In recent years, we’ve witnessed empty supermarket shelves, panic buying, and supply chain failures that would have seemed impossible a decade ago. Chronic vulnerabilities in the UK food system—from farmer poverty to just-in-time logistics—have created a system where minor shocks can cascade into major crises. The question isn’t if another crisis will hit, but whether we’ll be prepared when it does.
This challenge drives the approach we’re developing through the Backcasting to Achieve Food Resilience in the UK project. Rather than relying on traditional research methods, we’re using serious games to help decision-makers experience what happens when chronic vulnerabilities meet acute shocks. We’re identifying uncomfortable truths about how our food system actually works—and how it might fail. In doing so, we can be better prepared and respond to shocks with resilient strategies rather than letting crisis force our hand.
How a game can change minds
Working with game designer Matteo Menapace, we’ve created an exercise in which players navigate multiple interacting pressures. Participants take on roles across the food system—from civil servants to retailers to farmers—managing resources while responding to both ongoing challenges and sudden shocks. Chronic challenge cards represent ongoing vulnerabilities that must be managed across multiple rounds, while acute crisis cards deliver shocks that test system resilience. The game mechanics deliberately mirror real-world dynamics while compressing time, letting players experience in hours what might take years to unfold in the real world.
One of our project partners, the Food Ethics Council, hosted a workshop earlier this year, with professionals from retail, farming, manufacturing, cybersecurity, insurance and civil society testing our game prototype. There was plenty of initial scepticism as well as curiosity—these were people accustomed to working with spreadsheets and risk registers, not dice and game cards. But by the end of the day, participants were describing the exercise as immensely valuable, having gained insights their traditional tools don’t provide.
What changed their minds? The game revealed dynamics that our everyday environments obscure. Research on serious games demonstrates they create “emotionally impactful learning experiences” by making consequences immediate and visible. Crisis cards compound—cyber attacks during harvest season, extreme weather hitting multiple regions—and cascading failures become tangible, demanding a response.
What games make tangible
The UK food system faces multiple challenges that rarely make headlines but steadily erode system resilience: declining agricultural productivity; precarious farmer profitability; high sector greenhouse gas emissions; 14% of UK households affected by food insecurity; £268 billion annual costs for diet-related illness (greater than the entire food system’s economic contribution); biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. Yet these dispersed facts are difficult for any one sector to respond to, trapped as they are in separate policy domains, budgets, and timescales.
The true challenge isn’t understanding each problem but grasping how they amplify one another—a reality our siloed decision-making structures systematically obscure. These aren’t isolated problems but interconnected vulnerabilities. When farmers can’t invest in climate adaptation due to profitability pressures, they become more vulnerable to extreme weather. Supply chains strip away buffers for efficiency, causing them to lose capacity to absorb disruptions. Market concentration leaves us dependent on a small number of companies controlling key supply chains. Under these conditions, single points of failure multiply. These interactions are known in theory, but this knowledge rarely feels urgent enough to override short-term pressures.
This is what our serious game makes tangible. Players quickly discover how chronic weaknesses amplify acute impacts, with manageable disruptions unfolding into potential catastrophes. They see the full system at work—the interdependencies that their daily work only reveals in fragments, and how other sectors’ vulnerabilities become their own—a more complete picture that transforms how they understand their position in the food system.
Why collaboration becomes inevitable
Perhaps the most striking transformation occurs in player behaviour. Initial rounds see competitive hoarding and self-protection, with players optimizing individual positions. But as crises accumulate and resources are reduced, something shifts. Players begin to recognize how their strategies accelerate collective collapse—what researchers term the “tragedy of the commons loop”.
The game test workshop highlighted the urgent need to shift from competitive “race to the bottom” mindsets towards collaborative approaches. Our game makes this shift experiential rather than theoretical. Participants discover that seemingly rational self-interest becomes self-defeating when system failure threatens everyone. Collaboration emerges not from altruism but from necessity.
The game reveals another uncomfortable truth when players know what should be done but face constraints that force short-term thinking. With limited resources and crises mounting, participants find themselves making decisions they know will worsen future problems—but immediate survival trumps long-term planning. They experience firsthand how short-termism becomes a trap that players can see but cannot escape.
This dynamic confirms what our research identifies: building resilience requires sustained action over decades, yet our planning occurs on much shorter cycles. Political terms last five years. Business strategies focus on quarterly returns. Meanwhile, the changes that would actually build resilience – climate adaptation in agriculture, soil health restoration and supply chain diversification – all need need 10–20 year horizons. The mismatch is stark—and the game makes it tangible when players experience how short-termism becomes a trap they can see but cannot escape.
The limits of traditional planning
Conventional risk management tools have their place, but they struggle with the non-linear dynamics that characterize food systems. Risk registers list threats individually, missing how they amplify each other. Financial models project costs but can’t capture human behaviours under stress. Strategy documents propose interventions but rarely test how people will actually respond when systems begin failing.
Effective food security planning requires anticipating compound events and synchronous failures. Games excel at revealing these dynamics. Players experience how a cyber attack on payment systems combines with extreme weather to create panic buying. They can see how international conflicts disrupt energy supplies just as domestic harvests fail. They understand viscerally what analysis shows: that seemingly independent risks are increasingly correlated.
The BAFR-UK project uses these insights to develop interventions that increase resilience while delivering environmental and health co-benefits. But unlike traditional policy development, we’re testing these interventions through gameplay, revealing which strategies work, which backfire, and which require coordination across sectors that rarely collaborate.
From gaming to governance
Military strategists have long used war games to prepare for conflicts they hope to avoid. The Bank of England stress-tests financial institutions against economic scenarios. The UK’s food system deserves similar rigour. As polycrises—interconnected global disruptions—become the norm, exploring possible futures isn’t academic exercise but essential preparation.
The game serves as what researchers call a “boundary object”—allowing participants from different sectors to engage with a shared scenario despite bringing different perspectives and priorities. This common ground becomes crucial for the kind of cross-sector coordination that resilience requires but current structures too often inhibit.
Our forthcoming research will explore specific governance mechanisms that could overcome the short-termism trap, building on insights from game sessions where participants consistently identify the need for longer-term thinking and cross-sector coordination. The game doesn’t just diagnose problems; it helps players experience why transformation, not just reform, is necessary.
As we refine and continue testing the tool for wider deployment among policymakers and industry leaders, a fundamental question emerges: in a world of cascading risks and interconnected systems, can we afford not to game out our possible futures? The vulnerabilities are clear, the shocks are multiplying, and the window for building resilience is narrowing. It turns out that playing with our food is an incredibly serious thing to do.
Interested in bringing this game to your organisation? We’d love to hear from you.
I write about the future of food and the connections between our food systems, the environment and public health. Sign up for my newsletter.
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