Digital Games After Climate Change Change

2017

The burgeoning genre of climate fiction, or "cli-fi," in literature and the arts has begun to attract both scholarly and popular attention. It has been described as "potentially [having] crucial contributions to make toward full understanding of the multiple, accelerating environmental challenges facing the world today" (Buell). Implicitly, these works confront the current orthodoxy about where exactly the issue of climate change sits in domains of knowledge. As Jordan notes: "climate change as 'nature' not culture is still largely perceived as a problem for the sciences alongside planning, policy, and geography " (Jordan 8). In this paper we ask where is, or alternatively what could climate fiction look like within the field of digital games? Even a passing familiarity with the cultural output of the mainstream game industry reveals the startling omission of the issue – with very few games telling stories that engage with climate change and the unfolding ecological crisis (Abraham "Videogame Visions"). Finding a relative dearth of explicit engagement, this paper offers an alternative engagement with climate change in games by focussing on the underlying ideas, conceptions and narratives of human-environment relationships that have been a part of games since their earliest incarnations. We argue that it is possible to read games for particular conceptualisations of human relationships to nature, and offer a description of four highly prevalent "modes" of human-environment engagement. We describe and analyse these relationships for their participation in or challenge to the same issues and problems that undergird the current ecological crisis, such as enlightenment narratives of human mastery and dominion over the earth.

Narratives Crossing Boundaries

Due to the life-threatening impacts of climate change, the generation and communication of knowledge associated with it is given high priority. In recent years, environmentally changing behavioral knowledge can also be found in popular culture in a generally understandable form (= inter-discourse). Accordingly, the authors examine the games ANNO 2070, URBAN EMPIRE, and FATE OF THE WORLD with regard to their respective environmental discourse. For this purpose, the authors designed an analytical framework, which addresses current scientific discourses and investigates games for completeness, topicality, and validity of knowledge and mechanics and their aesthetic implementation. Overall, the authors identified three types of games: agenda, realistic and mixed-type games covering criteria of both other types. Despite the fact that games like URBAN EMPIRE or ANNO 2070 do not adequately reflect the complexity of real-world environmental problems (such as FATE OF THE WORLD), they effectively simulate intervention logic, understanding, and systemic representation. The authors contribute to the discourse on the environment and Serious Games' design by providing an analytical framework that practically identifies environmental discourses and has been tested successfully on three games. The analytical framework and consecutive systematization of games into realistic and agenda games can be of importance for didactics and guidelines when using digital games for school teaching: School teachers could specifically select games to portray certain aspects of environmental discourses.

Do you think playing video games help children in understanding the scientific phenomenon of climate change? According to recent research activities, we do understand the fact that mediated communications have an increased role to play in creating awareness and addressing the global issue of climate change. Hence, there is a larger collaboration happening between scientists and game developers could mean the climate change educating games of the future, take realism to a whole new level dedicated for children. As children are the most vulnerable groups to video games, such gamifications will help to spread easily the climate sustainable behaviors among this targeted group. It is also evident that game developers, scientists, educators, and activists who believe that games are an underutilized resource in the fight against climate change. As adopted the systematic literature review methodology, this research paper has reviewed 10 studies pertaining to climate change video games from around seven different nations using systematic search on electronic databases. Electronic data bases were used to identify the literature relating to climate change video games. Relevant literature on the topic was obtained from e-journal repository of the CHMK library, University of Calicut. The studies were mainly retrieved from the Sage Journals and Taylor and Francis Online (between 2000 and 2018) using the main combination of keywords; climate change and games. Systematic review analysis was based on the three research objectives including; to understand the role of climate change games to ensure children understanding on climate change, to understand the prospects and effectiveness of climate change games among children & to examine how the research area of gaming on climate change develop in global scenario. The major finding of research paper was reiterated that climate games have the potential to educate and enlighten the public towards the real solutions of climate change.

In this paper I describe my current research into videogame depictions of the future, and those that engage substantially with anthropogenic climate change, building upon an understanding of the role played by visions of the apocalypse as an outlet for expressions of popular fears and anxieties. The paper looks at games that have been released in the recent period, which has seen a rise in corporately funded campaigns undermining popular and scientific consensus on climate change, discussing three games in detail and the climate future they present; Anno 2070 (2011) which depicts a flooded earth; Fate of the World (2011) which presents a player with the supreme difficulty of balancing development goals with a finite carbon budget; and ARMA 3 (2013), which deploys visual depictions of renewable energy power generation (windmills, tidal power, solar arrays) to evoke a sense of futurity and in the process projects an unexpectedly optimistic vision of our climate future.

Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, 2021

It is critical to pursue climate change education through a variety of methods, with a variety of audiences, and in a variety of contexts. This short perspectives article describes our experiences as an early-career climate change researcher and an independent game designer in responding to a community challenge posed by a nonprofit organization focused on the potential positive social impact of video games. This was an excellent opportunity to do some strategic thinking around climate change education (e.g., conceptualizing “butterfly effects”). However, we ultimately observed shortcomings in the supports available from educational and funding organizations for climate change knowledge translation using this cutting-edge medium, despite the urgency of climate change. This article follows a dialogic style, alternating between the two authors in order to provide an authentic account of our individual and collective experiences.

Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis, 2024

With the climate crisis and its repercussions becoming more and more tangible, games are increasingly participating in the production, circulation, and interrogation of environmental assumptions, using both explicit and implicit ways of framing the crisis. Whether they are providing new spaces to imagine and practice alternative forms of living, or reproducing ecomodernist fantasies, games as well as player cultures are increasingly tuned in to the most pressing environmental concerns. This book brings together chapters by a diverse group of established and emerging authors to develop a growing body of scholarship that explores the shape, impact, and cultural context of ecogames. The book comprises four thematic sections, Today’s Challenges: Games for Change, Future Worlds: New Imaginaries, The Nonhuman Turn, and Critical Metagaming Practices. Each section explores different aspects of ecocritical engagement in and through games. As a result, the book’s comprehensive scope covers a variety of angles, methodologies, and case studies, significantly expanding the field of green media studies.

Sustainability

Serious gaming has gained increasing prominence in climate change communication, and provides opportunity to engage new audiences and new platforms for knowledge co-creation and dialogues. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a serious game on climate adaptation, primarily targeted towards high school students, practitioners and politicians. The game aims to provide an experience of the impact of climate adaptation measures, and illustrates links with selected Agenda 2030 goals, which the player has to consider, while limiting impacts of hazardous climate events. The game design builds on the key goals in Education for Sustainable Development combining comprehensive views, action competence, learner engagement and pluralism. This study draws on game sessions and surveys with high school students in Sweden, and aims to assess to what extent different aspects of the game can support an increased understanding of the needs and benefits of adaptation actions. The results of ...

Online games have been proposed as a promising tool for communication and education. Taking into account the new communicative paradigm of young people and the fact that climate change is one of the main threats to their future, this paper presents a checklist of indicators validated using the Delphi method to analyze the communicative elements of online climate change games targeting young people, and illustrates their use and usefulness with a qualitative analysis of a sample of games produced in Spain. This exploratory study maintains that online climate change games are shaping up to be innovative strategies, thanks to their immersive narrative and interactivity, among other features, which are used to meet the communicative and educational challenges regarding climate change: causes are made visible, actions are portrayed as local, uncertainty is avoided, contextualized information is provided in a positive and proactive tone, and a critical thinking approach is encouraged through decision-making.

2024

The reflections of the "stop climate change digital game" on primary school students' learning about climate change.

Media + environment, 2021