A game that no one really wins

A board game dreamt up on the anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol is meant to teach lessons for sharing scarce resources from energy to food.

Perspectivity is one of many games dreamt up in the past decade with a theme of global warming. In the activity, players have the chance to talk to other teams and even strike deals during negotiating rounds. Courtesy Perspectivity NetworkShow less

In 2007, Hans Keijzer, a Dutch risk manager, helped to create a board game designed to be played once in a lifetime.

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In Perspectivity, teams compete to cover a board with power plants - some cheap coal burners, others pricier wind farms. Players have the chance to talk to other teams and even strike deals during negotiating rounds.

Mr Keijzer and his acolytes brought the game to Cambridge University students, Royal Dutch Shell executives and even non-profit workers in Bangalore - which is where a group of supposedly selfless individuals demonstrated many of the behaviours Mr Keijzer has observed since the game's birth.

"What we see is exactly what we expect to see: in the face of uncertainty, incomplete information, and not so clear rules, people tend to go into competitive mode and they try to out-trick each other," says Mr Keijzer, speaking from the Netherlands, where he works for the vitamin and penicillin giant DSM. "During the game, in many cases they start to understand some of the mechanisms behind it, but they are unable during the negotiation rounds to communicate in a way where they really listen to each other, which creates a lot of distrust."

By each competing for the biggest slice of the board, players wipe points from the game. Were the teams successfully cooperating, they could earn the most points. No group has ever earned the maximum score, Mr Keijzer says.

"Some people," he adds, "are trying to gain the trust of others - and then they are completely let down."

In the history of being let down, the year of Perspectivity's creation was significant: 2007 was when China overtook the US as the world's top polluter. It was also the 10th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol, the global treaty to cap greenhouse gas emissions that failed to get the signatures of China, which said it held no responsibility for the emissions that western nations had produced for a century, and the US, which refused to sign unless China did.

That year negotiators in Bali recognised that the fight against climate change needed commitment from countries beyond Kyoto's 37 signatories. They proposed a model called Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Action (Nama), which is what it sounds like: every country for itself. As Kyoto approaches its expiration date next December and an immediate replacement for the treaty appears unlikely, nations such as the UAE have become increasingly welcoming to the Nama model and are setting their targets themselves.

Developing countries with dreams of big wind farms and solar arrays will have to come up with the money themselves or persuade a richer nation to pay the bill.

This month negotiators met in Durba for a final attempt at curbing global warming, which scientists say needs to be limited to 2°C to avoid the worst effects on food security, sea levels that threaten small-island nations and the frequency of floods and other natural disasters.

Discussions were scheduled to conclude on Friday, but as of yesterday negotiators were still locked in discussions over a road map towards crafting a treaty such as Kyoto by 2015 that would be palatable to China, India and the US - the world's top greenhouse gas emitters.

An intention to make a plan within the next five years is a long way from a binding cap on greenhouse gases. Many parties, including the UAE, had publicly advocated a renewal of Kyoto, but China and the US have been locked in a stand-off. Each has said the other should sign first.

The rhetoric behind such stances reflects the same human behaviours exposed in Perspectivity.

"We need to be able to go back to our own people, whether we live in France or New Zealand, and say we aren't the only people doing something," Tim Groser, New Zealand's chief envoy at the talks, told Bloomberg News. "You will not carry public opinion if the debate is 'you are the only idiots doing anything'."

Perspectivity is one of many games dreamt up in the past decade with a theme of global warming. But the failure of the group to allocate resources dates as far back as ancient Greece, where the problem was cited in the works of Aristotle and Thucydides. Game theory has since given it a name: the tragedy of the commons.

A 1968 essay by Garrett Hardin, an ecologist, describes a commons area with enough grass to feed 1,000 sheep.

If there are 10 shepherds, each with 100 sheep, every animal's belly is full. Even if one selfish shepherd ushers in an extra 100 sheep, the effect on the food supplies of the other rest is still negligible.

"So it is an advantage for somebody to put on extra animals because the gain is for him, and the loss is across all the rest," Mr Keijzer says. "So the others put on extra sheep - until at the end there is not enough food for everyone, and all the animals die."

Perspectivity, which is popular among climate and food-security workers, is meant to show an alternative to this catastrophic scenario. Its next stop, Mr Keijzer hopes, is the Middle East.

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