Climate Challenge: Earth’s future is in your hands

A game where you are president of the European Nations. You must tackle climate change and stay popular enough with the voters to remain in office.

Play the game.

(It’s a bit confusing but the help button gets you through) 

About the game:

Currently there is a growing consensus amongst climate researchers that Earth’s climate is changing in response to man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The main debate amongst scientists is focussed on the amount of climate change we can expect, not whether it will happen. With the current level of debate in mind, the BBC decided a game might be a good introductory route into climate change and some of the issues this creates for governments around the world. The producers’ primary goal was to make a fun, challenging game. At times it was necessary to strike a compromise between strict scientific accuracy and playability. For this reason, Climate Challenge should not be taken as a serious climate change prediction. Wherever possible, real research has been incorporated into the game. This document describes the scientific sources used to create Climate Challenge and some of the compromises made by the producers. These sources are a good starting point for someone interested in learning more about climate change. This document also describes some of the compromises the producers made for the sake of playability.

Game focus and aims

Apart from the primary goal of creating a fun game, Climate Challenge’s producers aimed to:

• give an understanding of some of the causes of climate change, particularly those related to carbon dioxide emissions.
• give players an awareness of some of the policy options available to governments.
• give a sense of the challenges facing international climate change negotiators.

Players must respond to catastrophic events caused by climate change as well as natural and manmade events, which may or may not be linked to climate change. This aspect of the game is meant to give some idea of what could happen as the Earth’s climate changes and also introduce the unpredictable nature of some natural events.

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Chromaroma is a game that shows you your movements and location as you swipe your Oyster Card in and out of the Tube (Bus, Tram and Boat coming soon). It connects communities of people who cross paths and routes on a regular basis, and encourages people to make new journeys and use public transport in a different way by exploring new areas and potentially using different modes of public transport.

At its simplest, Chromaroma is about amassing the most points possible. By watching your own travel details you can investigate interesting new ways to travel and exciting new destinations in order to get more points. Grab “multipliers” and bonus points by working with a team, building up connections with fellow passengers and discovering mysteries that are attached to locations on your routes.

Beyond competition and conquest, Chromaroma’s gameplay opens up the beauty in the city’s transport flows and reveals to its most persistent players some of the mysteries of travel, and even the strange characters travelling through the tunnels in the centre of the system, who may hold the secrets to your city.

http://www.chromaroma.com/

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I don’t totally understand this game, but mixing up social networking with real-time information and alternative transport use is something we’re pretty interested in at VEIL.  Check out Chromaroma on Vimeo to find out (a little) more. _KA

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From “Games for Change: An Interview with MiniMonos and a Look Back” by Amanda Reed:

Jeff Ramos of GameCulturalist.com recently interviewed Kaila Colbin from MiniMonos.com, which is a virtual world that encourages children and parents to practice sustainability, generosity and community. The game was developed by a group of New Zealanders who were trained by Al Gore to be Climate Ambassadors after The Inconvenient Truth came out.

Here is an excerpt from the interview in which Colbin talks about the real world projects the players of MiniMonos develop as a result of the game’s lessons:

What have you learned about gaming and social interaction because of MiniMonos?

We’ve learned that kids online will continually surprise and delight you. We’ve learned that kids are far more clued up about the environment than we had realized, and that they place far more explicit importance on it than we had realized. We’ve learned that they really appreciate being listened to, and the importance of a sense of belonging. We’ve also learned that they’ll go to astonishing lengths to get a rare virtual item!

We’ve been stunned and humbled by the many ways in which MiniMonos members have picked up the sustainability gauntlet and carried these messages into the real world. We’re seeing a generation of children who already care for the environment, who are tremendously generous, fun-loving, and supportive of each other.

We do everything we can to reinforce the need to take real-world action. We turned off the servers for Earth Hour, and every new membership provides clean drinking water for children in India…

Read the full interview and learn more about MiniMonos and the game developers.  As a relative newbie to Worldchanging and games for change, this interview inspired me to look into the Worldchanging archives to see what other games and virtual worlds had been written about in the past…the extensive collection of articles I found was stunning. If you’re interested in checking some or all of them out, the list has quotes from each piece.

Check out the list compiled by Amanda Reed on WorldChanging.

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Simulated urbanism and its effects on the negotiation of hyperreal cities
Rowland Atkinson and Paul Willis / Housing and Community Research Unit, University of Tasmania
Urban spaces have become blended even more seamlessly with their portrayal. Such representations are generated via a broad range of media which both influence and sculpt our sense of their constitution so that our sense of what the urban ‘is’ is inflected by a range of interpretations, atmospheres, inherited viewpoints, dialogues and scenarios derived from these media.

In this paper the authors look at this interpretive skew as generated through intense video gaming activity and from a particular simulated urban context, the city of the game Grand Theft Auto 3: Liberty City. Their objective is to conceptualise the linkages between gamers’ apprehension of the relative realism of this in-game environment and its influence on their experience of traversing ‘real’ urban environments. They suggest the notions of slipped and segued viewpoints as a means of understanding the differential degrees to which real and artificial interactive representations, based around violence, gang ecologies and dystopian urban space, bleed unevenly into the everyday urban life of these players.

This sense of space appears to influence perceptions of risk, the navigation of urban space, and received understandings of social ecologies and stereotypes which overlap with the non-game world. Gamers move within what we call the ludodrome – a mediated space between immersion in urban simulation and a real world that is simultaneously generated, destabilised and blurred by the effect of such gameplay.

To view the full text click here.