It’s a huge task, then, that game designer Sam Alfred has taken on in his attempt to build a video game with climate change at its heart. Best-seller lists are full of titles pushing destruction and violence, rather than constructive engagement with the environment.
Yet “Terra Nil”, a strategy game designed by Alfred and released in March last year, puts players in charge of rebuilding ecosystems—and has since attracted 300,000 players, according to the publisher Devolver Digital.
“I’ve lost count of how many people have dismissed the game or made fun of the game, because of its nature, because it’s a game which is not about shooting people or rampant expansionism,” said Alfred.
“The environment was the focus of the game. The one angle was trying to show players and other game developers and people that it’s possible to build a strategy game without exploitation of the environment.”
True to his word, the 30-year-old South African asks players of Terra Nil to help decontaminate radioactive zones with sunflowers and save the Great Barrier Reef among other climate-related tasks.
He is far from the first game designer to weave an environmental message into his games — nor the first to be pilloried for it.
‘Polarized’
In 2017, the city-building game “Cities: Skylines” launched its “Green Cities” spin-off, a sandbox where players could build their perfect metropolis based on pollution and environmental control.
“I remember that the Green Cities extension was something that surprisingly polarized the audience,” said Mariina Hallikainen, managing director of Colossal Order, the Finnish studio behind the game.
“There was actually feedback that we are now ruining the game by going political.”
The team behind the game deny there was any overt political message, flagging that players could choose whether to make their city green or not.
And other studios have not been discouraged from putting climate into their games.
The daddy of all strategy games, “Civilization”, included climate change in an offshoot of its sixth edition in 2019. With an estimated three billion people playing video games at least once a year, climate campaigners have long targeted them as a potential audience.
Even the United Nations has tried its hand at creating a climate game—”Mission 1.5″—that it said reached more than six million people.
‘Superpower’
Industry figures have banded together in a number of collectives to see how they can include the climate in their games.
Studios, trade associations and investors formed “Playing for the Planet”, an alliance backed by the United Nations that has held a “Green Game Jam” each year since 2020.
Other games industry figures coalesced to form a climate branch of the International Game Developers Association in 2019.
“You have a superpower: you’re gamemakers,” Arnaud Fayolle, artistic director at publisher Ubisoft and key mover in the IGDA’s climate branch, told their conference last year.
“You can talk to three billion players across the planet who already trust what you have to say, you can teach complex problems in fun and engaging way that schools never can match.”
The IGDA branch unites nearly 1,500 industry professionals and university professors, ecology and climate specialists, who share their experience to infuse video games with climate issues and encourage gamers to get involved.
“The idea is to generate a positive cultural impact through aesthetics, storytelling, game mechanics and technology,” said Fayolle.
This is where people like Alfred earn a pretty penny.
“A lot of our mechanics in the game are our way of trying to translate either real-life natural processes or real-life ecosystem restoration practices into game form,” he said.
“That means oversimplifying them and it means, you know, taking some creative liberties.”