Sustainable Development spotlight: Prasad’s climate action games
Posted on 13 March 2025
The York SU Sustainable Development Grant offers funding to projects that aim to address at least one of the Sustainable Development Goals within the York Community. With 17 Goals to choose from, this means the Grant funds a broad range of innovative, inspiring and impactful initiatives. Sustainable Development Spotlight stories celebrate the work delivered with the help of the Grant and interview successful applicants to find out more about how they used the Grant funding to realise their ambitions and have a real impact in the York community.
In this article, York SU are chatting to Prasad Sandbhor. Prasad is an applied games designer who is currently completing a PhD at the University of York. We caught up with Prasad to learn more about his research and how he used the Sustainable Development Grant to help him deliver work on climate action through role-playing games.
Tell us a bit about the project that you got funded through the Sustainable Development Grant.
I got funding to help with the production of role- playing games called ‘Climate Club’ and ‘Climate Club 2.0. These games are part of my PhD research looking at how we can design games that help people make sense of their climate actions. My focus is on University students in the UK and how we can use these games to help them think about their climate actions. The Grant allowed me to make prototypes of the games and then work with groups of students to test them out.
The first game, ‘Climate Club’, is a tabletop role-playing game dealing with climate action-related decision-making challenges within everyday constraints. Players played as individuals facing dilemmas about very specific individual climate actions, like how do I find the most climate friendly way of my daily commute to the university, or do I go for a vegan diet or not. The second game, ‘Climate Club 2.0’, follows a mini-live action role-playing (LARP) format wherein a group of University students are trying to plan a sustainable holiday.
In both these projects, I was looking at how the game can help players to creatively think of different climate actions they can do while keeping in mind the constraints or barriers that they may have at a systematic or individual level. The games are about how you make sense of what you think is the right thing for you to do or what is the most feasible thing for you to do in the context of the climate crisis.
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How did you use the Grant funding to help make this happen?
Developing the games was an iterative process. So I would make a prototype, play it and update it. Every time, I would do some printing and organise an event and call out to people to come and play the game. For all of this and most of the logistics, I was making use of the Sustainable Development Grant.
Did you face any challenges in delivering your project?
It was quite challenging to organise the play sessions to get people to play the game in the beginning. That took a lot of effort. I had to look for the times when students are free, when they don't have exams and just plan it properly in the timetable. Initially, I struggled a lot to get people to come along. I was also trying to reach out to colleges and then host the games in the college rooms through them. Although there was a lot of publicity through newsletters, I didn't get many participants.
But later, I partnered with Environmental Sustainability at York (ESAY) that I now am a part of and the University’s Sustainability Week to host my game sessions. I got more sign ups through these partnerships. I also collaborated with the York Environment Week to help get more engagement from outside the University.
Do you have any advice for someone who might be considering applying for the Sustainable Development Grant?
I do remember having to think about the impact of my project. That was the major question to address in the application, what is the outcome and then what is the impact that it's going to cause. I think highlighting that when you apply is important. I think identifying impacts is a helpful practice in general while applying for all grants.
Finally, sometimes it can feel quite difficult to take action on climate change because it is so overwhelming and such a big topic. Do you have any advice based on your own experiences for how people can get involved with climate action despite how overwhelming and complex it is?
I think I try to keep my work separate in my head from the discussions around climate change. A lot of what we learn about climate change on a daily basis is mostly quite depressing, serious and often very negative., It is what it is and I rather think that it needs to be like that because it moves us to act. But I also think when you are trying to work on something that is an intervention to address the climate crisis you can’t let the negativity around it affect you too much.
I don't think I completely understand what's happening and no matter how much I try to do that, it keeps changing. It's very fuzzy and at the same time I'm trying to just convey a part of that fuzziness to others through my games. Which means it's important for me to not let what's going on in my head impact my work too much.
What I’m trying to create through my games is some positivity. They don’t make people feel too negative, the aim is for people to think “oh, we can still do something about this”. So my advice is while you continue with your work try not to let the fuzziness and negativity impact you too much, and hopefully you can then bring some positivity to people’s thoughts and approach to address the climate crisis.
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You can learn more about the Climate Club game through Prasad’s published research paper ‘Climate Club: A Group-based Game to Support Sensemaking of Climate Actions’ and you can find out more about Prasad’s ongoing work via his IGGI profile.
If you’ve been inspired by Prasad’s Sustainable Development Grant project visit York SU’s Sustainability page and scroll down to ‘Sustainable Development Grant' to find out more about applying for your own grant funding.