THE BEST KELP SECRETS
It’s a bit hard to characterise you, but in a sense, you’re playing as the East Australian Current.
The Best Kelp Secrets is a narrative tabletop game in which participants take on the identities of various user groups occupying a fictional East Coast Tasmanian town, as well as the surrounding marine ecology. Commissioned by and researched in partnership with CSIRO, The Best Kelp Secrets is a tight 75-minute tour of a single coastal town amidst big and inevitable ecological, social and economic changes.
From southern rock lobsters to general store owners, from families with particular socio-economic needs to local business operators, players inhabit different perspectives in order to steer the future of their beloved town into its best possible iteration,
The Best Kelp Secrets is hands-on, with a branching narrative contingent on the outcomes of each stage of the game. Concepts communicated in the game include systems modelling, thresholds and tipping points, mapping futures, trade-offs and collaborative versus individual decision-making.
Appropriate for policy-makers and representatives of council, coastal and marine businesses, conferences, environmental or science groups, community leaders and festival audiences.
“When you’re bringing together different knowledge holders – for example, industry representatives, natural resource managers, community members – everyone comes with a different perspective or issues that they want to see addressed. The game creates an opportunity for those agendas to be momentarily put to one side and lets people interact as themselves rather than as their expertise.”
Photo by Jess Thomas
Photo by Matt Douglas
SCIENCE & FUNDING PARTNER
In researching and creating this work, Boho worked with scientists Dr Jess Melbourne Thomas and Dr Delphi Ward as part of CSIRO’s Future States project.
Title image by Matt Douglas.