Gaming in a Carbon Regulated World

Digital Games After Climate Change Change, 2022

Chapter 1 of book, email for full PDF if interested.

European journal of literature, culture and the environment, 2017

Whether framed as environmental communication, ’sustainable media’, ‘eco-media’, or ‘green popular culture’ environmental media and cultural studies constitutes an embryonic but rapidly developing body of research. The vibrant, multi-layered engagements of the eight essays collected here demonstrate not only that green gaming engages with all of the issues addressed in that research but also that games and game studies can expand the range of this incipient green media and cultural studies. This volume of Ecozon@is the first collection of essays to focus exclusively on the topic of ‘Green Computer and Video Games’. Working from these essays, we will demonstrate in Part I of this introduction how attributes specific to gaming might address and expand our understanding of environments and ecological relations; and, in Part II, how these essays might help develop green game studies itself.

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.

Games and Culture, 2007

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2017

"macrosociological" dimension to green media and cultural studies, the economic and political organization of media forms and technologies and the ideology (or ideologies) that underpin this. Perhaps because of the relationship of gaming to corporate media conglomerates, political, economic, and ideological dimensions have been prominent in green game studies. Allison Carruth has noted, for instance, how long-standing utopian connotations around ICT and the internet and, specifically, the "ethereal" metaphor of the "cloud" mask not only the "energy-intensive and massively industrial infrastructure" of "servers, wires, undersea cables, microwave towers, satellites, data centers, and water and energy resources" but also the manoeuvrings of the corporate bodies that produce, operate, sell, profit, and mine individual data from networked systems (342-3, 359-60; Parks and Starosielski). However, the more political emphasis taken by green game studies is also partly due to the influence of one heavily cited book, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter's Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (2009). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter incorporate games within what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call the 'Empire' of consumer capitalism, an empire that extends from economic power to an ideological, cultural, and affective capacity to permeate everything. Consequently, computer games encompass, they argue, mass market economics (in the sales of games, consoles, associated merchandise, film franchises, etc.), political struggles between labour and capital, the cultural transformation of free play into a commodity, and a training that games allegedly offer in preparation for the capitalist market-"virtual play trains flexible personalities for flexible jobs" (see xv-xix, xxix-xxx, 36). Additionally, they argue, while the interactivity unique, in many ways, to computer games "seems to break with the passivity" traditionally attributed to media consumption, that interactivity might actually intensify the internalisation of a game's ideological message. This isn't, though, their entire argument. For while deeply implicated in networked capitalist power, computer games also harbour powerful possibilities within what they call the sporadic "upsurges" which occur in the empire of capitalism (xxi). Hence, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter develop a second category, 'games of multitude', which, as described below, are games that act against the prevailing ideology and/or offer a creative, sometimes 'dissonant' force within it. Alexander Galloway has similarly argued that although games epitomise managerial bureaucracy and Deleuzian forms of informatic control, they also lend themselves to artistic appropriation and the resistance of the 'multitude' through what he calls 'countergaming'. These more emancipatory possibilities can be placed in context by considering two further dimensions of green media and cultural studies: modes of communication; and the conceptualisation of a ground-level green popular culture. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt's collection of essays, Ecomedia: Key Issues (2016) attempts to untangle the complex interrelationship of media, society, and environment. In particular, the book carefully balances how popular media texts treat nature as a material and ideological resource against their potential to promote a new, ecological "commons sense" around the "profound belief that we share the world in common with one another and with other non-human organisms and processes" (1-2).

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.

Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Game Based Learning, 2011

This study explored the potential of digital games as learning environments to develop mindsets capable of dealing with complexity in the domain of sustainability. Building sustainable futures requires the ability to deal with the complex dynamics that characterize the world in which we live. As central elements in this system, we must develop the ability of constantly assessing the environment that surrounds us, operating in it and adapting to it through a continuous and iterative individual and interpersonal process of revision of our frames of reference. We must focus on our world as a whole, considering both immediate problems and long-term consequences that decision making processes could generate. Educating for sustainability demands learning approaches and environments that require the development of systems thinking and problem-solving, rather than solely the acquisition of factual knowledge. Due to their characteristics, digital games present a high potential for “learning for complexity”. Although they can be very different from one another, digital games can indeed be proper complex systems. In fact, many modern games are set in sophisticated cyberworlds, requiring players to engage in cognitively demanding tasks relying on problem-solving and decision-making skills, dealing with ill-structured problems, unpredictable circumstances, emerging system properties and behaviours, and non-linear development of events. Furthermore, these environments support remote interactions across large numbers of players, often requiring collective engagement in the pursuit of common goals. To understand how games are currently used for “learning for sustainability”, we analysed twenty games. The games were selected based on their visibility on an online search engine. The analysis showed that there is an emphasis on using single-player games to educate children and to foster the acquisition of factual knowledge. Furthermore, our results show that sustainability games often do not leverage the usage of complex systems as gaming environments, hence not fully exploiting the potential of games as learning environments to develop “thinking for complexity”.

Enquiry: A Journal for Architectural Research, 2008

The American building industry is one of the major consumers of energy. Buildings use 39% of thetotal energy consumed in the United States, significantly impacting national energy demand andcontributing to global warming. The vast majority of architectural practice in US leads to construction of buildings with a little concern to sustainability leading to environmental degradation. Although the bulk of architecture practice continues to produce unsustainable buildings, there is growing stream of exemplary models of sustainable design. Examining the success of suchpractices leads into two a two-folded finding; first that achieving sustainable design is closelylinked to “integrated Design”1 - a type of practice in which various disciplines involved in building design work together to achieve efficiency and other synergetic benefits. Second is that theadvances in computing and simulation algorithms are paving the way to achieve “integrateddesign”. These technologies are enabling the de...

XXVI International Conference of the Ibero-American Society of Digital Graphics, 2022

Life is getting digital more than ever as technology improves. While the Internet is responsible for two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, it is underestimated as a pollutant. Since public awareness is one of the most important preservation methods, it can contribute to protecting the environment from carbon emissions by raising people's understanding. In this regard, serious games, as a type of gamification transmitting educational content besides entertainment, immerse the player in enjoyment while teaching them a specific topic or enhancing their skills in a field. This study proposes a serious game, taking the digital unseen carbon footprint and its effects on the landscape into the topic. The game considers SDG goals provided by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. In this regard, the research uses SDGs 4 and 7 by providing quality education for all and access to sustainable energy by changing people's everyday habits.

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.