[Haley Crim]

Civilization is appropriately criticized, but I have recently been playing Civ 6: Gathering Storm, which lets you build your civilization from one town up to and through the climate crisis. I haven’t played a game through to the industrial revolution yet but am excited (if that’s the right word) to guide my civilization deals with rising sea levels, diplomatic crises, and destructive storms

[Josh]

I love this. @Julie and I, along with our friend Guiller, began to develop a hypertext cli-fi fantasy game last spring called The Viridian Glade. I think video games, and interactive/immersive media more broadly, are powerful tools to imagine climate futures. Check out all these solarpunk games that can be played from your web browser! (And stay tuned for a VR space coming soon for the Imaginarium…)

[Jamie Liu]

Oh Josh so you were part of The Viridian Glade team! I went to the Columbia Climate Imaginations Fest last year and saw flyers for that, but the QR code on them didn’t work for me and I wasn’t able to find it again by Googling. Thanks for sharing, I’ll def check it out 🙂

I’ll also share my own little interactive fiction I made, it’s a dating sim (a very basic one, it was my “intro to Twine” experiment) where the player joins a climate activist org in college and chooses between four suitors: https://jialuostory.wordpress.com/2023/02/12/climate-dating-sim/

And I also know Arsht-Rock is doing cool things with climate and gaming, though it seems they may be more focused on the resilience-building rather than emission-reducing side. Still very cool though: https://onebillionresilient.org/project/gaming-technology/

jialuostory.wordpress.com

Climate Dating Sim

I’ve made a Twine game, my first work of interactive fiction! Sharing it is a bit more complicated than my usual stories, so I’ve included some simple instructions below. Go to this Goo…

[Tory Stephens]

This is great. I’m a huge advocate for climate storytelling and climate fiction and believe they are the most underutilized climate solutions in our toolbox. To me this is about a thousand points of light, or rather narrative. We need many tales about a hopeful future, and we need them on different mediums. Video games are huge.

“As per the report by SuperData Research, the Gaming Industry was valued at $159.3 billion in 2020; however, on the other side, the Movie Industry was worth $19.1 billion, which makes the Gaming Industry <b style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>around eight times bigger than the Movie Industry.”

“The global gaming market is expected to reach $268.8 billion by 2025—over three times the music industry’s revenue and almost four times that of the film industry.”

We need to be where people are, and currently there are not many big titles that are about hope, climate and justice.

I wish there was though.

Thanks for sharing!

[Susan Kaye Quinn]

I love this. I’m always tempted to say “I’m not a gamer” but then I love tabletop cooperative games with a fierce passion. Over the holidays, I played DAYBREAK with the fam (a game I helped kickstart and is finally available for purchase) and it was fantastic.

My kid: “Mom has been preparing us to play this game for six years.”
(“Daybreak is a cooperative boardgame about stopping climate change. It
presents a hopeful vision of the near future, where you get to build the
mind-blowing technologies and resilient societies we need to save the
planet.”–designed by the creator of Pandemic)

I also backerkit (is this a verb??) a record-breaking solarpunk cozy game (Loftia) that’s still in production but also points out how building community around *a game* is another way to engage people in the conversation about a better world (there are 40k people in their Discord!).

As Tory says, we should meet people where they are. But also: I’m all about people working local (to their physical area but also “local” in the sense of “within your talent wheelhouse”) and I’m seeing that happen a LOT. People are bringing their talents to the climate fight in the work/play spaces they already occupy.

Even the fact that eco-gaming brings awareness to the energy consumption of our online-ness is great.

Games are recreational for me but I see them as storytelling sisters that are joining the fight.

[Carolina Fautsch]

This is a fascinating discussion because I’ve always felt there’s some capacity video games might have that other mediums don’t that encourage us to see the environment as alive, respondent, essential to being what we are — but it’s obviously mostly used for sensationalist purposes and is probably counterproductive.

– I can also see games excelling at teaching the sort of big-picture thinking and strategy we need– and maybe cooperation, too, to judge by the Loftia game.

– More than strategy, I think they’re also harnessable in all kinds of storytelling ways. I have a lot of formative experiences with RPGs with environmentalist themes; there is something about ‘saving the world against evil empires’-type storylines that, while not as explicit as these climate strategy games (and going for something different), really cements in a convincing narrative about the environment, and that I think is what a lot of people are missing in Western society. None of that would have impacted me the way it did if I hadn’t been instilled with pro-environmental values to begin with, but my goodness did it make an impact.

– I do wonder if Augmented Reality games don’t hold the most promise here, when well-designed, since they get you out into the bigger world and working with others, but there’s still a long (and possibly carbon-costly) way to go before they’re sophisticated enough to bank on their potential.