Mayor of Mancunia: Developing an Interactive on Food and the Environment

The Mayor of Mancunia digital interactive has been on display at Manchester Museum since October 2025. It’s a fun, interactive game designed to share research from the SHIFT project which examines how to make the food system more sustainable for the planet and healthier for people while also exploring how to empower people with this knowledge. The game is also designed to allow researchers to learn what policy interventions would be palatable to the public.

So how did this come about?

We were very keen to steer away from individuals feeling a crushing responsibility for changing the food system so we knew we wanted to make a game which put the player in the role of a decision-maker about the food system. We worked with digital story studio, Fast Familiar, to create the interactive. One of the first things we did was run six workshops in south London in food banks, community kitchens and growing projects in order to find out:

• What influences food choices
• How people understand the link between climate change and food
• How people understand the food system

We discovered that food choices are influenced by cost, taste and perceptions of what is ‘healthy’. In general, people do not link food to climate change. Or if they do, it’s a broad ‘impact on the environment’ e.g. chemicals in the soil. As for the food system, to many people it seemed complicated and simply wasn’t something they thought about.

Talking to people also brought home to us that the message of reducing meat consumption was often not appropriate for people who already felt like they barely ate any meat because of its cost and this was something to bear in mind in our communication going forward. But people did seem to enjoy learning new things about the food system, and we had long and rich chats with many.

What did this mean for the development of the game?

It was clear we needed to design the game in a way that would help players understand the food system. We needed to explain the link between food, particularly meat, and climate change. It would also be crucial to place players within the narrative frame, to mitigate an ‘us and them’ feeling and the experience needed to be a mix of learning and giving opinions. This mapped well onto dual aims of sharing research and gathering information. As the content was complex and dense, an episodic structure (covering different changes to the food system in different episodes) would help us cover this without overloading people.

Fast Familiar took this away and came back to us with a draft which set up the player as the newly-appointed Mayor of Mancunia with a mandate to make new decisions for the health of the planet and people. This followed a ‘choose your own adventure’ structure with two different advisors, Mikaela and Jonny, weighing in to offer thoughts and information in order to guide the player through the different challenges.

The SHIFT research team were then tasked with coming up with environmental, health and economic weighting for each policy we wanted to include in the game. The policies ranged from making free school meals vegetarian to restricting the advertising of meat. This was a complex balancing act for our researchers but it was important to come up with scores to offer feedback and give a sense of the possible impact of each decision.

We then did a second round of workshops in Gorton in east Manchester, working with a community partner, Healthy Me, Healthy Communities. This involved facilitated discussions in small groups and asking the group play a beta version of the game on tablets and feedback. We wanted to find out:

• Does the ‘Mayor’ framing work?
• Do people like the characters and humour?
• Do people understand the way we’ve articulated the policies?

Broadly, people loved to be the Mayor and they liked Mikaela and Jonny and the easy way the game was designed so the advisors could chat with you. In fact, they wanted more of this kind of advice before being asked to make a decision on a policy. We learnt that we still needed to add in more of our research about the food system so the players felt they were making informed decisions and that we needed to build in opportunities for players to bring and explore questions. Fast Familiar took this learning away and, with the further support of our researchers, added more information that the advisors could share and also incorporated multiple new points for people to give us the thought process behind their decision-making.

So why do public engagement?

So far, we feel happy that we have found a format that makes people feel inspired to engage with these complex topics. We’re more confident that we are representing the experiences of people who are affected by the cost of living crisis and structural discrimination. And we’re excited by the potential of this approach as a way of doing dynamic two-way research and deepening relationships with audiences. And of course we’re very curious to find out which policies people felt were more appealing.

The Mayor of Mancunia is in Manchester Museum until the end of March 2026. You can play the first episode of Mayor of Mancunia online here.