“IIt was terrifying. He made you realize how, despite all the sophistication of modern society, we still depend on water that falls from the sky. Sam Alfred, the lead designer for the Cape Town-based video game studio. free lives, vividly remembers his city about to run out of water. During 2018, the area surrounding South Africa’s second-largest city suffered months of increasingly poor rainfall. The dams could not be replenished at the rate required by their inhabitants. The water was rationed. Closed businesses. The situation even called for its own grim version of the Doomsday Clock: hour by hour, the city moved closer and closer to Day Zero, marking the end of its fresh water supply.
ground zero, the video game that Alfred has been developing since 2019, is a response to these terrifying events. Dubbed an “upside down city builder,” he forgoes consuming and expanding on genre classics like Civilization and SimCity to paint a picture of environmental restoration. Starting with an arid desert, it’s up to the player to rebuild a landscape using various technologies: a toxin scrubber, for example, or a hive. At the speed of light and with touches of emerald green and azure blue that massage the eyes, the environment transforms into lush vegetation. Terra Nil’s simplicity is as beautiful as its visuals, offering the satisfaction of a coloring book while offering a clear critique of environmentally destroying extraction.
With Terra Nil’s “climate positivity” story, Alfred is part of a growing wave of game creators trying to educate players about the dangers of the climate crisis while broadening perceptions of what’s possible in response to it. Niantic, the creator of Pokémon GO, has used the real world settings of its augmented reality game to spearhead a tree plantation initiative. Ubisoft, meanwhile, put together a game climate march for Republic of Horsemen players, and is ready to unleash a virtual forest fire to demonstrate the devastating real-world effects of such tree disasters. The idea with each of these ventures is to use video games as moral instruction tools.
For the past three years, a United Nations project called playing for the planet has catalyzed these efforts with its annual Green Game Jam. Deborah Mensah-Bonsu, founder of a partner organization games for good and organizer of the jams, believes that video games are perfectly placed to encourage changes in mindset and behavior. “The idea of the player agency is a really important piece [of the picture],” she says. “Within other media, it’s more of a passive experience. With games, you get to be part of a story, you have a say in its outcome.” She sees two sides to what the organization calls “content.” green.” On the one hand, “it’s trying to help players understand these different issues.” On the other hand, it’s giving them “agency to act.”
In the hidden object game June’s Journey and the arcade fighting game Brawlhalla, these actions are equivalent to purchasing in-game items with proceeds of which are then donated to environmental charities such as Ecologi. For deeper engagements with the summary, you should look at titles like the snow sports utopia Riders Republic or another Ubisoft title, year 1800, the kind of great city builder that Terra Nil talks about. year 1800 ecological twist it is an environment that reacts to the expansionist actions of the player. The creation of monocultures depletes soil fertility, while overfishing destroys marine populations; each demand on the environment carries a consequence that could decide the fate of a city.
by david attenborough wonder because the natural world permeates the Horizon series, each blade of grass or clump of moss immaculately rendered in a small act of veneration. And the terror of dark weather hangs over the primordial landscapes of Death Stranding. However, there is a dark contradiction at the heart of these blockbuster games: the very extraction that Terra Nil is rallying against sustains gamers’ and industry’s thirst for increasingly high-fidelity graphics. every vanguard consoleThe graphics card and processor are the product of many carbon-intensive processes, including the extraction of rare earth minerals.
when sony promises planting trees for every “Reached the Daunt” trophy won by players in Horizon: Forbidden West, an effort promoted as part of Green Game Jam 2022, raises the specter of greenwashing. Sony recently announced that it was throttle its net zero commitments for 10 years, but 2020 emissions from use of its TVs and game consoles were the highest since 2016, according to its sustainability report 2021. In addition, 17.1 million tons of CO2 were generated throughout the life cycles of its products, with an additional 1.4 million tons emitted from the company’s commercial sites. Next to these numbers, it’s hard to see tree planting as anything more than trivial.
Radical ideas are needed if the games industry is to collectively decarbonise, and Playing for the Planet hopes to advise companies on how to do just that in the years to come. Kara Stone, a designer and assistant professor at the Alberta University of the Arts, is already working on a quietly radical alternative from the balcony of her south-facing apartment in Calgary: a solar powered web server from where players will be able to stream their games. The first is called Known Mysteries, a deduction game set in a near-future Canada that is held captive by big oil companies. Stone says it’s partially inspired by her home in Calgary, a city she describes as the “oil capital of Canada.”
It will feature “recycled” footage sourced primarily from 1970s industrial and nature films; Stone is compressing the images so the game can fit on the tiny solar-powered web server he’s creating using a panel bought off Craigslist, a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, and an old car battery. Stone’s work gently challenges the idea that increasingly high-resolution graphics, which require rendering increasing amounts of electricity, is the undisputed future of gaming. And because it runs on a solar server in Canada’s often dark and cloudy weather, players may not be able to access their game 24/7. “Not everything has to be accessible to everyone at all times,” says Stone. “I really don’t care too much if it goes down for even a few hours a day every day… Full access to all users is such a capitalist mentality.”
Stone isn’t trying to sell the audience on anything, he says; “That’s a condescending place to come.” Jonathan Hau-Yoon, Terra Nil’s art lead, isn’t interested in changing people’s minds either, preferring to show players an alternative to the status quo and let them do the rest. He references the futurist Monika Bielskyte, who thinks of “protopic” instead of utopian futures: a world of plural futures, instead of just one. “It’s very much about the idea of creating positive things to inspire the imagination,” says Hau-Yoon. “Think in terms of possibilities.”
The question is whether any of this can change player attitudes towards the climate crisis. According to new data collected through a series of mobile titles by Mensah-Bonsu and Playing for the Planet, the answer tentatively suggests yes. Of the 389,594 respondents (split evenly between men and women with the most between the ages of 21-39), 78.6% believe gaming could help them learn about the environment and 35.4% want to See more ambient content in your games. Nearly two-thirds of respondents (61.1%) said they would be motivated to pay for environmental content if it added to their in-game experience, supported a good cause, or taught them something new.
Mensah-Bonsu emphasizes that the research is far from “the last word on the subject.” She says that more studies with greater academic rigor are required, but it is the first step to validate a work that, until now, was not proven. At the very least, Mensah-Bonsu says, research shows that getting involved with the climate crisis doesn’t discourage gamers. Establishing causation would be more difficult: many have tried to find a link between games and player behavior when it comes to video games and violence, for a long time and at even greater cost, and none have succeeded.
Regardless of whether he changes his mind or behavior, game makers and players alike are interested in taking on the constant threat of global warming. Games like ABZÛ and Alba: A Wildlife Adventure –ecological fables set in the ocean and on land– are some of the many that show us a way of seeing the world that is not through a reticle of sights.
