Thriving Futures through Games, Film, and Fiction: A Recap of Sci X Sci‑Fi 2026
At the concluding event on Friday, March 27, Sci X Sci-Fi Flash Fiction Contest 1st-place winner Elizabeth Schell read her story, “Sinking Ships” to a packed Bowers Auditorium. Photo by Saish Solankar.
This year’s series featured Creatives‑in‑Residence Stephanie Barish, Founder and CEO of IndieCade, and Matteo Menapace, educator and designer of the board game Daybreak. Across the two‑day program, Sci X Sci‑Fi 2026 directly engaged more than 150 participants from Yale and the greater New Haven community.
The series opened with a hybrid event, Let’s Play Daybreak: A Cooperative Board Game about Stopping Climate Change, led by Matteo Menapace. In Daybreak, teams work collaboratively to decarbonize the global economy while increasing ecological resilience, strengthening infrastructure, and addressing inequality.
Groups gathered simultaneously in different locations to participate in a shared gameplay session, connecting via Zoom with Matteo. Players joined from the Yale Center for Climate Change and Health, the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, the Yale School of the Environment, the Provost’s Office, and the New Haven Free Public Library.
4
Let’s Play Daybreak session at the Yale School of the Environment.
Let’s Play Daybreak session at the Provost’s Office.
Players at the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology.
Students and staff heard from the game designer, Matteo Menapace, on the research and design of the game.
After an introduction to the research and design behind the game, participants navigated climate tradeoffs together, playing as the United States, China, Europe, or the “Majority World”. Players had to make decisions such as whether to invest in renewable energy or cut agricultural emissions for the region they represented, and whether to allocate limited resources to national priorities or contribute to shared global goals. Matteo closed the event by inviting participants to reflect on their gameplay experiences and what they encountered when implementing climate technologies, policies, and strategies at both local and global scales.
That evening, a lecture and interactive experience titled, The Power of Video Games and Short Fiction in Bringing New Voices to Climate Narratives, took place at the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM). In a conversation moderated by Joyce Hsiang, Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Architecture, Stephanie Barish spoke about IndieCade’s work supporting independent game developers and the role of gaming in engaging audiences around climate that might not otherwise participate in imagining and realizing sustainable futures. Following the discussion, participants moved into the CCAM computer lab to play freely available climate-related video games developed during IndieCade’s annual Climate Jam. Climate Jam, now in its ninth year, is a six-week game-making event where independent creators at any level sprint to develop games about the challenges of a changing climate, raise awareness of environmental issues, and explore solutions.
Stephanie Barish, founder and CEO of IndieCade, presented to students, faculty, staff, and New Haven community members at CCAM. Photo by Julia Weston.
Shifting from climate narratives in interactive media like games, the series concluded with a lunchtime program co‑hosted with the Environmental Film Festival at Yale (EFFY), Imagining Our Way to a Thriving Future through Film and Fiction. The event featured screenings of four winning EFFY short films alternating with live readings from the inaugural Sci X Sci‑Fi Flash Fiction Contest winners. To support the in-person attendance of the short-film producers, YPS provided modest honoraria to each filmmaker, and the Sci X Sci-Fi Flash Fiction Contest also awarded cash prizes to the first and second-place winners.
Following the screenings and readings, Jennifer Carman, Director of Survey Strategy at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, moderated a panel featuring all the filmmakers and writers, prompting them to reflect on why telling human-centered stories of climate and environment is important to them.
The new Flash Fiction Contest invited college and university students across the New Haven area to consider, in just 300 to 1,000 words, existing technologies and extrapolate how they might evolve to help solve the climate crisis. A wide variety of students submitted stories, ranging from Yale students in environmental science, physics, public health, and comparative literature to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of New Haven and Southern Connecticut State University.
The winning stories by Elizabeth Schell (1st place), Sonam Sah (2nd place), Olivia Johnson (Honorable Mention), and Yue Ying (Honorable Mention) offered evocative characters facing climate-related challenges like displacement, apathy, and systemic injustice, while providing hopeful renderings of a world where built islands provide floating homes, where carbon capture and sequestration has wildly advanced, and where humans have rediscovered compassion and connection. You can read their stories on our website by clicking on the author profiles.
Jennifer Carman (far right) moderated a panel of filmmakers, writers, and Creative-in-Residence Stephanie Barish. Photo by Ash Baker.
Sci X Sci-Fi operates on the premise that impact emerges from trans-disciplinary collaboration and opportunities where creative and scientific perspectives can inform and strengthen each other. The exceptional turnout for and engagement with this year’s series show the community’s excitement about the possibilities these interactions generate, as well as a readiness to shift in focus from the dystopian toward positivity and hope. In partnership with scientific innovation, creative expression is an exciting and essential tool in advancing planetary solutions. We can’t wait to explore more imaginations (and steps toward realizations) of thriving futures with you during Sci X Sci-Fi 2027!