I have to admit that when I first found out that we were making voicemails from the future for this Future Coast game, I thought it was a little weird because I didn’t understand the point of it and how it would be beneficial to the players of the game. When I went outside to make my voicemail, I didn’t want anyone that wasn’t in our class to hear me because I knew they would wonder what it was that I was doing since I was talking about how we ran out of water. So I tried to go where there was the fewest number of students possible.
Although after I listened to some of the voicemails I realized that it actually was a fun, entertaining idea. Once I started listening to other people’s voicemails I felt so embarrassed because other people got really creative with their voicemails, whereas I wasn’t very creative with mine. After listening to some of the voicemails, I started to realize what the actual point of the game was. The game is about getting people to think of the future and what it will look like with climate change. So in my case, I picked the first thing that I could think of would happen in the future due to climate change and that was running out of water. I noticed that a few other people used a similar idea of being short on water, but some people chose ideas that I would have never thought of either, which was really interesting.
One other example of Cli-Fi that we talked about in class this term that I thought related very similarly to Future Coast was the Global Weirding website. I found a connection between these two because Global Weirding gets people thinking about how we will be affected by climate change in the future except rather than people coming up with their own ideas, the ideas are provided to them. They are both also interactive versions of Cli-Fi. Future Coast is a little bit more interactive than the Global Weirding website since people actually make up their own ideas of the future effects of climate change rather than having those ideas provided to them. However, I think that both versions of Cli-Fi are very beneficial to not only students, but everyone. Future Coast and Global Weirding can both be used in schools to help get students engaged with talking about climate change and the possible effects it will have on our futures, which is extremely important.
Cli-Fi is a way to get people discussing climate change in a fun way because spewing random facts about climate change to people is not going to get them interested in learning about it and they won’t have an emotional tie to it. Both Future Coast and Global Weirding do this in different ways. Future Coast can have an emotional appeal such as when we listened to a voicemail in class today from a girl calling her mom and she was sobbing because she didn’t think she would ever see her mom again. That made my heart break when I heard it and then made me sad because I thought of my own mom in that situation. Global Weirding can also have an emotional tie by showing different areas and the effects that climate change may have on those areas.
There area many versions of Cli-Fi that can be beneficial in teaching people about climate change and getting them interested in talking about it. It is just a matter of getting those various versions of Cli-Fi known to the public, so they can choose how they want to learn about climate change in a fun, entertaining way.
I find this very interesting. I feel as though the cli-fi genre has probably the most room for creativity for getting the point across about the problem of climate change.
I totally agree with your last statement! I think there are so many different aspects of Global Weirding and the Future Coast project that get people talking and thinking about it because it creates situations outside of a book. I believe the way things as serious as climate change or global warming can resonate with others is by interactive or visual projects so people can find a connection with it. Often times, people connect with novels, but know they are made up so it doesn’t stick.
Thanks for these reflections on, and interpretations of, the Future Coast project. For me, your post really emphasized two key aspects of Future Coast and of cli-fi more generally: how it grounds us in specific places and how it appeals to our emotions (that is, how it localizes and how it personalizes). Of course, as you keenly suggest, these two aspects are connected: we have emotional ties to the places we care about, and emotions are more powerful when grounded in specific places. I also agree that it is very important to get the word out, so to speak, about these interactive or visual projects (forms of cli-fi), so that more people can engage with them.