This post was originally published on Substack. That platform does not align with my values so I have re-published it here as it was. If you has subscribed to my Substack please move your subscription to here.
Happy new year! A personally turbulent 2024 is out of the way and honestly, I am very much looking forward to a more settled 2025. With all that happened last year, not least our move to York, I did not make as much progress on my personal goals as I would have liked. Things like this newsletter and the FloodSkinner YouTube channel were neglected as I focussed on just getting through, and prioritising the day job.
Now settled into our new home, in a new city, and it being a new year, it is naturally a time to look forward. If last year taught me anything, it is how important it is to focus on what is important to you and to carve out time for that. Being ADHD, my focus can be easily pulled away and I can find myself committing to things that were exciting at the time but become a distraction down the line. Long-term planning is also something that does not come naturally to me.
So, 2025 is going to be a year where I try and turn this around. I want to be more purposeful, more strategic, and to lay the foundations for where I actually want to get to. I have done a lot of self-reflection, searching for my, what Simon Sinek would call, ‘why’ – what is important to me, what do I enjoy, who do I want to be. In short, I’ve been considering my ‘mission’ that will keep me on track:
“Empowering people to unlock their full potential by transforming imagination into a powerful, actionable skill.”
In this first quarter of 2025, I will be using this mission to develop a business plan that I will publish in April. It will lay out the ways I intend to achieve this mission and the services I can provide. It will also help me to determine which projects I can commit to and which I must regrettably turn down.
I am very excited to have developed this mission and am looking forward to moving forward into 2025 with renewed purpose. I hope you will join me by subscribing to the newsletter.
Chris (aka FloodSkinner).
Imagination as a Skill.
You will have noticed from my mission that I consider imagination to not be something some people have and others are born lacking. It is not something that artists, poets, and storytellers are blessed with whilst the rest of us philistines have not been bestowed our fair share. Instead, we all have an imagination, or as Albert Read would call an imagination muscle, that can be exercised and strengthened.
In fact, my belief is back up by research. A 2022 paper by Dr Andrea Blomkvist, a researcher in philosophy of cognitive science at the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience, University of Glasgow, showed empirical evidence that our imaginations demonstrate the hallmarks of two key qualities of a skill:
1. It can be improved through practice.
2. It can be controlled.
A key piece of evidence given by Blomkvist for imagination being improved by practice comes from mental rotation tasks. People are shown a test object and a number of images that could correspond to the test object having been rotated. They are asked to mentally rotate, i.e. to visualise, the test object and answer which of the images is correct. As participants practiced the visualising, they got better and faster at completing the task.
We control our imaginations by constraining them to reality. An example used by Blomkvist is imagining moving a bedframe up a staircase. To imagine this usefully, you have to imagine the bed and the staircase as the right sizes and also not being able to change shape or size or even vanish altogether. Our imaginations can visualise them doing those things but we can control it to help us achieve our goal. In exercises with children of different ages where they were asked to plan for imagined events, it was found that older children were better able to constrain their imaginations to reality.
There is much in this paper about imagining that reminds me of modelling and dealing with assumptions and uncertainty. Imagination is described as always involving simulation. When we simulate, either numerically or imaginably, we make assumptions, we have biases, and we miss potentially important information. Modellers can develop their imaginations to better understand the limits of their outputs and better communicate where they, and are not, useful.
Accountability.
It has been a couple of years now since I realised I was ADHD and it has been a journey of self-discovery. To be honest, it has been really hard to get over that grieving process many people in my position report as having – this is the mourning of the person you imagine you could have been had you known earlier. What more might have I achieved if I understand how my brain works, knew how to work with it, and had the support I needed rather than accepting the lie that I just lazy?
As I mentioned above, I struggle with making and sticking to long-term plans. This is a punch in the stomach for me as one of my ambitions since I was young was to write a book, very much a long-term project. I have many discarded plans and projects where I started a book project and either lost interested, lost confidence, or simply outright forgot about it. It has been an ambition that thus far has alluded me and I think it will continue to do so unless I find ways to work with my ADHD brain.
My mission above for ‘FloodSkinner’, and the business plan, will also be a long-term project and I know I have to work with my brain in order to be successful. On my ADHD journey, I have found Jessica McCabe and her ‘How to ADHD’ YouTube channel extremely useful, and with perfect timing she recently posted a video about how to use accountability to achieve long-term goals.
This newsletter will be part of my accountability system. I am committing, to myself and to you, to continue to produce this newsletter each month. I will include updates on progress and pieces of research relevant to my imagination mission – a few years down the line, maybe there will be enough there to form the core of my long longed-after book.
I have committed to publishing my business plan in April – this is also to keep me accountable. In that business plan I will also include a number of performance indicators, metrics to help me measure progress against my mission. Each year in April, to coincide with the end of the financial year, I will publish an annual report that will report that progress – I hope that publicly committing to this, being open about my intentions and progress, plus my love of a metric, will help me stay focussed and achieve my long-term ambitions.
FloodSkinner YouTube Channel.
My YouTube channel has been going for a couple of years now. If you needed any evidence of my ADHD, then the identity crisis of this channel surely provides this. In those two years, I have changed the name a few times – it started as FloodSkinner’s Model Life, then it was Floodology, then Practical Scicomm, before I gave up on a singular focus and just renamed it FloodSkinner.
The aim of the channel was always to be something I enjoyed, a chance to learn new skills, and to be a repository for the content I make. This has meant that when life gets stressful, it is one of the first things that gets neglected. My last long-form video was uploaded over 8 months ago now and it makes me sad I have not been able to make more.
The good news, I am planning a new short series of long-form videos. Planned as a 3-part series, it will document my experiences of the SeriousGeoGames and Earth Arcade projects I worked on at the University of Hull. I will be stretching my script writing and video making skills to inject more variety and more humour into the videos, as I explore the history of these projects and the learning I can pass on to you.
But, it has not been totally devoid of content. I have managed to sporadically post short form videos, as Shorts on YouTube and as Reels on Instagram. These have included a short series from last years European Geoscience Union General Assembly, a piece on the Foss flood barrier in York, and most recently three more entries in my Distracted Geography series on the Sustainable Development Goals.
To make sure you do not miss the new videos you can subscribe to the channel.
Project Progress.
The annual Games for Geoscience session is coming up this easter at the European Geoscience Union General Assembly. We are still accepting abstracts until midday January 15th, so if you have worked with games for anything relating to geoscience, natural hazards, or the environment come and share it with us! I have written a post on the Games for Geoscience website that contains all the details you need.
Last month we soft-launched Adventures in Model Land. This is a framework inspired by tabletop roleplay games (TTRPG) where we encourage numerical modellers to build imagined worlds that follow the same rules as their models. This exercise is firstly a fun thing to do and share but will also help them think more creatively about the limits and assumptions in their models. From my example short story about a CAESAR-Lisflood model land you can see how alien these worlds can be. We are looking for people to give the framework a try and to report on their created model lands. Find out more on the Adventures in Model Land page on my website.
Gaming Environments
Gaming Environments contains all the news I have found relating to the nexus of gaming and the environment. This news is also published on the Games for Geoscience website each month and can be found here.
The deadline to submit your abstracts for the 2025 Games for Geoscience session is rapidly approaching. You have until midday January 15th – find out all the details in our blog here.
Research led by Dr Francesca de Rosa of the Centre for Advanced Preparedness and Threat Response Simulation considers Transdisciplinarity in Serious Gaming Design for Improved Crisis Preparedness. It discusses the development and piloting of a Command, Control, Coordination and Communication (C3C) game and can be read in the International Journal of Serious Games here.
Christmas may have been and gone but it also now just less than a year away! So, this great article by Dr Linda Dunlop and Prasad Sandbhor, University of York, on how to have difficult climate conversations is still timely and relevant. They discuss the unique power of games to breakdown barriers and create a safe space for conversations, recommending five games perfect for raising the topic of climate action. Read it on The Conversation here.
More from Environmental Sustainability at York now, with the return of the Playing for the Planet conference on April 25th at the University of York. The meeting aims to “link research and practice in environmental gaming”. If you’d like to give a Research Blast presentation, you have until 12pm GMT January 17th to submit an abstract. Find out more and book tickets here.
Speaker and game award submissions for the world’s premier games for social good meeting, Games for Change Festival 2025, are now open. The festival will be held in New York and online in the summer (date TBC) with the deadline for speaker submissions on January 24th – submit here. You can also submit games for the showcase and awards, including Best in Environmental Impact, here.
Take Action Global and Games for Change have teamed up to create the Climate Action Day Virtual Arcade. The arcade features ten independent videogames created by school students, to be played by other students, and to share environmental messages and promote positive actions. View the game listings and find all the links here.
About this Newsletter
I am Chris Skinner, a science communicator, STEM professional, and ADHDer. I am on a mission empowering people to unlock their full potential by transforming imagination into a powerful, actionable skill. This newsletter tracks my journey. I would like you to join me, so please subscribe. The newsletter also includes a copy of Gaming Environments, the monthly news relating to the nexus of gaming and the environment that I collate for the Games for Geoscience website. This newsletter is free and I do not offer a paid tier. If you would like to say thank you and/or help me in my mission please buy me a coffee using the link below.
Views expressed in this newsletter are mine and do not represent those of my employer. Content and links are provided for informational purposes and do not constitute endorsements. I am not responsible for the content of external sites, which may have changed since this newsletter was produced.
GeoSkinner 
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