemes, whereas gaming narratives are non-linear because they predominately utilise affordances of the visual mode based on spatial conventions. Further, gaming narratives are often embodied by the player and interactive meaning movement is also a core convention. Thus, when designing a methodology to work with children in game design it is important to utilise the modes of communication most in tune with this, so they can think through the related materials and be able to fully articulate their ideas.

Drawing on such communication theory, the character design and gaming mechanics workshop simplified an idea used by Yamada-Rice in Masters-level teaching where University students, working on game design, are asked to embody their character ideas before making them digitally by creating costumes and then ‘living’ as their character for 24-hours to see how they would embody everyday scenarios (Figure 2). The intention of this is that it will add additional depth and ideas for how students’ character designs might respond in the digital game world they will go on to create later.

Figure 2.

Living as a game character (Image by Yamada-Rice, 2020).

This idea was adapted and used with the children in our project on a smaller scale. As a result, children were provided with a prompt to make a mask and embody their character in the school playground while showing us the intended narratives and mechanics for their game design (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Design prompt for the character design and gaming mechanics workshops (Image by Yamada-Rice, 2024).

As time with the children was limited, they were provided with a selection of base masks to use as a starting point. As with the worldbuilding workshop, children were also presented with a wide range of craft and natural materials to work with. In addition to the theories mentioned above, this also drew on the idea (and ecopedagogic aspiration) that:

Thinking with and through materials, their signification, their origins, and life cycles, can animate one’s relationship to the living and non-living world. As a little push back against alienation it can also enliven one’s sense of responsibility towards that world. (Dittel and Edwards, 2022: 5)

Thus, by providing a selection of natural materials with other selected elements such as stickers of eyes from anime and manga, we hoped to provide material links to children’s interest in popular culture which is often connected to gaming, and offer direct connections between that and trees and the wider natural environment.

Analysing the models, character designs and ideas for gaming mechanics was undertaken by combining Visual Content Analysis (Bell, 2001) with Thematic Analysis (Braun and Clark, 2006). However, this article reflects on just one idea emerging from the research workshops which is how children’s gaming worlds could act as spaces to validate children’s knowledge of climate oppression and their particular interest in more-than-human worlds in the context of climate justice. This is discussed next.

Climate oppression and justice for more-than-human worlds

In this section we draw on just two game worlds created by children that link with some of the issues discussed this far. Firstly, the politics of oppression and secondly their interest in justice for more-than-human worlds.

One group of secondary school-aged children produced a dystopian forest in which people believe they are going to relax, but in actual fact are under government surveillance. This was indicated by placing ‘googly eyes’ on animal figurines, hidden in vegetation and on bark on the ground (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Dystopian government surveillance forest.

Although this example was one of a kind, it replicates some of the tensions between capitalism, oppression and the climate crisis perfectly, where nature is used as a cover for government surveillance. In his book ‘24/7’ Crary (2014) describes in detail the sinister entanglement of governments and the military to use nature as a hotbed for research that is hoped can lead to greater human productivity- and thus greater extraction and wealth at the expense of the planet.

Over the past five years the US Defence Department has spent large amounts of money to study these creatures [birds]. Researchers with government funding. . .have been investigating the brain activity of birds during these long sleepless periods, with the hope of acquiring knowledge applicable to human beings. The aim is to discover ways to enable people to go without sleep and to unction productively and efficiently. The initial objective, quite simply, is the creation of the sleepless soldier. (Crary, 2014: 1/2)

Although the production of such an overtly political game world was rare, most children articulated their interest in creating a more-than-human gaming environment and narrative where human desires cannot compete with other living creatures and trees. Several of the children hoped the gaming narrative would portray non-human life powerfully revolting against humans. A climate change narrative that is not the one commonly touted by governments, which rather tend to focus on foregrounding human desires and needs, with other life there to be dominated and controlled by us.

One child articulated this desire in relation to her awareness of climate politics by producing a radioactive cat character (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Radioactive cat mask.

The child who made the mask said that the radioactive symbol she had drawn and attached to it referred to wastewater the Japanese government had begun releasing into the ocean after the collapse of part of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami which she believed to still be radioactive. The water, she said, will create radioactive super animals, like the cat she had made, to rise up and fight the humans who put the wastewater in the ocean. This child’s creation of the radioactive cat character could be seen as a form of climate protest to political decisions made by adults towards the environment. Indeed, visual analysis of her creation shows how she designed the cat’s face to resemble the Japanese flag, yet it also includes the Asian lucky cat lifting its paw to beckon in good fortune. Zhanda et al. (2021) outlines ‘the rising role of teenagers’ activism and protests for climate change action’ (p. 87), yet this example shows how children even younger are eco-conscious and keen to express their protest of adult decisions made in this context.

If adults truly want children to take on the physical and mental labour associate with the climate crisis and produce changes, then we must accept that we cannot control their ways of protesting current policies, such as the ‘school strikes for climate’ (Zhanda et al., 2021), and must similarly listen to them when they show us the kind of gaming worlds and eco-pedagogies they hope for, even if this moves us away from literal representations of planting, caring for and using trees, as was the initial aim of this project.

These powerful narratives of nature conquering human life were also mirrored in the disruption caused when insects escaped from the natural materials used in the workshops into the classroom. Nature cannot be contained by human rules. Yet the surprise of the disruption was also a reminder of how separated UK schools usually are from the natural world. As a point of contrast, we also attended Ashoona’s (2024) exhibition ‘When I draw’, that contained images of hybrid human-animal/fish forms which the accompanying explanation stated resulted from the Inuk artist living in close and prolonged contact to the natural world and thus not making a distinction between human and other animal forms. These two points of contrast make it possible to ask the what if formal education made better us of the natural world as a setting for learning.

Conclusion

This article has reflected on the first part of the ‘Digital Voices of the Future’ treescapes project to include children’s ideas in the design of a videogame about changing treescapes in order to engage them in exploring, caring for and using real trees.

We described some of the tricky context in which we set out to engage children in the project, which includes the entanglement of politics, big tech and education with the climate emergency, all of which were connected to meeting children in schools with curricula that we believe, like others before us, deliberately sets out to oppress them in the broadest sense such as Freire (1967/2017) has shown, but also specifically through the accidental or deliberate lack of quality education in relation to the climate crisis (Benevento, 2021; CMC and Dubit, 2022). Further, when children do take action against this, they are often punished, such is the case with direct action like the ‘school strikes for climate’.

Mindful of this backdrop, we designed workshops that we hoped would allow children to respond in ways that were free from the school curriculum and different to the experiences they might regularly meet there. For example, we created prompts that had limited rules and did not steer children’s making in any direction. Indeed, they were also free to make nothing at all.

We hope that the two examples we have included in this article serve as strong illustrations of how children are often politically aware but most importantly, given the chance, they do not frame the world in the same way as us. The latter is particularly important, given the nature of the climate emergency which will need ways of seeing it that are radically different from our own.

To this end, children’s interest in the workshops and the materials offered to them provide hope for alternative narratives in relation to the climate crisis. In particular, although children could use any of the materials provided, their willingness to create gaming worlds that incorporated natural materials call into question gaming aesthetics that are made for them and seems to respond directly to Crary’s (2022) call quoted at the start of this article for the need to combine digital and analogue materials more frequently, in order to view materials which are all sourced from the Earth (even digital ones) more holistically.

Next, it falls to us to decide how to incorporate children’s ideas into the development of the videogame fully to show they are listened to, but also create an engaging and playful space in which they can socialise with others. As stated at the start of this paper this is particularly important given how prior research has shown that social opportunities educate in beneficial ways (James, 2013) and gaming offers spaces for children to socialise without adults. However, children are still not as of yet fully free of the aesthetics and mechanics created by adults. Our work with children suggests that there could be potential for a new kind of biodiversity in digital games, that incorporates aesthetics and patterns from nature, and seeks to break the common ‘addiction’ mechanics that try to keep children gaming for hours and instead encourage children to play as much in physical environments too. Doing this will better acknowledge all matter and support the natural world. We will explore this directly in the game development to see if it is possible to do all this while encouraging children to stop playing the video game we create and go outside and explore trees and nature, even if this is one tree in an urban landscape or observing their roots pushing up paving stones. To do so would be to develop a game that has principles of Design Justice (Costanza-Chock, 2020) at its core. We move on to this challenge next.