Why we contextualised the SDG narrative for Asia-Pacific

Most English-language climate serious games carry an unspoken context: their default crisis is a North-American or European one, their default policy is a federal carbon tax, and their default actor is a Western utility or government. Watts and Wealth was authored in Asia-Pacific and submitted to a regional MAPS-SDG academic process. Re-mixing the narrative for the region was not branding — it was a pedagogic requirement. This entry explains why, drawing on regional energy-outlook data, AR6 regional risk assessments, and cross-cultural framing literature.

The regional energy mix is different — and changing faster

Southeast Asia’s primary-energy mix is dominated by coal and natural gas in roughly equal share, with oil concentrated in transport and a renewables share that is rising but still in the low double digits (International Energy Agency, 2023). Compared to OECD averages, the region:

• builds coal capacity as well as retires it (multi-decade lock-in pressure)
• depends on imported LNG with significant geopolitical exposure
• has the world’s fastest growth in air-conditioning demand
• has near-universal access to electricity but uneven access to clean electricity

IRENA’s 1.5°C transition pathway requires Asia-Pacific renewable shares to roughly triple by 2030 to keep regional alignment with global temperature targets (International Renewable Energy Agency, 2023). Watts and Wealth’s Renewable Pathway ending threshold (≥60% renewables by round 18) is calibrated to this trajectory — it is aspirational but not fantastical relative to IRENA’s pathway.

Several cards in the deck reflect this regional energy reality directly: Petrodollar Trade Pact, Oil Crisis 1973, and Oil Boom Prosperity locate the geopolitics of fossil energy at the centre of the early-era deck; Solar Panel Oversupply, Solar R&D Grant, Perovskite Solar Breakthrough, and Feed-In Tariff describe the policy mechanisms that have driven the Asia-Pacific solar surge; Coal Lobby Influence and Dirty Industry Surge model the political headwinds against retirement of existing coal capacity.

Asia-Pacific is the highest-exposure region for climate impact

The IPCC AR6 WGII Asia chapter is unambiguous: Asia-Pacific carries the highest absolute population exposure to sea-level rise, the largest agricultural-impact projections under SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5, and the most acute compounding-hazard risk in coastal megacities (Shaw, 2022). ADB’s regional risk assessment finds that adaptation finance gaps in Asia-Pacific are an order of magnitude larger than current flows (Asian Development Bank, 2017). Germanwatch’s long-term Climate Risk Index documents that eight of the ten most-affected countries between 2000 and 2019 are in this region (Eckstein, 2021).

The game’s event-card pool reflects this exposure pattern. Tsunami, Flash Flood, Drought, Wildfire Near Facilities, Ocean Acidification, Smog Emergency, and Smog Fog Crisis are not generic climate disasters — they are the specific compound-hazard profile that AR6 identifies for the region. The cards do not say “Asia” in their text, but their cadence, severity, and frequency in the deck reflect the regional risk distribution.

Framing matters, not just data

Hofstede’s cross-cultural framework is often misused to caricature national differences, but the underlying observation is sound: the same factual content lands differently depending on the framing register of the audience (Hofstede, 2010). Asia-Pacific audiences engage less readily with framings that emphasize individual responsibility (“your carbon footprint”) and more readily with framings that emphasize collective fate and inter-generational obligation.

Watts and Wealth’s narrative architecture leans into the collective framing deliberately. The two non-bankruptcy endings — Tipping Point (all players lose together) and Renewable Pathway (all players win together) — make collective fate structurally legible at the table. Even the Round Limit “richest empire” win is framed as a failure to coordinate rather than a hero narrative: the game ends because the table did not converge on either collective outcome in time.

Policy cards reinforce this framing. UN Green Pact Support, International Green Funding, Paris Climate Agreement, and Nuclear Treaty Signed describe collective-action infrastructures, not individual-virtue narratives. Climate Protest and Net Zero Movement model the social-movement layer that AR6 cites as essential to regional transitions.

What we deliberately left out

Honest contextualization also means naming what the game does not attempt. Watts and Wealth does not differentiate between specific Asia-Pacific countries; it abstracts the region into a generic empire-builder frame. The deck does not include country-specific energy policies, named utilities, or politicized actors. This abstraction is a trade-off: it keeps the game deployable across classrooms in different ASEAN, South Asian, and East Asian contexts at the cost of country-specific realism. Future modules (post-launch) may add country-specific overlay decks; the v1 deck is intentionally regional-generic.

The contextualization is not a claim that Western climate framings are wrong. It is a claim that defaults matter in pedagogy, and that a game submitted to a regional academic process for regional learners should make its regional defaults explicit rather than inheriting them silently from a different context.