Future Coast

Future Coast is an online resource to get an audible look into our future as climate change continues to impact our every day lives. Each voicemail has a specific subject matter, whether it is food, air, water, activity, etc and each voicemail has a different character each with a life that is impacted in a different way by climate change. Each voicemail also takes place in a different year in the future, some being as soon as 2020 and some as late as 2065.

Some of the voicemails are very realistic visions of our possible future an a little scary. For example, a voicemail called Lobster Order is Cancelled is the voice of a man who ordered lobster, his wife's favorite food, from a seafood company five years ago, however they had to cancel his order because they did not have a big enough supply of lobster for everyone who was on the waiting list.

Another voicemail called Grab Some Fresh Air is not so believable. A wife asks her husband to stop at the store to pick up a bottle of fresh air because she had forgotten. I just don't believe we will be bottling or will even need to be bottling "fresh air" by the 2050's.

 Future Coast is a very easily accessible activity, however not so much a game. Perhaps a way to use it in a classroom is to have students pick a few voicemails that really stand out to them and then have them write and analysis about the few they selected. They may choose to express how it made them feel or even cause them to do research to discover how realistic the voicemail might actually be. All in all, Future Coast is not really a game, but just an activity.