About TAG

What is TAG?

The Adaptation Game (TAG) is an inclusive story-telling experience that scales climate change and disaster preparedness down from overwhelming global fears to local, human risks and realities.

TAG provides a fictional experience of ‘living through’ three natural disasters in their local area. TAG enables players to create their own place-based storylines that clearly and meaningfully humanises the concept of disaster planning and climate change into players’ lives in a meaningful, practical, actionable way. After playing, players have taken actions such as joining community groups, starting neighbourhood WhatsApp groups, and generally reporting a better understanding of personal and communal resilience.

Here's some of the feedback we've received:

“Woah, this is like real life stuff but we can do it from a safe space.”

“It’s creating a micro community for that time, we can play ourselves, coming up with little solutions to these wicked problems with these other people…learning from each other which is what community is anyway when it works well.” 

TAG Principles

TAG was created based on the following principles which were cocreated with the community including input from First Nations Australians:

1. Give space for unexpected creativity: the game must avoid assumptions about ability or resources of players and provide freedom for creativity while acknowledging constraints.

2. There is no ‘right’ way to prepare, adapt or mitigate: the game should not make judgement on the quality of adaptations or mitigation actions in a ‘standardised’ way.

3. Encourage story telling: players learn the most from sharing and hearing each others’ experiences and community knowledge.

4. Avoid stereotypes: when creating awareness of the experience of vulnerable community members, avoid assumptions, stereotypes or speaking on behalf of others in ways that might not be appropriate.

5. Build a sense of community: the game should support the ability to form real-world connections and discussion about who will support you and who you will support in a crisis.

These principles have been central to why the game has connected with players in a radically different and meaningful way.

TAG Benefits

TAG was designed to and is showing the following benefits for and with players:

• Connecting residents to each other and highlight the need for a strong, connected community. 

• Reducing anxiety about climate change and ability to respond to disasters.

• Increasing agency to act and prepare early.

• Reducing feelings of isolation by connecting players to each other, their local area and showing that they aren’t alone in feeling unsure about what to do.

Want more detail?

Download the TAG Explainer PDF