Using Game Design to Inform a Plastics Treaty: Fostering Collaboration between Science, Machine Learning, and Policymaking

Introduction: This multi-disciplinary case study details how an interactive decision support tool leverages game design to inform an international plastic pollution treaty. Design: Seeking to make our scientific findings more usable within the policy process, our interactive software supports manipulation of a mathematical model using techniques borrowed from games. These "ludic" approaches aim to enable user agency to find custom policy solutions, invite deep engagement with scientific results, serve audiences of diverse expertise, and accelerate scientific process to keep pace with intergovernmental negotiations. Implementation: Built in JavaScript and D3 with user-modifiable logic via an ANTLR domain specific language, this browser-based application offers adaptability and explorability for our machine learning results with privacy preserving architecture and offline capability. Demonstration: Policymakers and the supporting community engaged with this public simulation tool across multiple treaty-related events, investigating plastic waste outcomes under diverse and sometimes unexpected policy scenarios. Conclusion: Contextualizing our open source software within a broader lineage of digital media research, we reflect on this interactive modeling platform, considering how game design approaches may help facilitate collaboration at the science / policy nexus. Materials: Available on the public Internet, we host this browser-based decision support tool at global-plastics-tool.org, work also archived at zenodo.org/records/12615011 in a Docker container.