What changes when ecology becomes the subject of play

A creature description can tell you how to defeat something. It can also ask what that creature eats, what depends on it, and what happens when it disappears. The second set of questions changes the work of imagining a world. A monster becomes part of an arrangement that reaches beyond its encounter with the players.

Caro Asercion’s Exquisite Biome makes those relationships its subject. The creator describes a game in which players invent an ecosystem, populate it and explore interactions among its creatures. A standard deck of cards supports solo or shared play, and the resulting material can be used in other games. The creator’s account of Exquisite Biome

I am considering the documented design invitations in Exquisite Biome and Cloud Empress, rather than reporting a playtest. Neither a nature theme nor an enthusiastic response establishes that a game teaches ecology. The more interesting question is what kind of attention its subject invites, and how a librarian might make that invitation useful without overstating it.

Relations enter the description

Suppose a group invents a moth whose larvae feed on a particular tree. Adding a predator gives the moth another relationship. Adding a village that harvests the tree makes people part of the same account. These invented details create questions that a list of independent creatures would leave unasked. What changes when the tree becomes scarce? Who notices first? Which consequences has the group assumed rather than explained?

That example is mine; it is not a transcription of Exquisite Biome’s rules. It illustrates what becomes available when worldbuilding treats relationships as part of a creature’s description. The imagined world starts to require connections among choices that might otherwise remain decorative.

Donna Haraway’s 2015 essay on making kin offers a demanding way to examine this shift. She argues for attention to histories made through relations among species and other actors, rather than treating species as solitary agents. Her argument is situated and ethical, with a scope much larger than game design. It supplies a question for reading these games: who or what is allowed to matter in the account? Haraway’s essay in Environmental Humanities

The question can expose a limitation even in an appealing design. A game might give creatures elaborate relationships while treating human institutions as simple background, or describe a landscape only through the resources it offers visitors. An ecological label does not settle how fully a text attends to those relations. Readers have to examine the actual choices it makes.

For an academic library session, I would ask participants to identify one relationship the publication explicitly provides and one they themselves add. That distinction keeps textual interpretation accountable. Students can then explain how their addition changes the world, instead of attributing every imaginative possibility to the published design.

A setting with competing demands

Cloud Empress presents ecological science fantasy through a setting shaped by giant cicadas, burial practices and the threat of a much larger brood. Its premise places human arrangements within the insects’ recurring activity. The publisher’s catalog separates a standalone rulebook, a larger exploration book and a bundle of five mini-zine adventures. Ecology is therefore encountered through a setting and several publication forms, rather than through a single isolated creature generator. The setting premise, the book catalog

The contrast helps explain what collection descriptions need to convey. Someone looking for a short collaborative worldbuilding activity may have a different need from someone preparing a sustained campaign. Both could reasonably search for ecology and roleplaying. A useful record should give them enough information about activity and dependence to choose the relevant publication.

A library event can make a similar distinction. Inviting participants to invent relationships is one kind of session. Asking them to interpret a published setting’s treatment of death, settlement or environmental disruption is another. Either can be worthwhile, but they call for different preparation and different evidence of what participants understood.

The second activity also makes room for disagreement. One reader may see a setting’s human practices as accommodation; another may see unequal burdens or an attempt at control. Those interpretations need support from the text. A facilitator can invite competing readings without declaring that the publication has already resolved the ethical questions it raises.

Fiction can lead to a researchable question

The move from imagined ecology to environmental information needs to be deliberate. A plausible fictional food web is still invented. If a public library combines a game session with local natural-history material, the transition should identify which claims come from the game, which come from observation, and which require a scientific source.

I would give that transition a small, concrete task. After the imaginative exercise, participants choose one relationship they want to investigate in an actual local habitat. They locate a source, state what it supports and note where the fictional analogy fails. The purpose is to practice asking and answering a bounded question, with the game supplying an occasion for curiosity.

That recommendation needs evaluation in use. A facilitator could examine whether participants distinguish invented claims from sourced ones, or whether their questions become more specific during the session. Attendance and enjoyment can matter to a program, but neither alone demonstrates that this distinction was learned. The evidence should match the outcome being claimed.

There is also room for an event whose purpose is simply imaginative play. A public library does not have to turn every creative activity into a lesson in another discipline. The IFLA-UNESCO Public Library Manifesto includes knowledge creation and sharing among the library’s purposes; it offers a professional rationale for making space, without proving the effects of any particular event. The 2022 manifesto

Ecological RPG publications become most interesting when their relationships survive close attention. Follow what depends on what, ask whose account supplies the connection, and notice where a player must invent the rest. The resulting discussion can remain faithful to the game while giving readers sharper questions to take beyond it.