Joe Posner, Director, Producer

Sloan Grant(s) Received: 2024, Independent Media Initiative, Sloan Science Prize for YouTube: Narrative Fiction

Project Type: Episodic 

Genre: Animation, Documentary

Length: 90 minutes 

Field of Science: Climate Change, Technology, Engineering

Stage: Development 

Synopsis: 

Students join the 2084 club to imagine a series of possible futures through a repeated role playing game. Each 2-3 hour game begins with them transported to another of the infinite possible 2084s of New York City, where they attempt to survive the dangers they imagine in the city’s future.

The games start in what we call ‘status quo city,’ animated in the uncanny valley style of architectural renderings and creating a familiar feeling version of the city in the future that is as close to “business as usual,” following current best predictions and currently under-construction plans to protect New York City. Animated versions of the characters—driven by real-time audio and footage of the participants’ role-playing—depict action scenes of how they respond to the first of many crises: caught between eco-terrorist group THE FREAKS and an ineffectual NYC GOVERNMENT, the club scrambles to save their neighbors when the city’s resilience infrastructure fails.

Soon, it’s GAME OVER for our heroes. We reveal the people who voiced the animated story and learn that the narrative was the product of a role-playing game. The club explains the game’s rules to a guest non-playing character, and we learn more about the participants and their motivations.

Preparing for the next game, the group is allowed to tweak the world, moving their future NYC one step further from the status quo. Through this process, they visit a series of iterative alternative futures allowing students to realize more of what experts advise them to advance the city – from a technologically gray city, to green city beginning to merge with nature, and blue city that has embraced the water the city previously tried to keep out. But each advancement comes a cost, and The 2084 Club continues experiencing both the ripple effects of small changes and the dramatic blowback of their actions.

By the end of the film, the participants have experienced a Edge of Tomorrow–like compendium of frightening risks inherent in any vision of the future, but also optimistic scenarios where transformative change is possible. Along the way, the real-life teenagers develop a sense of agency, empowerment, and empathy. Their frustration with leaders shifts toward the game’s arbitrary rules, and they eventually break those rules to invent a better solution: traveling back in time to sacrifice in the present for a better future.

Adults serve as nemeses; prominent experts inform the rules and ground the world in realism, and well-known actors play roles in conflict with the heroes to keep the story on track—similar to how Non-Player Characters (NPCs) and a Game Master guide a campaign in Dungeons and Dragons.

Do they succeed or fail? It doesn’t matter: anything is better than waiting for disaster, and having found their voices through the process of the game, they start to use them.