Digital Voices of the Future: Children's visions of future UK treescapes revealed through gaming

The future of UK treescapes belongs to the children and young people of today: they will witness and judge the long-term legacy of the UK Treescapes programme. Yet, interdisciplinary research that explores their engagement with treescapes temporally and spatially remains rare. Voices of the Future (VoF: NE/V021370/1) has co-produced research seeking to understand and engage children with valuing treescapes in a meaningful, hopeful manner. Even from their early years, childrens' understanding of the form and function of treescapes has been found to be nuanced and sophisticated and is usually framed within the challenges associated with observed and predicted climate change. VoF is generating research impact within educational and environmental policy and practice at local, regional and national levels. However, the impact of VoF needs scaling-up with the most important stakeholders, the children themselves. This knowledge exchange proposal seeks to address this gap to amplify the reach to a potential global audience of millions through different gaming environments.

Every child experiences treescapes differently, but what might this mean for their imaginings and world-making? Is it possible for an online environment to be the dreaming, thinking, sharing and making space for children to predict and model the different treescapes of their futures? Can we use online environments as a space to democratise knowledge exchange, both amplifying and empowering the voices of children in the planning and planting of real UK Treescapes?

The project applies key findings of VoF to co-produce and share game environments enabling children to visualise and explore what future treescapes could look like as a response to different choices made within their lifetimes. By simulating existing and new treescapes within real-world contexts, we can apply new knowledge of carbon storage and how children understand treescapes arising from VoF into game environments. This will afford children opportunities to envisage the worlds they would like to inhabit in symbiosis with their treescapes and experience a simulation of futures that are otherwise challenging to imagine, and even harder to place themselves within.

The project centres on 7 encounters between children (8-13 years) at 2 schools within The Mersey Forest locale (Parklands Primary School, Ellesmere Port Catholic High School) and the project team to co-design and develop games using two platforms: Roblox & Unity. Each encounter comprises 2 days (1 day at each school), with each day involving two 60-90 minute interactive co-design and production workshops, each of ~30 children. This will engage ~120 children in game design and development. Between encounters, the project team will compile and incorporate the resources developed in each workshop into development of assets, mechanics and narratives within the two game environments. The Mersey Forest community woodland will host an event beyond the end of the project to link game development with real-world community tree planting.

The outputs of the project will comprise immersive (Unity) and interactive (Roblox) online games enabling users to develop, visualise & share treescapes in their own real world and imagined settings. Modelling and simulating the outcome of tree planting and management in these environments will visualise how treescapes may look in the future, and can visualise and quantify the environmental (e.g. carbon sequestration, microclimate, biodiversity) socio-economic and cultural benefits provided by treescapes. These games offer potentially global scaling (Roblox has ~145 million monthly users, mainly children) of knowledge-exchange opportunities. The case example working with The Mersey Forest will evaluate how playful approaches and gaming can offer a powerful mechanism to incorporate the voice of children into the planning of treescapes and woodlands, through input to the 2025 revision of The Mersey Forest Plan