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EarthGames | iOS | Android

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It's almost Election Day, and your ballot initiative is clinging to a narrow lead in the polls. Voters are concerned about effects on jobs and cost of living, and the press is waiting for answers about difficult policy questions. An angry fossil fuel CEO has contacted you with a proposal that sounds an awful lot like a threat. And do I smell smoke??

In honor of this historic day of climate action, we're proud to release our newest game, Deal: A Green New Election! It's available for free for iPhone/iPad and Android (Google Play). You can play it on your phone on the way to the climate strike! Although mobile is the preferred platform, we've also created a version that you can play in your browser.

We here at EarthGames are so inspired by the movement building around the Green New Deal. In this game, you're part of a team trying to pass a ballot initiative which will be voted on directly by the the voters in your state.

The Green New Deal would mobilize the workforce to build clean energy and resilient infrastructure, while addressing environmental justice and income inequality along the way. But do you have the passion and skill to get your initiative passed?

Over the 15 week campaign (which can be played through in just 5-10 minutes), you'll

Make decisions about what voters to target and messaging

Meet cool characters based on real-world climate activists

Respond to difficult interview questions

Witness fossil fuel infrastructure disasters

Encounter angry CEOs

Learn about environmental justice

Probably face some pretty harsh opposition

And much more...

When making this game, we were inspired by real-life heroes of the Green New Deal, and hope you're inspired to join their organizations, like the Sunrise Movement, Zero Hour, and 350.org. A list of some of our Green New Deal heroes is on this page - we hope you'll listen to their speeches and read their words about the Green New Deal!

The team who made Deal: A Green New Election includes:

Dargan Frierson
Jasmine Leung
Arman Kazi
Sisir Kadiveti
Rikki Parent
Erik Huang
Judy Twedt
Andrew McDonald

Thanks to all the play testers and climate activists we worked with as well!

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It's almost Election Day, and your ballot initiative is clinging to a narrow lead in the polls. Voters are concerned about effects on jobs and cost of living, and the press is waiting for answers about difficult policy questions. An angry fossil fuel CEO has contacted you with a proposal that sounds an awful lot...

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Could a video game help us solve climate change?

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Could a video game help us solve climate change?

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Could a video game help us solve climate change?

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2018 | Grist

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Could a video game help us solve climate change?

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EarthGames | iOS | Android
Teachers' Guide

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Download Life of Pika now on the App Store (iPhones and iPads) or Google Play (Android phones and tablets). It's free!

Our mountain home is getting so hot! It's becoming harder and harder to gather food and stay away from predators. You'll need to be quick to help your little pikas make it through all the levels of Life of Pika!

Life of Pika is a runner game by EarthGames in which players direct a pika (a real animal that is threatened by climate change) to collect food as they dodge predators and avoid overheating.

In addition to a full single-player campaign with a compelling story (illustrated by Ben Celsi), there is a split-screen two player mode. After you complete the story, perform challenges in infinite mode to collect all the unlockable content.

Teachers! If you are interested in using Life of Pika in your classroom, check out our useful teacher's guide!

EarthGames is an award-winning group of developers, students, and faculty at University of Washington. This is our 11th game and maybe our best yet! Thanks to all our crowdfunding campaign supporters who made this game a reality.

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Download Life of Pika now on the App Store (iPhones and iPads) or Google Play (Android phones and tablets). It's free! Our mountain home is getting so hot! It's becoming harder and harder to gather food and stay away from predators. You'll need to be quick to help your little pikas make it through all the...

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EarthGames | iOS | Android

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Now available for iOS and Android! Or play in your browser here! My home in the wild northwest of Alaska is usually so beautiful and snowy! But since NM Energy has moved in with all of their trains…

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Now available for iOS and Android! Or play in your browser here!

My home in the wild northwest of Alaska is usually so beautiful and snowy! But since NM Energy has moved in with all of their trains, boats, and oil rigs, things have gotten messy. Their smokestacks are spitting out so much dirty soot. That yucky soot makes me cough, and it’s making the snow melt away much faster!

I need your help to catch all of the gross soot particles before they hit the snow. Grab them in the air as quickly as you can. Otherwise the temperatures will rise above the freezing point (0 degrees Celsius or 0 C), and we’ll be all soggy.

You won’t be alone — you’ll unlock some cool power-ups to help you along the way. The scientists help to catch soot over one of your islands. The special scientific vacuums will clean off the soot from all the areas. The final, secret power-up lets you harness the power of nature — you’ll have to see it to believe it!

After each level, you have a chance to collect soot particles that you can analyze back in the science lab. These let you unlock real scientific facts and images about soot in the Arctic, written by climate scientists!

Soot Out at the 0 C Corral was designed and built by EarthGames, a group of scientists, game designers, and artists at the University of Washington. We’re an award-winning group of students, researchers, and professors that are dedicated to making fun science-based games. Help us get the Soot Out!!

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EarthGames | iOS | Android

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EarthGames is proud to announce the release of Erode Runner, an exciting game that teaches players about coastal erosion in the Arctic. Down for free on iOS and Android! You play the role of an ar…

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EarthGames is proud to announce the release of Erode Runner, an exciting game that teaches players about coastal erosion in the Arctic.

Down for free on iOS and Android!

You play the role of an arctic fox struggling to escape coastal erosion and other obstacles, such as drunken trees and sinkholes. Move fast because, as a result of climate change, the permafrost is melting and sea ice is disappearing. Unfortunately, these factors make the Arctic coast more susceptible to erosion.

But that’s not your only challenge! Along the coast are lost baby foxes that need to be rescued. Stay focused on your goal— and save as many foxes as you can before they fall into a sinkhole or the Arctic Ocean!

Throughout the game you can take the baby foxes you’ve saved to the den to exchange them for science facts and bonus stuff. Here you’ll learn about the role of climate change and about the many environmental, social, and economic impacts of coastal erosion.

Be on the lookout for exciting bonus modes mixed in with the science!

Have fun, avoid obstacles, save baby foxes, and learn about Arctic coastal erosion!

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EarthGames | iOS | Android
Teachers Guide

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Put yourself in the hooves of a caribou in this science-based adventure!
Download for iOS Download for Android
Boo the caribou spends her days happily playing with her mom and dad, learning how to break through the snow to reach the tasty grass below. But everything changes when rain comes to the normally frigid Arctic. Ice is much harder to break through than snow! Experience the emotional yet uplifting plight of the caribou as you learn about the science of the Arctic.

It takes skill to bounce your hoof off of different surfaces and reveal enough grass for your family. You'll carom through 16 different levels, each illustrated with striking original watercolors by Rikki Parent. Rain on snow events are occurring more and more in the Arctic. You'll witness this challenge right affect your game before your eyes, and how we can help the caribou!

A Caribou's Tale is based on real science facts, with educational material written by environmental scientists at University of Washington. Additionally, if you are a teacher interested in using this game in your classroom, check out our teacher's guide!

A Caribou's Tale is a project of EarthGames and the University of Washington. Samuel Dassler designed and programmed the game and wrote the story. Rikki Parent did the art. Sara Brostrom wrote the educational content. Dargan Frierson wrote the music and was executive producer. Judy Twedt contributed additional writing. Jingyang Wu, Xian Wu, Grayson Sinclair, and Nick Butschli worked on earlier versions of the game. A Caribou's Tale was first prototyped during the Arctic Climate Game Jam in early 2017.

Download it now for iPhone and iPad and Android phones and tablets! If you enjoy playing, we'd really appreciate if you shared it with your friends, rate the game on the app stores, and leave a review.

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Put yourself in the hooves of a caribou in this science-based adventure! Download for iOS Download for Android Boo the caribou spends her days happily playing with her mom and dad, learning how to break through the snow to reach the tasty grass below. But everything changes when rain comes to the normally frigid Arctic....

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EarthGames | iOS | Android

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Download now for iOS and Android!

Got a minute to save the planet? This fun, frantic minigame collection highlights the great work of student organizations at University of Washington that work on initiatives related to sustainability. Play 21 different minigames - each taking only seconds.

In just one short playthrough, you'll...
Bring clean electricity to an island community
Keep your friends from wasting paper
Attract butterflies to a green wall
Spot a sasquatch
Be a bee at the UW Farm
Maybe pop a bike tire
Harvest tomatoes and purple peppers
Bring clean water to a pig
Capture methane in a biogas bin

Once you've toured all the groups, play through each game at higher difficulty levels, and play high score mode for a randomly generated challenge that gets harder and harder!

The fun doesn't stop there! These are all real campus groups that you can work with at UW!

This game made possible by the generous support of the UW Campus Sustainability Fund.

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Download now for iOS and Android! Got a minute to save the planet? This fun, frantic minigame collection highlights the great work of student organizations at University of Washington that work on initiatives related to sustainability. Play 21 different minigames -- each taking only seconds. In just one short playthrough, you'll...

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EarthGames | iOS | Android | itch.io

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EarthGames is proud to announce Infrared Escape, a game that combines frantic arcade fun with… learning about the greenhouse effect!? Download now for Android or iOS! You can also play I…

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EarthGames is proud to announce Infrared Escape, a game that combines frantic arcade fun with… learning about the greenhouse effect!?

Download now for Android or iOS!

You can also play Infrared Escape in your browser on itch.io here!

You play the role of an infrared light beam, trying to make it out to space. Along the way you have to dodge pesky greenhouse gases by tapping left or right.

Each collision with a greenhouse gas causes your beam to lose some energy. If you keep grazing the gases, it’s game over.

Your journey through the air is divided into levels — each one an actual layer of the atmosphere! Making it through the stratosphere into space is a great accomplishment! It means your ray has done its part to cool down the Earth and offset global warming. As a reward, the game converts your Joules into Jewels, that you can use to purchase interesting science trivia in the shop!

We also have a helpful teacher’s guide for the game if you are a teacher and interested in using this game in the classroom!

Infrared Escape Teacher’s Guide Download

The easiest mode is the pre-industrial past, so there aren’t as many greenhouse gases to dodge. The hardest difficulty corresponds with a much more polluted future. Light-speed reaction times will be needed to conquer this mode, since greenhouse gases are so tightly packed in the air.

Infrared Escape was designed by Samuel Dassler, Professor Dargan Frierson, Amara Kitnikone, Rikki Parent, and Ben Peterson. Make sure to crank the volume on Dargan’s pulsing electronic dance soundtrack!

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EarthGames | iOS | Android

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mosquito/NET is a project that gamifies data collection and citizen science for community health and empowerment. When the Zika outbreak hit her community in Brazil, scientist and educator …

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mosquito/NET is a project that gamifies data collection and citizen science for community health and empowerment.  When the Zika outbreak hit her community in Brazil, scientist and educator Renée Codsi empowered her school to protect their health by identifying and removing mosquito breeding grounds to prevent the spread of Zika. Now, in collaboration with EarthGames, she is teaching educators throughout Brazil and Peru how to reduce the risk of mosquito-borne disease with the help of digital games.

EarthGames lead developer Andrew McDonald recently spent the summer updating the user interface and functionality of mosquito/NET.  Now you can track sightings of birds, animals, and other insects in addition to just mosquitos!  We hope this helps users recognize that mosquitos live within an ecosystem, so we need to find solutions that don’t harm other species!

Download the current version of mosquito/NET for Android or iOS.

EarthGames student Nik Gaub has made a game to raise awareness about our effort.  In Slappy Bug, you must protect yourself from mosquitoes by slapping them and by eliminating the standing water where they breed.  It’s practically impossible on Hard — what’s your high score??

Download Slappy Bug for Android or iOS!

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iOS | Android

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EarthGames | RASHMI SHARMA iOS | Android

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EcoTrivia version 2.0 has been released. This new version included completely redone art by Rikki Parent, along with twice as many questions as before, separated into easy and hard categories. Try …

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EcoTrivia version 2.0 has been released. This new version included completely redone art by Rikki Parent, along with twice as many questions as before, separated into easy and hard categories. Try getting the high score for both! Download now on iOS and Android for free!

EcoTrivia for iOS

EcoTrivia for Android

In EcoTrivia: Save the Animals!, you are led by animal ambassadors through four different ecosystems: a toucan in the rainforest, a polar bear in the Arctic, a clownfish in a coral reef, and a pika in the mountains.  In each area you have to answer trivia questions to protect the animals from climate change and habitat destruction.

EcoTrivia: Save the Animals! was made by Rashmi Sharma, Rittwika Rudra, and Courtney Harris for their Information School MSIM capstone project, in collaboration with Dargan Frierson.  Erica Escajeda provided questions for the polar bear section, and many members of EarthGamesUW helped with testing. Version 2.0 was developed by Samuel Dassler and features all-new art by Rikki Parent, and new science questions by Sara Brostrom and Dargan Frierson.

Check out Rashmi’s project website that describes the entire development process here.

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Video game industry levels up on climate change

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Video game industry levels up on climate change

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A NEW WAVE OF INDIES ARE USING GAMES TO EXPLORE CLIMATE CHANGE

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A NEW WAVE OF INDIES ARE USING GAMES TO EXPLORE CLIMATE CHANGE

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2020

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As the world grapples with the enduring impact of climate change, indie creators are finding ways to use games as a form of interactive education.

Nature isn't exactly new territory for games. From the loathsome lusus naturae of behemoth horror series to the sprawling cosmopolis of complex management simulators, video games often feature wrenched contortions of the natural world as core tenets in environmental design. In some cases this is largely innocuous and more a product of pure creativity than a riposte against real-world issues.

But more recently, smaller creators have been designing worlds as mirrors to our own. Their purpose is to reflect injustice and encourage change as we seek to undo the damage done by the contemporary climate crisis. This could mean anything from a game exploring the oceans made in concert with the BBC, to an interactive look at the importance of bees.

One such case originated in 2016 after developers at E-Line Media were approached by the BBC to commence work on Beyond Blue. Kevin Jorge, senior producer for games and interactive at BBC Studios, explains that Never Alone - a game centered on native Alaskans -had brought the studio to their attention. "We realized their goal of developing games that are a force for good and help[ing] players understand the world aligned with our principles and we began chatting," Jorge explains. At the time, Blue Planet II, a BBC documentary series on the wonders of marine life, was still in development and served as the basis for many conversations to come.

What struck the BBC about Never Alone were its "Cultural Insights," which appear as short, unlockable documentary videos centered on thoughts from members of the real-life Alaska Native community. In the words of Michael Angst, E-Line Media co-founder and CEO, contributors spend these vignettes "discussing the cultural background behind creative decisions and providing an opportunity for players to get to know the perspective of the elders, storytellers, and artists that helped create the game."

On top of this, the BBC's Blue Planet II was a huge hit that helped bring important conversations to a larger audience. "Everyone is becoming more conscious of the world around us, so it would be great to provide our content and expertise to game developers who are interested in bringing these stories to life in new and exciting ways," Jorge tells me.

He explains that BBC Earth alone creates over 60 hours of natural history content a year, with their continued and constant aim being "to raise big issues and provoke discussions about our planet." Angst shares these sentiments, explaining why it's important to make games that are innately tied to reality and contemporary issues. "We believe the real world is as mysterious, complex, and beautiful as the most richly imagined worlds of fantasy and science fiction," he says.

Games set in the ocean are a testament to this, and, as Angst notes, certain indie experiences like Abzû and Subnautica have already proven "how engaging the setting of an underwater world can be." In his eyes, the structure of Beyond Blue is close to the serene Abzû. "We really wanted to balance the goal of progressing through a narrative with an invitation to relax into the environments and explore," he explains.

As a result, the team at E-Line Media has taken pains to depict a waterscape and soundscape that prioritize the beauty and mystery of the ocean. Depictions like Blue Planet and Beyond Blue show people the ethereal majesty of the underwater world, and also emphasize just how ephemeral this magical world is. One could certainly design an experience centered on darkness and dead zones as a fear-instilling deterrent. But Beyond Blue is more acquainted with optimism, hope, passion, and appreciation.

"We thought it would be interesting to set the game in the near future."

"We thought it would be interesting to set the game in the near future, not so much to project [it], but to invite players to be part of imagining what our ocean's future might realistically be," Angst tells me. He explains that the scientists who consulted on the project helped to imagine a future that we can aspire to, while simultaneously depicting the harsh realities our ocean is experiencing as a result of the contemporary climate crisis. "The impacts resulting from a warming ocean, the flow of waste / plastic, and growing noise pollution have reached a crisis level in some regions," he adds. "The threat of population collapse in species, especially large, social animals like whales and dolphins, is always looming."

Here's how Angst describes the world and premise of Beyond Blue:

When our game begins, some areas of the ocean are under significant pressure and disruption, while others are showing revitalization following increased global action to mitigate human impact. The world in our fiction is one more attuned to the tie between the health of the ocean and the health of our planet and a growing sense of awe and wonder of the ocean has led to an enthusiasm for exploration of this largely uncharted world, the hope of discovery of new life forms here on earth, and the promise of potential insights into medicine, human health, and well-being.

This cohesive experience is altogether designed to engage players, to challenge them to consider the significance of scientists in a rapidly changing, globally connected world, question what underlies the human drive to explore and discover, and find hope and feel agency amidst a natural environment under real pressure.

Angst remarks that Sylvia Earle, one of the scientific advisors on the project, once said, "there's a lot of water we now know elsewhere in the solar system and elsewhere in space, but to have a liquid ocean with frozen polar areas - it's taken four and a half billion years to shape the world in a way that is favorable to humankind. It's taken us about four and a half decades to significantly unravel those systems."

Naturally, E-Line Media also partnered with a variety of other academics to ensure their depiction was accurate and respectful. David Gruber is a marine biologist and ocean explorer. Gruber has been a biologist for the state of Florida, an underwater tour guide at the John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, a professional divemaster, and a test pilot for new underwater devices. Clearly, Gruber loves the marine world, but what drew him to its equivalent within game spaces? "I recognize the power and allure of gaming," he explains. "I am also a very visual and tactile learner. I feel gaming is a creative vehicle to bring across all the fun aspects of being an ocean scientist."

"Gaming is a creative vehicle to bring across all the fun aspects of being an ocean scientist."

Gruber first met the team at Beyond Blue in 2016, right near its initial conception."Along with Dr. Mandy Joye, we would have monthly discussions framed around different aspects of ocean related stuff," he tells me. "We covered both the science and the social aspects of exploration and science. We even got into how to prepare for a ten-hour dive in a submarine with no bathroom." Some specific elements Gruber consulted on for Beyond Blue include fluorescent sharks, whale communication, bioluminescence and biofluorescence, underwater robotics, and liquid breathing.

Gruber's passion and expertise had a direct influence on the game's systems. "Our near future world is one where technology has enabled ocean explorers and researchers to more intimately explore the ocean at depths currently difficult to reach," Angst tells me. "Our scientists in the game are powered with less-invasive sensing and sampling equipment that can feed data to machine learning models and simulations developed by scientists around the world working on diverse questions. Our lead character (Mirai) utilizes an advanced diving suit that can help her bring human dexterity and intuition to complement the power of the technology and enable players to explore with a human lens." The idea is to educate players on how to interact with the ocean in a way that enriches it, as opposed to continuing to destroy it and the countless organic lifeforms to which it is home.

Education goes further in this case, too. Like in Never Alone, players will have access to unlockable "Ocean Insight" videos that feature commentary from the researchers consulting on the game, as well as never-before-seen footage from the Blue Planet II production.

Although Beyond Blue is a carefully considered force in the contemporary climate crisis, environmental destruction isn't solely confined to the ocean. Javier Ramello, co-founder, CEO, and programmer at Herobeat Studios, tells me of how Endling, a game initially designed as a side project to work on in his free time, evolved into a radical critique of habitat destruction.

"We will avoid making the eco-conscious statement too obvious."

Endling was originally a point-and-click game, and was closer to a fox simulator than anything else. But when Herobeat started to actually pitch Endling, the game received a remarkably strong reception, despite only having a small amount of concept art at the time. After getting accepted by GameBCN, quitting their jobs, and receiving an Epic MegaGrant, Herobeat was eventually noticed by its current publisher, HandyGames, with Endling consistently becoming a more scathing and essential critique all the while.

"Foxes are animals with incredible capacities for adaptation and survival and are masters in stealth and cunning," Ramello tells me. Although foxes are common in contemporary wildlife, Endling imagines a different future. "This fox is the last [fox], thus emphasizing the concept that human beings have reached the zenith of destroying ecosystems."

In Endling, you control the mother fox, but you are not alone. Your cubs are also a significant part of the game. "You need to protect them and guide them, but cubs will evolve, grow, and learn much like a party member of an RPG," Ramello explains. "Our intention is to strengthen the bond the player will forge with the protagonist and her offspring. What better way to do it than witness the birth of the puppies, see them grow up, and develop unique skills and personalities?"

Ramello says that the team at Herobeat wanted to explore the idea of video games as more than mere entertainment products; an "awareness tool," as he describes it. "We aimed to reach both young people who do not consume traditional media and a more mature population concerned about the current environmental crisis and social impact issues," Ramello explains. "From the beginning we knew that we wanted to sensitize players by representing a dystopian universe close to the world we are living in, where we could express our concerns about many different topics. What better way to explore it than through the eyes of an innocent animal?"

Each scenario in Endling addresses a major issue in the modern world, including problems that arise from "intensive livestock, pollution of the seas and rivers, the accumulation of electronic waste, overpopulation, [and] climate change."

A tale of an innocent animal's perseverance in the wake of a dystopian disaster

At the same time, its depiction and critique, although scathing and necessary, are carefully considered. " Endling is a very emotional game, and for the sake of immersion we will avoid making the eco-conscious statement too obvious," Ramello tells me. "The mother fox's only motivation is making sure her litter survives. She can't read nor understand humans, so there won't be voice over or texts talking about how fucked Endling's world is. Our goal is to present this landscape in a way that reflects how we think the Earth can end up being in the near future if we don't act now, and Endling 's players will [draw] their own conclusions."

It doesn't shy away from what is at the heart of its story, though. Endling raises awareness by balancing an emotional experience with the harshness and violence that are inherent to life. It is a tale of an innocent animal's perseverance in the wake of a dystopian disaster wrought from human greed.

And, as with all stories, especially lasting ones, form is important. In Ramello's eyes, Endling earns its pathos at least partially due to the interactive affordances held uniquely by video games. "[This] interaction is a much more powerful medium to empathize with the situation we present," he explains. "A life and death situation where the mother fox is defenseless in a dangerous world: a selfish society is destroying the environment, food is in short supply, humans are desperate and dangerous, your cubs depend on you and your only tool for survival is animal instinct."

This is, unfortunately, reality. According to a 2018 report from the World Wildlife Fund, populations of vertebrates have declined by an average of 60 percent since 1970. "It is a problem that cannot be ignored, since the result of the decisions we make today will mark the future," Ramello says, before explaining that Herobeat's ultimate goal is to "make players feel more responsible for our actions." In his eyes, developers of entertainment products released digitally on a global scale are presented with a unique opportunity to educate and influence younger generations.

This feeds into other games, too. For example, the recently released Temtem, which has drawn a range of comparisons to behemoth franchises such as Pokémon and Persona, has been received favorably on a global scale. It hit over 30,000 peak concurrent players the first week it launched on Steam. Its colorful palate and warm humor make it a game that is accessible to people of all ages, which, by extension, increases its potential reach and subsequent influence.

"It is a problem that cannot be ignored."

Narrative designer Victor Ojuel tells me that the world of Temtem is sort of pre-climate change - at least man-made climate change. "The societies of the Airborne Archipelago are a kinder, more social version of our world," he explains. "Because they have emerged in relatively small landmasses, they are very aware of how limited their resources are, so they have more conservationist traditions."

According to Ojuel, this influences the game world's emphasis on coexistence and eco-friendliness. However, the world of Temtem is simultaneously on the verge of becoming radically smaller. The recent invention of technology such as airships, which facilitate readily available travel between detached islands, and TemCards, which are Temtem 's equivalent of pokéballs, make Archipelagian society more universal and easily traversable. As a result, the Airborne Archipelago is a world on the eve of globalization, which nefarious forces such as Clan Belsoto - the game's antagonistic party - seek to exploit, on one occasion even instigating a devastating natural disaster by scientifically rekindling an ancient and sacred volcano.

There are also forces in Temtem more resemblant of contemporary ripostes against environmental issues. One such example is the FreeTem! organization, which Ojuel describes as "another reflex of new tensions within Archipelagian societies; a new movement, clearly an heir to their long conservationist traditions, but also boldly challenging something as deeply ingrained in Archipelagian culture as temtem taming." Like the problems we face with conservation, domestication, and animal care, this movement is a sort of reinvigoration of values that have been held for a long time, but haven't been challenged in almost as long. "You could say man-made climate change hasn't happened yet, but the first signs of change are already there," Ojuel says.

Other indie games are more focused on the directly contemporary, eschewing speculative thought for what we face in the current moment. Lukasz Rosinski, founder of Bee Simulator studio Varsav, explains that although games are obviously designed as entertainment products, they have the potential to give us so much more. "In our opinion, they are a medium that could be the best link between generations, and the best way to educate players in the most modern and effective way: via entertainment."

This idea was at the core of Varsav's first game right from the get-go. It all started when he was reading a book about bees to his young daughter, which made him realize the potential of stories told from unique perspectives. "During development we focused on raising awareness of bees with our players, educating players on how major a role bees play in our environment and about how important they are for us as pollinators, and highlighting the major troubles they're facing right now," Rosinski explains.

The knock-on effects of potential bee extinction have been widely discussed, but few creative experiences have sought to make the phenomenon tangible. "We wanted to show a completely different perspective for this small insect using realistic models, graphics and gameplay mechanics inspired by real bees' tasks, not cartoonish ones with an infantile story and mechanics," Rosinski tells me. "We wanted Bee Simulator's players to be much more aware of this micro world and its challenges after finishing the game. For example, implementing a huge glossary that's full of information regarding different species of bees and all the flowers and animals encountered during the game. We also planned for Bee Simulator to be a link between generations."

Rosinski firmly believes other creators should follow suit and focus on weaving inspired and important experiences that seek to educate and motivate. "All initiatives that could slow down the soaring consumerism and, in consequence, the amount of garbage that we produce globally are very welcome," he explains. "We may show the beauty of our environment and warn of the dark future that awaits us, and we may show animals that were fascinating, but became extinct through human activities. Such small things may be worth doing, but in my opinion this may only influence game players, not necessarily the politicians who are the final decision makers in global nature conservation initiatives." Clearly, the phenomenon that has spread among indie games is a step in the right direction, but change, resolution, and redemption demand more. Our climate and planet demand more.

This small movement is inspiring, though, and indicative of our capacity for change. Angst definitely thinks so. "We believe that well-crafted games have the power to speak to the human condition," he tells me. "[To] bring new and diverse voices to the medium, and celebrate the complexity and beauty of our planet, helping us to understand and shape our world."

If this contemporary trend in games continues to gain momentum, we could, potentially, learn to do exactly that, preserving the wondrous natural phenomena of our world and ensuring Earth's successful retention of its status as a safe and sublime home for posterity. Not just for humans, but for animals, environments, and the wonderfully weird mysteries we have yet to unravel.

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A new wave of indies are using games to explore climate change

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As the world grapples with the enduring impact of climate change, indie creators are finding ways to use games as a form of interactive education. Nature isn't exactly new territory for games. From the loathsome lusus naturae of behemoth horror series to the sprawling cosmopolis of complex management simulators, video games often feature wrenched contortions of the natural world as core tenets in environmental design.

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2021

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Outsiders know it for mayhem, misogyny, and murder. They blame it for vices from time-wasting to addiction. But some involved in video gaming, a business bigger than film and television combined, want to clean up its act, using its cultural cachet to cure the world's ills. Item one on the agenda? Climate change.

"Gaming is a cultural juggernaut," says Hugo Bille, a game designer and climate advocate who runs the podcast Doing Our Bit. "We have been underestimating our impact on the way that people think about the world."

Be they simple mobile phone games or elaborate console challenges, cerebral strategy journeys or adrenaline-fueled shoot-'em-ups, video games are now at the fingertips of well over 2 billion players worldwide. And, as states, nations, and organizations around the globe work toward climate targets, the gaming industry is starting to play its part.

Turns out, gaming's secret weapon against climate change might be the same issue that has long had parents and lawmakers clutching their pearls: the power of video games to influence behavior.

The Power of Play

Since time immemorial, human beings have used play as an educational aid: from sports that build team spirit to kindergarten games that make hand washing fun. Lizzie Magie designed her Landlord's Game in 1903 to teach the progressive economics of Henry George; it went on to inspire Monopoly. Sadly, toys and board games were among the tools that helped Nazi Germany indoctrinate its population.

While parental fears over violent games dominate column inches and search results, video games can drive positive change too, observes Lindsay Grace, Knight Chair in Interactive Media at the University of Miami and author of Doing Things with Games: Social Impact through Play and Love. "We have solid evidence that elements of persuasive play offer long-term effects," he notes.

Students who played Spent, a game around homelessness, demonstrated increased empathy for people living with poverty both immediately after playing and some weeks later. The Re-Mission Games transport young cancer patients into the human body where they use an array of therapies to attack their disease. Clinical trials have shown they increase understanding of cancer, boost positive emotions, and help young people stick to tough medical regimens.

"There are some things that are just remarkable about games," enthuses Dargan Frierson, a climate scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. "You become that character. When you move something around the screen, that's you. The possibility of really immersive storytelling to build empathy, to tell stories, to imagine different and better futures, is pretty remarkable."

"The best gamesaretheonesthatletplayers understandasmallelementof climate change."

-Lindsay Grace, Knight Chair in Interactive Media at the University of Miami and author of Doing Things with Games: Social Impact through Play and Love

A gamer himself, Frierson believes deeply in the persuasive power of games. He created EarthGames, a group dedicated to producing educational climate games rooted in scientific research. The goal is to bring critical climate issues to gamers' attention in an engaging and accurate way. Their output thus far includes 11 games and six interactive climate science tools. In one game, Climate Quest, players send experts to resolve climate-caused disasters across the US. Along the way, they learn about the causes of the disasters and mitigation strategies.

The Risk: Gamifying a Complex Problem

When it comes to a problem as large and multi-faceted as the climate crisis, selecting where to focus gaming's persuasive power is one of the primary and hardest challenges. "It's important to make the problem seem surmountable and to encourage players to understand a complex issue with simplicity," Grace emphasizes. "The best games are the ones that let players understand a small element of climate change, which then expands out to the more complex integration of climate science to leave the player understanding how their small behavior change can make a meaningful change."

Frierson cites Thunderbird Strike, an award-winning mobile phone game by the Anishinaabe artist, researcher, and game designer Elizabeth LaPensée, as an example of an effective (and intersectional) climate game. In a world inspired by Native art styles, gamers play as the Thunderbird, an Anishinaabe spiritual being, to learn about the impact of oil pipelines on animals, communities, and the environment-with a website for further information.

Grace recommends Eco, a multi-player strategy game developed for use in schools. Players aim to develop civilization to a level where they can build sophisticated technology in time to save the planet from an imminent meteor strike-without destroying Earth's fragile ecosystem in the process.

As in the real world, the consequences of individual actions are often small yet sometimes shockingly visible. Cutting down trees might eliminate a local rabbit population; joining other players to mine minerals without managing waste may poison local fish. Players' simple actions intertwine into a complex whole as they echo across the planet.

"I like Eco for its scale and demonstrative effect," Grace observes. "It allows people to experiment with playable models of climate."

The Kenyan gaming developer Internet of Elephants has developed an entire suite of video games that aim to engage urban dwellers around the world in real-life wildlife conservation. In the company's flagship game, Wildeverse, mobile players use augmented reality to engage with four real-life apes (Fio the orangutan, Aida the chimpanzee, Buka the gorilla, and Chilli the gibbon) in habitats that appear overlayed on the player's yard, park, or anywhere they happen to be. The latest Internet of Elephants game, Unseen Empire, educates players on the intricacies of biodiversity. It's based on a real ten-year study on the habitat of the clouded leopard.

Minecraft, the blockbuster building game now owned by Microsoft, showcases environmental elements both in mainstream gameplay and in its school edition. Its Sustainability City world offers wind turbines, hydropower plants, sustainable homes, and more as teaching tools.

And, while strategy games have touched on climate change since players first took control of a planet's ecosystems in 1990's SimEarth, a new generation of immersive first-person games, is joining the party. The trailer for the next release of shooter Perfect Dark centers on ecological disaster; We Are the Caretakers will see gamers pulling together a squad to protect endangered animals; while Endling will put players in the place of the last surviving mother fox, striving to protect her cubs in a devastated earthscape.

The Challenge: Is Saving the World Fun?

Yet not all climate games are pristine reflections of the most current climate science, and the results can be a mixed blessing. Gathering Storm, a 2019 expansion to the long-running PC strategy game Civilization, is climate-related and loved by millions of players, but it also includes fictional (and unideal) solutions. While players contend with human-caused climate change and extreme weather events, their tools span the gamut, from the realistic- carbon capture-to the realm of cli-fi with "seasteads," or floating communities.

Bille says Gathering Storm exemplifies one of the central challenges for games as a climate communication tool: the need for playability.

"There's always a tension between truthfulness and playfulness, and these bigger games like Civilization tend to err on the side of playability," he says. "Climate change is presented as quite manageable. You're going to get some disasters, and you're going to get some sea-level rise, but the criticism is that it does not portray climate change as a serious enough problem. And that's bound to happen when your core goal is playability"

" Shooting zombiesathighspeeddeliversa dopamine hitthatslowlyrebuildingsoilsthroughpermaculturejustcan't match."

Bille sees this dynamic as part of a deeper problem within the industry: the player's general relationship to the on-screen universe. Winning in video games is often very different from winning in life-and lightyears from the cooperative strategies required to solve the climate crisis.

"Most mainstream games are about killing stuff," Frierson says.

In an industry still dominated by patriarchal ways of thinking and seeing, video gaming can take competitive play to its limits. The more dramatic and taboo the scenario, the more exciting it can feel. Shooting zombies at high speed delivers a dopamine hit that slowly rebuilding soils through permaculture to draw down carbon just can't match.

"Video gaming tends to portray a pretty destructive relationship between the player and the environment-a very colonial, extractive relationship where everything in the game world is all laid out there for the players' benefit," Bille says.

Even gentle, open-ended simulation games such as the popular Animal Crossing often subscribe to this ethos. Animal Crossing players deforest, commodify, and reshape their landscapes, fishing for creatures that include endangered species such as whale sharks. Games like this exist, however cutely, to dominate and exploit the world around them.

And the desire for dominance extends to planet-wide strategy games. "Even the good strategy ones are basically about colonialism. How many cultures can you wipe out?" says Frierson. "I think we need new metrics."

Could saving earth, rather than dominating it, become the key goal of strategy games? And then what would winning look like? The questions are far from simple.

"The more important part of the creative work ahead of us is not to make people make climate games, because I think that's about to happen anyway," Bille says. "We need to ensure that the climate games they make are good."

Games like Unseen Empire illustrate a new vision for gameplay. In it, players engage in tasks like identifying rare species, placing camera traps, and using scientific evidence to influence policymakers on wildlife conservation. Another example is the PC diving game Beyond Blue, a spectacular journey through the oceans that ties into the BBC's Blue Planet series. Creators E-Line Media worked with scientists to help imagine a future humans could hope for-without ignoring the toxic realities of waste, warming, noise pollution, and acidification. But not every studio will be equipped for that level of endeavor, and nuanced, narrative adventures do not appeal to every player.

The Industry's Quest Toward Climate Action

In 2019, the United Nations Environment Programme launched the Playing for the Planet Alliance, a partnership between industry leaders and environmental experts whose members include Sony, Microsoft, and Angry Birds maker Rovio-although titans including Nintendo and Electronic Arts have yet to sign up. Besides encouraging members to cut their carbon footprints, its annual Green Game Jam, now entering its second iteration, aims to incorporate green "nudges," from calls for donations to adjusted storylines, into existing titles.

Last year's Green Games Jam test run produced edits that over 100 million players experienced. Racing game Hill Climb Racing 2 introduced electric and hybrid car parts and solar recharge stations, the WordBrain puzzle game allowed players to donate to plant real-world trees in-game, while Angry Birds 2 ran an in-game event around deforestation promoting the UN's Trillion Tree Campaign.

This year, the target is to reach a billion people, with messaging and calls to action about the conservation and restoration of forests and oceans. "It's about empowering players through the games they already know and love," says Deborah Mensah-Bonsu, founder of social impact games initiative Games for Good, who is consulting on Playing for the Planet.

Some of these green nudges are appearing on their own, making some headway on Frierson's idea of finding new metrics for gaming-rewards for real-world climate action or rewards in the form of such action. Before the pandemic, augmented reality favorite Pokémon Go rewarded participants in Earth Day cleanups with in-game gifts. London indie studio Ustwo Games is planting a new tree for every download of its climate-centric game, Alba: a Wildlife Adventure.

Beyond the studios, activists and researchers have used game spaces to deliver on their environmental action goals. Greenpeace Poland utilized Minecraft to build a detailed map of the Białowieża Forest, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that's one of Europe's last remaining old-growth forests, and cut down every single tree but one, as part of a campaign against logging in the forest. The UN and Oxford University used pop-up questionnaires in games to deliver the world's largest climate change opinion survey, reaching audiences that are hard to find by traditional tools such as phone calls.

But for all the passion and commitment that individuals within and around the gaming industry demonstrate, much work remains to be done. One study showed that, in the US alone, energy-hungry gaming devices suck up 34 terawatt-hours of electricity per year-more than the entire country of Hungary. And, while Microsoft vaunts its ambitions to become carbon negative by 2030, its 2020 Xbox console ships in "instant-on" mode-a decision that saves users 5-10 seconds and could use as much electricity as a large coal power plant generates each year.

While the industry marches onwards toward its 2030 climate goals, there remains one large elephant in the room: the energy and resource costs of gaming itself. "One thing I would absolutely love to see is if gamers would actively talk about the carbon footprint of the gaming industry, and put that pressure on the Twitter accounts of gaming companies," Bille says. "I think it would be a great exercise in civic action."

Theodora Sutcliffe

British-born, Theodora lives in Bali, Indonesia, the island of the gods. When she's not writing, she likes to hang out with manta rays, practice ashtanga yoga, and drink sunset cocktails on the beach.

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Gaming vs Climate Change - Means and Matters

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Outsiders know it for mayhem, misogyny, and murder. They blame it for vices from time-wasting to addiction. But some involved in video gaming, a business bigger than film and television combined, want to clean up its act, using its cultural cachet to cure the world's ills. Item one on the agenda?

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The many ways video game development impacts the climate crisis

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THE MANY WAYS VIDEO GAME DEVELOPMENT IMPACTS THE CLIMATE CRISIS

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THE MANY WAYS VIDEO GAME DEVELOPMENT IMPACTS THE CLIMATE CRISIS

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2020

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Since the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has overtaken the climate crisis as the most pressing existential threat for much of the world's population. As we adapt to isolation, the warming planet has taken an understandable back seat in the news coverage, although scientists have noted the spread of the novel coronavirus instigating a fall in carbon emissions. But there's a potential dark side to the virus-related reduction as China and countries across the globe seek to make up lost ground. Far from halting the climate crisis, coronavirus might just temporarily pause our emissions, albeit at different times and rates across the world. Once we get through this ( whatever that ultimately looks like), its most alarming facts will still ring true: we only have 10 years to prevent catastrophic overheating while our destruction of entire species continues unabated.

Video games might not appear inextricably tied to the climate crisis, but they are. There's the electricity use of gaming devices themselves, estimated to sit at 34 terawatt-hours of energy each year, or the equivalent of 5 million cars. Once you start unraveling where else the industry intersects with environmental issues, it can be difficult to stop - from the petroleum-based substances the hardware is made of, the workers mining raw materials in already sweltering conditions, to the millions of air miles underpinning business deals. Even just a cursory peek into the future shows the internet infrastructure games are reliant upon might be submerged by rising sea levels. As the crisis rolls on, game makers are beginning to give serious thought to how they might reduce their industry's contributions to the crisis.

COVID-19 has thrown one aspect of the games business into sharp relief: industry conferences. Buoyed on by business and promotional opportunities, thousands of game makers would usually be taking long-haul flights across the globe right now. Except, this year, they aren't. In the United States, GDC and E3 have either been postponed or canceled, the UK's EGX Rezzed is on hold, while in Germany, gamesweekberlin is off for the foreseeable future, with more announcements predicted over the coming months. The effect this will have on the games industry is unclear, but it's already impacting the carbon footprint of game developers. With restrictions on travel, event organizers have been forced to think creatively about how aspects of their conferences might be carried out digitally. GDC broadcast some of its talks online via Twitch and is making its summer event online-only, London Games Festival is taking place digitally, while Steam hosted a new indie festival made up of game demos for upcoming titles. Meanwhile, the new Summer Game Fest will feature an E3-like smattering of product announcements, only in an online format.

In 2019, Rami Ismail, co-founder of the independent studio Vlambeer, established the digital conference gamedev.world. The event started from the perspective that "everyone should have access to knowledge" at a moment when travel restrictions, at least in the US, were at their most stringent (pre-COVID-19). Considering the environmental benefits of a remote event, Ismail says these "rolled" naturally into a broader conversation. While virtual conferences can't yet replace face-to-face networking, gains are made elsewhere, namely in the removal of often prohibitive barriers to entry such as expensive flights and accommodation. If, following the global pandemic, developers opt for a greater emphasis on virtual events, the upside might not just be a reduction in carbon emissions but a more diverse and equitable games industry, one whose perspective is less oriented toward major epicenters such as San Francisco and Tokyo.

Ismail, arguably one of the games industry's most visible presences at physical conferences across the world, notes the global demands of his job (which often centers on advocacy for regional games industries) while acknowledging how his own behavior has changed over recent years. "I've been trying to minimize how much I use aeroplanes," he says, explaining how he "bundles" travel to particular regions. "If I have a flight to China, I can hop over to Indonesia or Japan. But I won't do Los Angeles to Japan or New York to Shanghai." Global journeys of this kind also take place within an environment in which often it's all too easy to forget the activity's harmful impacts. "It does a number on your body," Ismail continues. "But it's strange how painless travel has gotten."

While there's good will toward digital conferences such as gamedev.world, and many game developers acknowledge the negative impacts of frequent flying, hard data on either aviation within game development or the industry's broader environmental impact is limited. This is exactly what Ben Abraham, a lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney and author of the upcoming book Digital Games After Climate Change, has been trying to ascertain with his own research (game makers can help by completing this survey). While he can make best guesses about the carbon impact of the video game players, including distribution, game development is still under-researched.

"One of the goals is to be able to produce a guide or best practice around carbon neutral game development," he says. "What does that look like? How do you do that? What kind of changes do you need to make to your development structures." Abraham's research aims to gain information about participants' attitudes toward the climate crisis, environmental workplace initiatives, and, perhaps most importantly, the actual electricity usage of organizations.

"When it becomes a good thing that people can promote, more studios will do that."

Space Ape Games, a London-based studio with approximately 120 employees, has already begun to assess and reduce its own carbon footprint, spearheaded by a self-appointed "green team" involving head of content Deborah Mensah-Bonsu, CEO John Earner, and head of technical operations. A page on the organization's website details its emissions; 177.6 tons for flights, 47.8 tons on commutes, 51.9 tons on office device purchases, and a mammoth 376.8 tons on the company's cloud data usage which powers its iOS and Android titles. The studio footprint doesn't include the energy use of the devices its 150 employees use during the workday, but these are powered by the renewable energy provided by building management. Importantly, Space Apes' green policy accounts for the carbon emissions of its players simply because "it was the right thing to do," according to Mensah-Bonsu.

Despite the company's commendable work, which involves workshops with other studios that also want to reduce their carbon footprint, its achievements come with caveats. Space Ape bills itself as carbon negative, but this is achieved partly through carbon offsetting, the theory being that while it's still responsible for pumping hundreds of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, this can be rebalanced by investing in environment-adjacent initiatives. Mensah-Bonsu admits this isn't perfect, but the organization has committed to reducing its carbon footprint in real terms by 10 percent in 2020 as part of the United Nations-backed Playing For The Planet initiative.

Cloud computing, which makes up almost half of Space Ape's entire carbon footprint, is dependent on a service provider Mensah-Bonsu says helps power many other organizations within the games industry. While commitments have been made regarding renewable energy, Space Ape hasn't yet seen the results. "We're trying to put pressure on our cloud computing provider so those changes will trickle down not just to us but to the rest of the industry," she says. "If they come too slowly then I think we're open to moving our workload somewhere else."

The Playing For The Planet initiative Space Ape voluntarily signed up to includes many of the industry's most recognizable names such as Sony and Google (although Nintendo is notably absent). Amid the bullet point list of commitments, Microsoft offers arguably the most robust action, including the "expansion of its existing operational commitment to carbon neutrality into its devices and gaming work." Yet in January 2020, Microsoft sponsored the International Petroleum Technology Conference, a major focus of which was the development of new technologies to aid fossil fuel extraction. For the game makers keen to lessen their environmental impact, Microsoft's inconsistent actions might provoke reasonable questions regarding the actual effectiveness of their - by comparison - negligible emissions.

While Playing For The Planet makes notable gains elsewhere in securing public commitments, the pledges appear notably scattershot. Speaking to , Gary Cook, author of the Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics report, said: "the actions they're taking here, for the most part, are not going to move the needle and are not reflective of the significant impact the gaming industry has on the environment."

Regardless of its long-term effects, Playing For The Planet is symptomatic of an industry that increasingly views environmental responsibility as an asset, a point noted by Ismail. "They're being loud because it's marketable," he says. "When it becomes a good thing that people can promote, more studios will do that."

But waiting for environmental responsibility to become a promotional checkbox implies that the climate crisis might be averted through existing economic structures. It's worth remembering that hardware manufacturers continue to operate within a framework of planned obsolescence. "It's great that they're getting producer and manufacturer buy-in because oftentimes a lot of the environmental rhetoric is focused on the individual level," says Alenda Y. Chang, professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games. "But there's no questioning of having to replace your PlayStation every few years." In the immediate future, Sony and Microsoft will release their respective new consoles, each of which is underpinned by eye-watering technical specifications whose environmental impacts are far from clear.

Actually running games also comes with an ecological cost, according to Jonathan Koomey, a computer scientist and researcher who has investigated both the energy use of consoles and carbon footprint of games distribution. The power use of consoles and PCs is dictated not only by the level of graphical fidelity but also a game's structure and action. "If you choose path one versus path two, that can have an effect," he says. "It's not like a refrigerator [which] you can put in a room at a certain temperature and have a pretty good idea of what will happen."

"The higher hanging fruits are exponentially more difficult to reach."

For the most part, designers have sought to expand the ways we interact with increasingly detailed and vast game environments. Open worlds, arguably the de facto choice for major game studios looking for their next hit, are predicated on exactly this approach. Over the past decade, these games have begun to incorporate robust online multiplayer components meaning they're "always on," both in consoles and data centers across the globe.

Free-to-play titles are usually backed by similarly resource-intensive online infrastructure and design principles that seek to maximize player attention and engagement. The more time players spend in such games, the more likely they are to part with their cash through microtransactions. Chang asks the reasonable question: "What if playing for the planet meant playing less or playing differently?" The question could be extended to game makers and studios. If the carbon footprint of games were measured, and each title was required to be at least carbon neutral, we might begin to see both new design possibilities and infrastructural sustainability taken more seriously.

Carbon neutral or even negative games might still be wishful thinking, but studios and game makers can take other steps toward environmental sustainability. Koomey, whose research has also explored energy-efficient software, believes studios may need to be more proactive to ensure their games, and the consoles they run on, use as little energy as possible. Since 2000, gains in energy efficiency have slowed as computational power has risen. He says that while game consoles are already designed to be more efficient than general purpose computing devices, this shouldn't mean designers and programmers should shy away from further optimizing their games.

Optimization tends to be associated with achieving target frame rates such as 30 or 60 frames per second. Game engines generally come with extensive performance profiling which tracks how hard CPU and GPUs are working. Designer and activist Hugo Bille believes these demands likely correspond to energy use, but, for the time being, such tools aren't framed around a question of energy sustainability but achieving the much-vaunted target of 30fps. "I've never come across any thought of optimizing code beyond what's required to meet our target framework," says Bille, referring to his time developing console games such as Fe. "In most cases, you've already worked really hard to get the game running at 30 fps. A lot of the time, the higher hanging fruits are exponentially more difficult to reach."

Still, Bille, who also founded the environment-focused Game Devs For Future discord channel, says in-engine systems might be a useful place to start educating game makers on the energy intensity of their software. "I could imagine profiling tools better highlighting opportunities for low-intensity play, nudging developers to aim higher than their target fps."

The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Climate Special Interest Group is already looking to "develop and advocate for power-saving software design patterns for video games." According to Erin Hoffman-John, head of the creative team for Google Stadia's research and development, the Climate SIG will "document what developers are already doing, consolidate resources to make best practices more accessible, and help connect communities of developers interested in this kind of work." The Google Stadia team is also exploring a new Sustainable Game Development Guide as well as research into "green nudges," the latter described by Hoffman-John as "early science" but which its advocates hope will shape consumer behavior.

Google's aims might be laudable, including a robust commitment to renewable energy, but the company, like Microsoft, is plagued by contradictions. It funds climate change deniers and recently established a new group to court the oil and gas industry.

Nature doesn't care whether we're playing thoughtful ecological adventures or the next high-tech military shooter

Perhaps the most obvious way game makers might tackle the climate crisis is through the games themselves. Historically, few games have even bothered with the issue let alone effectively tackled it. Civilization 1 and 2 featured a global warming mechanic, but the series didn't broach the subject head on until 2019's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm expansion. In the last five years, educational games such as and the Minecraft mod " Global Warming" have sought to use the medium to deepen a younger audience's awareness of the issue. In blockbuster titles, environmental anxiety occasionally bubbles to the surface, as it did in Anthem's geoengineered landscapes and Horizon Zero Dawn's lush biosphere, but indie titles such as Bee Simulator and the upcoming Beyond Blue are, perhaps unsurprisingly, exploring the issue more explicitly. Art games such as , Even in Arcadia, and arguably offer the most confrontational work, channeling the issue's urgency in uncompromising style.

As game worlds have become richer, their capacity to tell compelling environmental narratives has increased. These stories will only become more resonant in the coming decades. But as for their utility beyond storytelling, Abraham is skeptical of their capacity to alter behavior or foster newly ecological minds. "I think the value in the idea of promoting things through design is really limited," he says. "Particularly when it comes to issues that are ideological or routed in a person's political background, their history, and their upbringing."

Ultimately, nature doesn't care whether we're playing thoughtful ecological adventures or the next high-tech military shooter. There are more concrete areas game makers can focus their efforts, like switching to renewable energy and considering the performance intensity of their games. If studios want to put pressure on industries' biggest companies, including the hardware manufacturers and major service providers, collective organization might offer not only the best shot at being heard but also of enacting substantive change. As for one potential area of focus, supply chains are still woefully invisible for the most part. Greater transparency might enable a better chance of not only lessening hardware's environmental impact but also improving the allegedly backbreaking work conditions in developing nations that continue to prop up the industry.

These are big challenges to overcome, particularly within a development industry so dependent on keeping console and store platforms in good favor. But as the clock ticks on, there is little else to do but try.

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The many ways video game development impacts the climate crisis

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Since the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has overtaken the climate crisis as the most pressing existential threat for much of the world's population. As we adapt to isolation, the warming planet has taken an understandable back seat in the news coverage, although scientists have noted the spread of the novel coronavirus instigating a fall in carbon emissions.

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Video games get serious about climate change

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Video games get serious about climate change

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Dressed in a futuristic wetsuit that enables her to stay submerged for hours, diver and scientist Mirai is trying to discover secrets of the deep in the Western Pacific.

Mirai is the animated protagonist in Beyond Blue, an ocean adventure video game set in the near future. Inspired by the BBC Blue Planet II nature documentary, and using some footage from the British broadcaster, the game is designed to make players care about the marine world.

Both Mirai and the deep she is exploring are based on insights from three real-life experts active in the field of marine biology, oceanography and ocean exploration.

Alan Gershenfeld, a co-founder of E-Line Media, the US game publisher and developer behind Beyond Blue, said he wanted to create a strong protagonist who would serve as a role model for players to connect with and look up to.

Developers of Beyond Blue aimed to inspire gamers to care about the ocean by exporing its wonders virtually

"The more gamers care about the ocean, the more they want to explore the ocean, avocational or as a career," he told DW. "I believe, that's a key step towards ocean preservation."

According to a UN report, environmental video games like this one might be the next step in raising environmental awareness. Around 2.6 billion people, or one in three across the globe, play video games. And the industry generates annual revenue of over $140 billion (€116 billion) - more than Bollywood, Hollywood and recorded music sales combined.

One in three people play video games across the globe

The report describes the reach, creativity and problem-solving ethos of the gaming industry as an "untapped resource for encouraging engagement in environmental issues."

Environmental issues in mainstream games

While nature has long featured in virtual landscapes, game design is now shifting towards specific environmental issues.

In Bee Simulator, for example, players become bees, buzzing through the microworld of their declining population - the fate of the family lies on the player's wings when people decide to destroy the tree that holds the hive. The survival game Endling, coming out later this year, is told through the eyes of Earth's last remaining mother fox, trying to protect her cubs in a world destroyed by humans.

In Bee Simulator players become bees - they collect pollen, take orders from the Queen and have to save the hive's tree that humans want to cut

Sims 4 Eco Lifestyle encourages players to change their world with eco-friendly solutions

Likewise Minecraft - which has sold 200 million times in all formats - has a Climate Hope City map that invites players to explore real-world green solutions like vertical farms and an energy generator that can produce different types of green energy.

More recently, Sims, the life simulation game that first emerged in 2000, has released an Eco Lifestyle expansion pack where players can run a clean-water and recycling project or build wind turbines on rooftops to decrease their carbon footprint. True eco-warriors can even go dumpster diving.

Alenda Chang, author of the book "Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games" says players can learn about the human impact on the environment by witnessing different scenarios of how their actions impact their world.

"Games force us to interact with the system, and they produce feelings," Chang said. "Players do things and can feel guilty because of their choices. Or they can feel the flash of success when things work out in the game."

Gen Z levels up the game

Chang attributes the trend toward more eco-based storylines to both the needs of younger players and the priorities of new designers.

"Young people see climate change as something that informs who they are as individuals," she said. "Organically what's happening is that this new wave of game designers is bringing these interests with them."

The virtual environmental experience can, and appears to have already inspired players to be more active in their real lives. When the American software development firm Niantic, Inc - which developed and published Pokemon Go - called on players to collect waste on Earth Day in 2019, more than 17,000 people in 41 countries showed up. Together, they picked up more than 145 tons of trash.

And in China, the Alipay payment app introduced Ant Forest in 2016, a mini-game featuring a virtual tree that grows when users earn points by reducing their CO2 emissions. For each virtual tree, Alipay plants a real one; 220 million trees have been planted in arid areas in China in five years.

In 2019, 21 companies, including giants like Sony Interactive, Microsoft and Google, formed Playing For The Planet Alliance - convened by the UN Environment Programme - to unlock the potential of gaming to tackle environmental issues.

"We want to inspire the gaming community to think what role they can play in tackling the climate crisis," said Sam Barratt, chief of the Youth, Education and Advocacy Unit in UNEP's Ecosystems Division and co-founder of the alliance. "We also want to get the industry to hit net-zero emissions as soon as possible."

Gaming's green image problem

Gaming itself generates its own environmental problems, though, whether as e-waste or as contributing to a country's carbon footprint.

It's hard to estimate how much electricity gamers consume since it varies based on how often a gamer plays, what platforms they use and how energy efficient their devices are.

In 2012, for example, the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that gamers with personal computers consumed around of electricity globally . 75 billion kilowatt-hours

And when it comes to the world's trash problem, gaming consoles in 2019 contributed to the 4.7 million tons of e-waste generated by Small IT products, including mobile phones and personal contributors, or about 9% of the total e-waste generated worldwide, according to the UN's Global E-waste Monitor.

What gaming in 4k and eating beef have in common

Then, there's a question of distribution. While sales of physical copies of games are dropping, another obvious package-free alternative is growing: downloads. However, a 2014 study of Play Station 3 in the UK found it to be a more CO2-intensive practice than the use of Blu-ray Discs (BDs). Downloads only have a lower carbon footprint than BDs for games smaller than 1.3 GB while the average size of modern titles is 20 GB.

Another rapidly growing option is cloud gaming in which the software is streamed to a smartphone or a laptop, similarly to how video and music streaming services work.

Game companies will have to look at the whole value chain of products to fulfill their climate commitments

But this comes with extra pressure on data centers and network infrastructure. Lancaster University in northern England estimated that if gamers moved to streaming by 2030, carbon emissions could increase by 30%. And that's before taking into account streaming in higher resolutions, such as 4k.

"We already more or less have a connection in our heads that eating meat is bad for the environment. But we don't have the same thinking for a game stream in 4k," Chang said. "This mindset needs to be translated over to gaming, too."

With more advanced graphics and new devices for VR and AR games, the pressure is on for companies with climate ambitions, to look at the whole value chain of their products.

Truly green gaming will mean winning on all those fronts.

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Video games get serious about climate change | DW | 03.05.2021

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Dressed in a futuristic wetsuit that enables her to stay submerged for hours, diver and scientist Mirai is trying to discover secrets of the deep in the Western Pacific. Mirai is the animated protagonist in Beyond Blue, an ocean adventure video game set in the near future.

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Playing For The Planet | The Gaming Industry Is Tackling Climate Change

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Playing For The Planet | The Gaming Industry Is Tackling Climate Change

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2019 | SYBO TV

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Playing For The Planet | The Gaming Industry Is Tackling Climate Change

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Video Games Against Climate Change | OpenMind

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Video Games Against Climate Change | OpenMind

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2020

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Video Games Against Climate Change | OpenMind

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Gaming can make a better world | Jane McGonigal

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Gaming can make a better world | Jane McGonigal

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Ted | 2010

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Gaming can make a better world | Jane McGonigal

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Since 2004, Games for Change has offered programs and events for people of all ages and backgrounds to explore, learn, and create at the intersection of games and social impact.

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Global Esports Federation joins United Nations initiative for Climate Action

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The GEF is proud to join the UNFCCC's Sports for Climate Action initiative as a signatory to the Sports for Climate Action.

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This teen fights climate change with video games

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This teen fights climate change with video games

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2018

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This teen fights climate change with video games | Crosscut

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Operation Sustain teaches kids about climate change and how their choices affect the planet.

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HOW ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES CAN PAVE WAY FOR CHANGE

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HOW ALTERNATE REALITY GAMES CAN PAVE WAY FOR CHANGE

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2021 FUTURITY

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Scientists are rethinking how to leverage games in a way to address some of the world's biggest issues.

Professor Patrick Jagoda and Associate Professor Kristen Schilt, both of the University of Chicago, are designing alternate reality games that allow players to become active participants not just as players, but as designers.

By using these games to educate users about climate change, marginalization, and public health, these scholars and players are investigating how the process of crafting alternate realities can help reshape the real world in which we live.

"I see games as some of the most important social and cultural technologies that we have in the 21st century," says Jagoda. "For both of us and our other collaborators, game design is a powerful mode of reshaping norms and the rules that we live by."

Here, the two discuss what defines a game, how games can be used in education, and how alternate reality games can make real change:

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Listen: How alternate reality games can pave way for change - Futurity

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Scientists are rethinking how to leverage games in a way to address some of the world's biggest issues. Professor Patrick Jagoda and Associate Professor Kristen Schilt, both of the University of Chicago, are designing alternate reality games that allow players to become active participants not just as players, but as designers.

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BBC

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Can a role-playing game improve climate negotiation outcomes?

The latest round of climate negotiations, COP25, have ended without agreement on many fundamental issues. We join researchers from Perdue University in the US who have developed a role-playing game to encourage climate negotiators and others to take a long-term view. Key to this research project is the concept of tipping points, where an environment changes irreversibly from one state to another. This is accompanied by the loss of ecosystems - for example, the widespread melting of Arctic sea ice, rainforest burning or coral bleaching.

The idea is that such tipping points provide a more meaning full focus for the implication of climate change than abstract concepts like temperature rise.

Image: Polar bear in the Arctic Sea (Credit: Coldimages/Getty)

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BBC World Service - Science in Action, Gaming climate change

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Can a role-playing game improve climate negotiation outcomes? The latest round of climate negotiations, COP25, have ended without agreement on many fundamental issues. We join researchers from Perdue University in the US who have developed a role-playing game to encourage climate negotiators and others to take a long-term view.

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How a Fortnite squad of scientists is hoping to defeat climate change

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The storm is closing in quickly as a ponytailed woman with the handle ClimateScientist glides into view on a multicolored umbrella. She lands and runs into a house. Wielding a comically large wrench, she begins to smash the house's kitchen to pieces.

As she does this, an older man - username SuperDad64 - provides narration over voice chat as he scavenges for supplies elsewhere on the map: "If the Democrats win, they will basically be able to stop, sort of, the climate policies of Trump."

Abruptly, a young boy interrupts. He's focused on the game, specifically a llama nearby that contains useful supplies. "If any - um, don't... don't open the llama just yet!" he says. "I know a bug where if you use a shockwave grenade on it, you can double everything that's inside it." Another boyish voice agrees. SuperDad64, heading out into the storm to find the elusive llama, talks about congressional politics and midterms as he does so.

This, of course, is Fortnite - but not as you know it

"I think the Democrats will take the House, and then they'll have a lot of hearings into Trump's activities, and that'll cause him to go insane," SuperDad64 says. At the same time, ClimateScientist explains that he's on the way to where the llama was. (The voice makes it clear that although it's a female avatar, the player is male.)

This, of course, is Fortnite - but not as you know it.

SuperDad64 is Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. The two younger voices belong to his 13-year-old sons. Henri Drake, a doctoral student in physical oceanography at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is ClimateScientist. The group is part of the Climate Fortnite Squad, perhaps the quirkiest science communication outfit in the land.

Fortnite is the world's most popular video game, with hundreds of millions of players worldwide. (In August, a record 78.3 million played the game.) The premise is a lot like the Japanese movie Battle Royale: 100 people land on an island, only one person or team can win, and victory is obtained by murdering everyone else. To make things more exciting, a toxic storm slowly begins to compress the map so that the players are forced into the same areas. As in The Hunger Games, special caches, including crates and llamas, are dropped to encourage players to go to the same areas. It is fast-paced, fantastical, and utterly ludicrous - and, perhaps, a great platform to talk about climate change.

It's especially difficult to talk about climate science in the US where wealthy interest groups, from the coal mining conglomerate Murray Energy to oil colossus ExxonMobil, have lobbied for decades to suggest climate modeling is inaccurate, and humans aren't to blame. Sometimes, the lobbying message is different: action against climate change is too expensive, unnecessary, or impossible.

There's another challenge: public apathy

There's another challenge that's proving difficult to surmount: public apathy. It could be said that too many scientists discuss climate change as an abstract issue that most ordinary people struggle to connect with. The result is that while around three-quarters of Americans believe climate change is real, just over half of the public think it's mostly driven by human activity. Around 28 percent of Americans don't believe climate change will personally affect them. Getting any real climate change legislation through Congress will require engaged voters, and most people aren't there yet.

One reason scientists struggle to connect is because of their limited understanding of how to reach the public. Most scientists think that outreach is limited to a handful of options: public talks, social media, or blogging, says Katharine Hayhoe, a renowned climatologist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. But all those options require a public that already wants to engage in climate change discussion, which means they're not the best way to reach the apathetic. Hayhoe has tried to branch out: knitting projects with patterns that display rising temperatures, for instance.

Then, unexpectedly, Fortnite entered her life.

Hayhoe had just recorded a webinar on climate change that proved to be particularly popular. A few days later, her son, Gavin, was playing Fortnite, and he uploaded a video to the streaming service Twitch. "The climate science webinar I uploaded to YouTube last week has 1k views," a subsequent tweet from Hayhoe reads. "The Fortnite FPP video my eleven-year-old uploaded yesterday has 10k views."

Gavin's best Fortnite video got 18,000 views, he says, and he's not even on the high end: some Fortnite streamers have over 16 million subscribers on YouTube. Hayhoe sensed an opportunity to make climate communication more fun for a much broader audience - crucially, an audience that wasn't already invested in climate change.

One of the people who saw Hayhoe's tweet was Henri Drake, who'd just started playing Fortnite. He had an epiphany: combining virtual battles with climate science was now, finally, a possibility. A serious gamer since he was eight, he was thrilled about the chance to, as he puts it, "make the time I'd spent gaming useful." Drake quickly contacted Hayhoe via Twitter, and this past summer, the Climate Fortnite Squad was born.

Every Sunday for two hours, Drake jumps into Fortnite, bringing climate-themed guests - such as Dessler and Peter Griffith, the founding director of NASA's Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Office - with him. While they play (and stream to Twitch), they chat about climate change. The three-month-old squad has set out to make climate change information accessible to Fortnite fans.

The setup is akin to a TV chat show with virtual gunplay: the squad hopes their streams will be watched by climate-curious gamers who can send in questions for them to answer midgame. The sessions are invite-only, so the chat is private until the streams are uploaded. Right now, the only thing the squad exchanges with other gamers is gunfire. You must view the videos in order to hear the climate banter.

Chatting about climate change while trying to murder other players in the game isn't easy. In an early match, Dessler wonders whether telling people that the world has become a degree warmer since the Industrial Revolution is the best way to win hearts and minds compared to, say, talking about how climate change might impact crimes rates or incomes. Drake, about to reply, is distracted: he's attempting to unload a shotgun into someone's face. Soon after, they're scrambling for resources, and Dessler and one of his sons argue about the timing for jumping from the Battle Bus. Climate chat doesn't resume for some time.

"At first, we were really bad at it. We'd lose the conversation as soon as one of us got shot, so it took a while to get used to," Drake says. "Now, we'd maybe drop the conversation for 40 seconds or so and engage in a super quick battle."

During the same session, Drake talks about a study that estimated the effect that climate change would have on Hurricane Florence before it made landfall, as his avatar smashes through a house's wall with a crowbar. In between all the resource gathering, llama hunting, and enemy takedowns, Dessler wonders what use such a study might have. "Attribution is really important, but not 72 hours before the storm hits," he says.

Figuring out how to talk and play simultaneously took time - and learning gameplay took the squad even longer. But early death isn't much of a concern for the Climate Squad since the Fortnite dead can speak without interruption, Drake says. They can, in theory, provide "surreal soliloquies of science." In reality, however, when a squad member goes down, the deceased tend to spend their time shouting encouragements at the surviving members instead of talking about carbon footprints.

The difficulty of gameplay sometimes becomes clear when the Climate Squad invites guests to join them. Brian Kahn, a senior reporter from Earther, was invited to join the stream, so he played from his iPhone. Over the course of five games, "he went from dying instantly to, by the end, almost shooting at people," Drake says.

The conversation only really flows when the group avoids other players, says squad member Christopher Gaulin, an Army captain and climate and security graduate student at Boston University. Climate discussion can also make the gaming muddled. Gaulin wanted to discuss how climate change can worsen military conflicts; as a result, he accidentally left all his in-game items behind. On one occasion, the team ended up losing track of the storm and perishing in it.

Chatting about climate change while trying to murder other players in the game isn't easy

Dessler proved to be the biggest surprise. "Dessler and his sons are really good at Fortnite. I was surprised, to be honest. I was expecting him to suck," Drake says. It's all relative, of course. At one point, Dessler - who was talking about serving on the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) - was reminded by his somewhat-exasperated sons that green weapons aren't as good as purple ones.

If it's difficult for Climate Squad members to play well while they chat, it may also prove difficult to attract a large audience. What most people watch on Twitch streams is exemplary gameplay, and that has often eluded the squad.

But the scientists like the novelty of the medium, and they hope it might lead them to a brand-new audience. More than 60 percent of Fortnite players are ages 18 to 24, according to Verto Analytics, a market research firm. That younger audience is ideal for the Climate Squad's purposes since these players will be most affected by climate change, Dessler says. And Fortnite gives the scientists an opportunity to bond with their audience over a shared activity, making it easier to connect, Hayhoe says.

But the area that might prove most fruitful for bonding with the public - interactions midgame with other players who are randomly placed on their squad - are still rare. At present, squad members are invited by Drake, and they tend to be science communicators or journalists who asked to add their name to a waiting list to join future matches.

Playing in a one solo session, Drake was randomly matched with a climate change denier in a small team. The denier spotted Drake's ClimateScientist username, and asked: "Wait, so are you actually a climate scientist?"

"Wait, so are you actually a climate scientist?"

Yes, Drake said. That's when the other player began to suggest that the Little Ice Age "disproves anthropogenic global warming" while misrepresenting temperature changes over time. The two argued while they fought for resources and sought shelter from the oncoming storm. Drake and the denier ended up being some of the last players left alive.

They played a few more games together, and Drake thought he was really getting somewhere. But when that player was added to the squad in a subsequent match, something changed. Maybe it was just that he was outnumbered by climate scientists or that he was suddenly being streamed live online, but he reverted to aggressively denying climate science.

It was, nevertheless, an "interesting insight into the psyche of a climate denier," Drake says. He hopes that these online moments can help people realize that climate scientists are, well, human.

Drake hopes the squad will grow, though, at some point, the climate scientists may have to learn new games. Fortnite's popularity won't last forever. (Gavin suggests Overwatch as another platform for the scientists.)

For now, though, Fortnite is the squad's home. At the end of a recent session, Drake, Gaulin, Dessler, and his sons were faced with several guided missile strikes. They took cover in an improvised wooden tower, dodged them with ease, and effortlessly took out a few more hostiles. Dessler scoffed as the enemy squad split up, calling it a "terrible strategy." When it was just them and one other squad, Drake said he was "feeling it, guys."

Their instincts are correct. Taking the high ground, ClimateScientist distracted the enemy as SuperDad64 and company rushed in and took out the second to last enemy player. Advancing as a collective on the last outpost, they gunned down the final player. The match was over: the squad achieved its very first victory.

Sadly, due to the intense coordination and concentration this feat took, the players forgot to talk about climate change at all during this climactic battle. But their win had a payoff: a clip of this stream has been viewed several thousand times, far more than their other videos. Now, they just have to learn to chat about climate science while they win.

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How a Fortnite squad of scientists is hoping to defeat climate change

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The storm is closing in quickly as a ponytailed woman with the handle ClimateScientist glides into view on a multicolored umbrella. She lands and runs into a house. Wielding a comically large wrench, she begins to smash the house's kitchen to pieces.

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Scientists Are Playing Fortnite on Twitch to Teach People About Climate Change

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https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-teaching-about-climate-change-playing-fortnite-on-twitch

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Fortnite is an unprecedented, smash hit video gaming phenomenon - where the aim is to be the last person standing after a battle royale shootout on a magical island - and now scientists are tapping into its popularity to try and teach kids about climate change.

The new ClimateFortnite Twitch channel features what many a Twitch channel does: live streams of players fighting their way through rounds of Fortnite. The difference is, the audio commentary deals not just with Fortnite strategies and tips, but also with the consequences of our changing planet.

Credit for the idea goes to climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe from Texas Tech University, who tweeted about the disparity in viewing figures between her own climate change seminar on YouTube and her 11-year-old son's Fortnite stream on Twitch. Henri Drake, graduate student at MIT, took up the challenge, and ClimateFortnite was born.

"It builds a community where people can ask the hard questions directly to an expert," Drake told Emily Waite at . "For a topic like climate change that is steeped in misinformation, direct access to experts is crucial."

"I had never streamed myself, but I'd been watching League of Legends on Twitch since about 2013 and had always thought about doing some kind of educational stream about climate science."

The channel now has 17 videos and counting, with Drake and his co-hosts discussing the finer points of climate change with other online gamers. From methane gas emissions to renewable energy, there's a lot of ground covered - both virtually on the Fortnite island and in terms of the topics discussed.

The clip above features NASA Earth Scientist Peter Griffith dropping in to talk carbon cycle and warming in the Arctic while Drake blasts his way through a few opponents on the Fortnite island: it's a good example of how the channel mixes gameplay with climate chat.

As well as seeing some high-paced Fortnite action, we also learn that the Arctic is warming faster and earlier than anywhere else on Earth, and how the thawing permafrost locked away in Alaska is increasing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

While viewing figures are relatively low for now, Drake and the other scientists working on the channel are hoping to attract a bigger audience over time. The channel is now available on YouTube too, and the very top Fortnite streams can attract hundreds of thousands of viewers.

Those viewers can ask questions via the real-time chat system built into Twitch, questions that Drake can put to whichever expert he happens to be chatting to - the channel is intended to be interactive as well as informative.

With its incoming storms and scavenging for resources, Fortnite sort of fits with the topic of climate change, but Drake is also experimenting with streaming games of Eco - a game specifically focussed on the careful management of natural resources.

And as well as highlighting some of the challenges and dangers of climate change, scientists on the channel also discuss some of the ways we can try and model it, mitigate it, and ensure the stable future of the planet.

If you're a fan of Fortnite or just science in general, we'd recommend tuning in.

"Scientists do a good job of communicating via traditional routes - talking to journalists and policymakers and writing op-eds," atmospheric scientist Andrew Dessler from Texas A&M University, who has been featured on ClimateFortnite, told .

"But not everyone listens to policymakers or reads op-eds or follows scientists on Twitter. ClimateFortnite is a great way to reach people who don't get news from traditional sources."

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Scientists Are Playing Fortnite on Twitch to Teach People About Climate Change

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Fortnite is an unprecedented, smash hit video gaming phenomenon - where the aim is to be the last person standing after a battle royale shootout on a magical island - and now scientists are tapping into its popularity to try and teach kids about

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5 Video Games Advocating For Climate Change

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https://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/5-video-games-advocating-for-climate-change/

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Becoming more conscious about the environment is more important than ever. In an attempt to reach a wider audience and encourage more action against climate change, some smaller video game creators have introduced virtual worlds that reflect the earth's changing environment. According to statistics, there were 2.69 billion video game players worldwide in 2020. The figure will rise to 3.07 billion in 2023 based on a 5.6% year-on-year growth forecast. Video games can be used as powerful and effective tools to start raising climate change awareness at all ages, all around the world. These games have great potential to bridge the gap between knowledge and taking action. This is a small step that can lead to giant leaps in the right direction when it comes to protecting the planet.

Environmental Games

1. Playing For The Planet

Source: Climate Change in Video Games: The Ultimate Boss Battle/Youtube

In the UN Climate Action Summit of 2019 in New York City, the Playing for the Planet initiative involves 20 companies that represent 970 million gamers globally who have pledged to actively use their platforms to inform, take action in the fight against climate change. According to The Playing For The Planet Alliance, "In total, the members of the Alliance have the ability to reach more than 1 billion video game players. In joining the Alliance, members have made commitments ranging from integrating green activations in games, reducing their emissions and supporting the global environmental agenda through initiatives ranging from planting millions of trees to reducing plastic in their products."

2. Beyond Blue

Source: Beyond Blue - Gameplay Trailer/Youtube

Another climate change-related video game was developed by E-Link Media, and is called ' Beyond Blue', an educational game about saving the ocean. It's a single-player narrative adventure that puts you in charge of a research team to explore the creatures and mysteries of the ocean and learn more about the results of the rapid climate changes caused by humans. This immersive virtual experience focuses on engaging gameplay and science-focused achievements. According to a review of the game, "Beyond Blue provides players with a truly unique virtual underwater experience that encourages them to learn, explore and care more about the marine world."

3. Plasticity

Source: Plasticity | NEW Student Game Trailer Reveal/Youtube

Plasticity by Plasticity Games is a virtual experience centered around waste management and recycling. In the game, Noa, the main character is a girl who leaves home in search of a better future. Throughout the game, you are asked to make choices within the plastic-filled world. Each decision you make carries a consequence, a few of which are irreversible. This immersive experience urges the player to consider the type of garbage they are throwing away and how they are getting rid of it. It brings to light the importance of recycling plastic and the drastic consequences that will eventually impact our world.

4. Ice Flows

Source: Ice Flows Video 1: The Game/Youtube

Ice Flows was created by the University of Exeter and InHouse Visuals (2016). It is a free-to-use scientific simulation game that tells the story of the impact of climate change on the Antarctic Ice Sheet. " The game tasks players with controlling the size of the ice sheet in order to get penguins to their desired destination. The climate changes whether that's decreasing snowfall or increasing ocean temperatures, make it harder (or easier) for the penguins to catch fish, high-five birds and thrive in their environment." The aim of this game is to provide information about the impact of climate change and the complexity of the ice sheet system in an accessible way to children and game players of all ages.

5. Lumino City

Source: Lumino City - trailer/Youtube

Developed by State of Play, Lumino City is a " puzzle adventure crafted entirely by hand out of paper, card, miniature lights, and motors - and resulting in a 10-foot-tall model city." The creators of the game had the goal of raising awareness about renewable energy technologies and teaching players of all ages about sustainable practices. The puzzles within the game are centered around using renewable forms of power and ultimately becoming more self-sufficient.

Educational video games like these just might be a step in the right direction when it comes to raising environmental awareness. While nature has already been included in video games before, these newer games are encouraging increased engagement in environmental issues in a fun, immersive, and interactive way. In his piece about environmental consciousness in gaming, Nico King explains, "Games can be a compass, guiding players towards developing a positive attitude and mindset. Environmental games offers players opportunities to negotiate conflict, conduct ecological problem solving, identify problems and connect with other like-minded advocates."

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5 Video Games Advocating For Climate Change

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Becoming more conscious about the environment is more important than ever. In an attempt to reach a wider audience and encourage more action against climate change, some smaller video game creators have introduced virtual worlds that reflect the earth's changing environment. According to statistics, there were 2.69 billion video game players worldwide in 2020.

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Apps, Games, & Insights Podcast | Android Developers

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Next-Gen Gaming Is an Environmental Nightmare

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Next-Gen Gaming Is an Environmental Nightmare

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2020

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Console waste plus energy-hungry cloud gaming equals the worst of both worlds for sustainability.

It's a sad truth that escapist pursuits are not truly separate from real life, and some even have a nasty tendency to exacerbate real-life problems. And while gaming offers a reprieve from thinking about dooms both personal and global, it threatens to bring at least one of them-climate disaster-closer to reality.

What with plastic casing, mined-metal circuit boards, guzzled power, and e-waste, gaming has for decades been an industry unfriendly to the environment. Now, in line with more meta trends in tech, gaming's technological underpinnings are becoming smaller and more invisible. Cloud gaming has arrived alongside digital consoles like the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition and Xbox Series S, where games are buttons on menu screens. You're not going to see the equivalent of 700,000 Atari 2600 E.T. cartridges buried in the New Mexico desert.

But while many gamers will ditch the discs, experts say that less visible tech in no way equals less damage to the planet, and that the games industry as a whole is not on a path to reducing its carbon footprint. Right now, US gaming platforms represent 34 terawatt-hours a year in energy usage-more than the entire state of West Virginia-with associated carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to over 5 million cars. And it's only going to get worse. "Total emissions are going up," says Gary Cook, global climate campaigns director for Stand.Earth, an environmental nonprofit founded to challenge corporations' climate practices. "There's a real reckoning that needs to happen."

Two features define next-gen consoles: digital services and big-daddy specs. You might pick up Microsoft's $300 all-digital Xbox Series S and, downloading games off the cloud, live a life free of disc clutter. You might forgo a console entirely and sign up for Google Stadia, Xbox's Game Pass Ultimate, or any number of smartphone-based cloud gaming services. Even if you do opt for a specced-out PlayStation 5, you'll likely still be downloading very big video games from data centers in northern Virginia, Las Vegas, Chicago, and beyond.

In interviews with WIRED, Microsoft executives have described how the future of Xbox isn't about taking away hardware altogether. Cloud gaming is additive. Microsoft wants to reach potential gamers where they are already, expanding its user base to everybody who might even passingly consider gaming. It envisions customers logging into Minecraft on their Galaxy S20, their Xbox Series S, and their PC, all contained within the Microsoft ecosystem. That's a lot of hardware, and a lot of power.

"If people are going to choose to play games, we want to be as efficient as we possibly can in delivering that experience, either via a console or a data center in a streamed environment," said Microsoft's vice president of cloud gaming, Kareem Choudhry in a March interview with WIRED. "We're working pretty hard on those issues, all within the envelope of the broader Microsoft carbon-neutral initiative."

Microsoft has plans to be carbon-negative by 2030. But like Sony, which wants to achieve zero environmental footprint by 2050, Microsoft declined to answer WIRED's specific questions about changes to its supply chain, console manufacturing techniques, and data centers to meet that goal. (Nintendo, which has not yet announced a next-gen console, has publicized some initiatives in recycling and nontoxic substances.) As the dual winds of big console performance and big demand for server-side computing meet, the gaming industry could be setting up for a worst-of-both-worlds situation.

"The worst-case scenario is still using relatively energy-intensive hardware on your side and then still using the cloud gaming platforms that have a lot going on the backend in terms of energy demand," says Cook.

It's no secret that consumer electronics are bad for the environment. Consoles comprise chips, circuit boards, fans, all wrapped up in plastic, all destined for a landfill when they've outworn their welcome. They require the use of conflict minerals like tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold to manufacture. Historically, the mining of these minerals has led to human rights abuses, land degradation, chemical pollution, water contamination, and deforestation across countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa. Microsoft and Sony both vet their supply chains in pursuit of ethical sourcing, but Microsoft has managed significantly better transparency about where its so-called 3TG minerals come from.

"There's a real reckoning that needs to happen."

Gary Cook, Stand.Earth

The consoles and their components are generally manufactured in Chinese plants that lean hard on fossil fuel and coal energy. Millions of PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X units are already in production. ( Bloomberg has reported that Sony hopes to produce 15 million PlayStation 5 units before March 2021. Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan told The Washington Post that the company plans to have more PlayStation 5s available at launch than it did for the PlayStation 4 launch in 2013.) A little counterintuitively, designing these new consoles' increasingly tiny chips requires more energy. The hyper-controlled conditions in which these intricate chips are made, including air filtration and chemical treatments, guzzle huge amounts of electricity. Once everything is assembled, often by robots, there's shipping, which Cook describes as "kind of invisible to the average consumer, but actually has a really big carbon footprint that we're all a part of." And finally, recycling. As specialty electronics, consoles are notoriously difficult to recycle. With parts soldered onto circuit boards, consumers can't really upgrade them when their specs are out of vogue, like, say, when a new generation launches. So a lot of the time they end up in landfills, where their chemicals and plastics are introduced into the environment-the fate of single-use electronics.

Last generation's PlayStation 4 and Xbox One used 137 and 112 watts, respectively, when running games. (PC gaming uses a tremendous amount of energy: globally, per year, the equivalent of 25 standard electric power plants.) The disc version of the PlayStation 5 has a maximum output of 350 watts, and Xbox Series X is at 315. (Real-world performance remains to be seen.) "We quadrupled the performance, but we did not quadruple the power," Xbox's head of gaming engineering, Liz Hamren, says about the new console. "We have a constant desire to drive down power consumption, but drive up performance."

Gaming companies seem quite aware that these stats are abysmal. Sony has boasted of a new, optional "low-power mode" for the PlayStation 5. Jim Ryan has said that if "just 1 million users enable the feature, it would save equivalent to the average electricity use of 1,000 US homes." And Hamren says the Xbox Series S and X will have a new, lower-power "connected standby" mode that "ratchets the power way down" when it's not actively in use.

Consumers aren't going to buy next-gen consoles that are less powerful than their predecessors. It's a tension that retired Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory energy researcher Evan Mills says is at odds with necessary climate goals. In 2018, Mills gathered 26 gaming systems, including the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4 Pro, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One, and gauged their wattage with a digital power meter. With that data, his team authored a groundbreaking report on gaming systems' carbon emissions, noting that increased performance, more gamers, and more time gaming have "given rise to a perception of unavoidable trade-off between gaming user experience and energy efficiency." Advances in technology-like lowering frames per second per watt-have helped, but "have not translated into reductions in energy use at the macro level."

What surprised Mills wasn't that PCs and consoles were guzzling refrigerators' worth of power, though. Mills says the more impending threat is cloud gaming.

Cloud gaming shuttles input signals from a mobile gamer's couch to a far-away data center equipped with top-of-the-line CPUs and GPUs, where a new game state is calculated and transmitted back. Because much of the processing happens remotely, so too does the bulk of the energy use. (Some, of course, still happens locally.) In addition to energy-intensive hardware demands, data centers depend on substantial ventilation and air cooling.

"You can think of the data center as a factory: Electricity and water go in, and data and heat go out," says Aaron Wemhoff, director of Villanova University's Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems. "While adding IT equipment adds to electricity consumption, the focus on energy efficiency is to minimize the extra electricity required to make up for cooling systems and electrical power losses."

Cloud gaming uses more energy per hour of gameplay than local gaming, which means data centers are taxed regardless of the console people play on. Microsoft, which runs its own Azure data centers, is pushing hard to convert its facilities to renewable energy. Wemhoff says that while he is seeing more data center operators express interest in moving in that direction, progress has been slow. "Industry members have told me there is little financial incentive to drive this change," he says.

Cloud gaming isn't quite mainstream yet; gaming only accounts for 7 percent of global network demand, according to researchers at Lancaster University in England in a 2020 study. And content downloads account for 95 percent of that gaming total. But with Microsoft's Project xCloud, Amazon's Luna, Sony's PlayStation Now, Nvidia's Geforce Now, and other, smaller cloud gaming services pushing console-free gaming, it seems as though this growing trend may have real repercussions on the environment. If even 30 percent of gamers adopt cloud gaming, by 2030 that will mean a 30 percent boost in gaming's carbon emissions, Polygon reported in a recent story on cloud gaming's environmental toll.

Despite these grim stats, the most prominent group promoting environmentally friendly gaming practices appears optimistic. Playing for the Planet is a UN Environment Programme-facilitated alliance comprising top gaming companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Google (but not Nintendo). The organization said in a statement to WIRED that while increasing trends in use, graphics, and energy intensity contribute to higher network loads, cloud gaming is an opportunity to promote renewable energy. "There's also systemic efforts to be considered, because as large and visible companies commit and invest in renewables at broad scale, low-carbon power becomes more accessible to everyone," the organization said.

Playing for the Planet focuses a lot on consumers-educating them, getting them hyped about environmentalism, helping them modulate device settings, commissioning games about trees. They want to encourage players to protect nature and biodiversity, asking, "What if video games could also help us tackle the biggest environmental challenges of our time?"

Stand.Earth's Cook says these companies need to stop passing the buck. Infrastructure needs to be the focus. Recyclable materials. Renewable energy. "Otherwise," he says, "you're increasing emissions at a time where we're in the last 10 years [before it's too late] on climate change. We must halve emissions by 2030, full stop. And is gaming taking us in the right direction, or is it the exact opposite?"

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Next-Gen Gaming Is an Environmental Nightmare

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Console waste plus energy-hungry cloud gaming equals the worst of both worlds for sustainability. It's a sad truth that escapist pursuits are not truly separate from real life, and some even have a nasty tendency to exacerbate real-life problems. And while gaming offers a reprieve from thinking about dooms both personal and global, it threatens to bring at least one of them-climate disaster-closer to reality.