How Video Games Are Coming to Our Planet’s Aid

by Gunjan Nanda

I’ve been playing video games for as long as I remember. My family was not one to push me to play with other kids or make new friends in my neighborhood, instead they always supported my passion and curiosity to try new things, even if that meant being a gamer girl in school. I guess that worked out pretty well in my favor, who knew playing video games would help save the planet one day?

I want you to imagine a scenario where Spiderman is trying to save a city from a flood or Ironman is on a quest to fight the perils of global warming and climate destruction, ultimately saving us all. 

What is Green Gamification in Sustainability?

Green Gamification is exactly that! You make use of game mechanics to engage people and change behavior, and apply it to sustainability issues. For some time, gamification has been proving highly useful in fields like medicine and education. Now it is also reshaping the ways we strive to save mother earth.

Any kind of change is hard. Walking or riding a bike to work rather than driving or taking a taxi becomes too tough a challenge. So is the case with avoiding the use of take away containers/single use disposables. However, change can be much easier than we may think. For instance, cleverly designed games can transport people back into the distant past and teach them to appreciate the evolution of life and the world we live in. On the other hand, games that incorporate the method of forecasting can let us experience the consequences of our actions or inactions in the foreseeable future. Games can entertain or even scare us, but they can also inspire us and help us create life-changing solutions to the most complex of problems. 

Environmentally Conscious Games That Are Changing the World

Now, the simplest way to gamify sustainability is to ‘greenify’ what’s already viral. The Sims is one classic example! Back then, when I was amazingly obsessed with my Sims family, I never really cared too much about what I was doing to the environment when I was in the game. I’d leave the TV on all day and heat the outdoor pool right through winter. But The Sims 4: Eco Lifestyle expansion pack lets your characters live through an environmentally-conscious phase – recycling, building wind turbines, collecting dew for the water in their morning showers, and so on. In 1990, a decade before Will Wright made the first Sims game, he incorporated global warming into SimEarth, threatening players’ planets with rising temperatures that could melt ice caps and cause oceans to boil away. 

Minecraft is another instance. A recent add-on for Minecraft introduced carbon dioxide to the game, which rises to dangerous levels if you smelt ore, but diminishes when you plant trees. Several other environmentally-inspired games prioritize sustainable messaging over the fun of their gameplay. For instance, Plasticity – an elegant platformer where you traverse a world drowning under plastic waste, and the work of Earth Games – a studio which releases educational projects with titles such as Soot Out at the 0 C Corral, in which you attempt to catch falling soot particles before they contaminate the snow. 

Many new games are set to release this year that are mainly going to operate around environmental themes – We Are the Caretakers tasks players with protecting huge animals in its Afrofuturist world, while Endling casts you as a mother fox protecting her cubs from threats like climate change and pollution, according to a Financial Times article.

Unknown Side of The Gaming Industry

The real-world gaming industry only recently started interrogating its sustainability practices, even though the above environmental themes in gaming are not entirely new. In fact, each stage of a console’s life cycle, from manufacture to distribution to consumer has its own environmental price. An investigation by The Verge calculated that production of the PlayStation 4 resulted in more carbon emissions than all of Jamaica in a year!

Consoles are transported through an international delivery network with its own fuel costs. When they’re settled under our TVs, US gaming hardware uses an estimated 34 terawatt-hours of energy per year which is equal to 5m cars or the annual energy use of Denmark – according to a study in the Computer Games Journal. Towards the end of their life span, obsolete consoles often end up in landfills as ‘e-waste’, the global sum of which produced in 2019 was 53m tonnes – according to the Global E-Waste Monitor, which is heavier than the combined weight of all the adults in Europe!

The Sustainable Shift in Gaming

Change won’t happen in a day, that is why we need more games specifically dedicated to teaching gamers about sustainability. One of the most prominent ones around is Harvest, which leads you through the depletion of the ocean from unsustainable competition (the tragedy of commons) and helps you learn ways to avoid it. Another recent example, Eco – a civilization simulation game that pays close attention between the development and preservation of the natural world.

Such games really help people in understanding science and the need to feel an increased urgency to act, according to a recent research. However, another approach might bring about even more promise for real change: the gamification of our own lives and the very real sustainability challenges we face.

Now, even the United Nations has just launched its very own mobile video game to help young people engage with climate change!

The idea is to capture the attention of ‘Gen Z’ to protect the ozone. Reset Earth is set in 2084, in a post-apocalyptic world where the ozone layer has been completely ruined. Three teenagers are teaming up to save the planet. The game is one of the latest attempts to harness the power of the fastest-growing media platform in the world, as there are more than 2 billion video gamers globally. A report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)’s in 2019 found that this was a medium which engaged billions, encouraging them to find solutions to social and environmental challenges. 

Covid-19 Sparks A Gaming Reprise

The video game industry has yearly revenues of $140 billion – more than Hollywood, Bollywood and recorded music sales combined. In 2017, 666 million people watched other people play games on YouTube and Twitch – more than the combined audience of HBO, ESPN and Netflix, according to a recent UNEP report.

The global pandemic has sparked a reprisal in gaming with players keen to connect, join online communities and pass time during lockdown. In 2018, the global video games market was worth approximately $115 billion, a value that is set to surpass $128 billion by 2021, according to research from Statista. Animal Crossing is a prime example, dubbed as the game of quarantine with its therapeutic qualities benefiting mental health (in moderation of course). 

There’s More to Playing for The Planet

The gaming industry, amongst many others, is also considering how it can become carbon neutral, or in some cases carbon positive – a welcome move for a sector that has been scrutinized for its environmental footprint. The ‘Playing for the Planet’ Alliance has almost 30 members, including the production companies behind the games - Angry birds, Assassin’s Creed, Subway Surfers and Transformers: Earth Wars, who have all committed to introducing environmental messages into their games. The Alliance will also share guidance with its members on how to decarbonize, with Sony leading a working group that includes other console makers. The alliance will help devise a new carbon calculator for the industry, develop fresh guidance on offsetting and forge new collective commitments around the restoration of forest landscapes, which help absorb carbon emissions. 

Ustwo games is also one company, who besides inspiring action through play, have also pledged that it will plant one million trees – one for every copy of their latest game sold. They are close to reaching half a million trees already, which contributes to their goal of offsetting 100% of their carbon footprint from 2021 onwards. The company has also made a commitment to reduce its carbon footprint by 30% by the end of 2022 and move to sustainable energy sources.

Indeed, there is no easy recipe for success. But if we all do our part in some way or the other, without a doubt, we can make a change in the real world.