"Gotta Get 'Em All!": A Game About Billionaires and Climate Obstruction

This paper presents a design case study of "Gotta get 'em all!", an analog collaborative game about climate obstruction, which the authors define as future actions that prevent people from effectively addressing climate change. Its central aim is to examine whether games can use active literacy, meaning the performance of a newly learned concept through play, to move players beyond hegemonic capitalist worldviews toward critical literacy. The authors ground the project in the premise that extreme wealth and powerful vested interests function as barriers to climate action, citing scholarship in climate policy and game studies alongside recent journalism on ultra-wealthy individuals investing in private apocalypse bunkers as evidence that this concern has moved from theory to observable practice.

The game is a satirical tabletop experience in which players, cast as assassins, research a wealthy target using their phones and craft a wanted poster arguing why that individual should be "stopped" first. Teams then pitch their targets, and the group votes on the most compelling case. Investigation, team discussion, and a structured debriefing form the core sequence, with the debriefing intended to help players process difficult emotions. The designers justify the violent framing as a deliberate way to foreground systemic power and to counter climate anxiety by encouraging collective, action-oriented engagement, drawing on research into sustainability game jams.

The methodology is research through design, with the game tested across several early iterations and currently being prepared for an online print-and-play release. Preliminary findings are qualitative and suggest that players adopt the concept of obstruction in their pitches and can explain it after some initial difficulty separating it from individual unethical conduct. Playtests produced debate over whether climate obstruction could justify violent self-defense, while the debriefings revealed mixed reactions, with some players experiencing stress and others finding the experience cathartic. The authors acknowledge open design questions, particularly whether to use real, fictional, or thinly disguised billionaires.