A game for the planet

Drawing a line between good business and business for good can sometimes be hard, as is the case for a British-made computer game released on Monday called Fate of the World.

A far cry from traditional adventure gaming, Fate of the World arms its players with facts and figures about the environment and places them in charge of an international environmental body. The aim? To save the world from global warming, overpopulation and dwindling natural resources on a limited budget. How will depend on the player and his/her integrity as tools include “good things” like policies promoting renewable energy, re-forestation and sustainable development as well as less pc (politically correct) things like deadly viruses, nuclear energy and one-child policies.

“We are not pushing one particular agenda [or] saying one route is the best route”, says the founder of the Oxford-based company that developed the game. “Your objectives can vary from colonizing Mars to geo-engineering projects to reshape the earth and the things that stop you are climate change, pandemics, population problems and those sorts of things”, he explains.

Gobion Rowlands is 35 and not an environmentalist, so to make the game his company, Red Redemption, teamed up with Oxford University, Greenpeace, WWF and Amnesty International. An advisory board made up of scientists and climate change experts worked on collecting the data, although this wasn’t always easy as the game looks at modelling the next 200 years, whereas most models looking at economic and environmental forecasts look to much shorter time frames. Also, some of the data simply doesn’t exist.

Dark humour characterises the game, so while players endeavour to accomplish goals like saving the Amazon, developing Africa or responding to a war over natural resources, the options to achieve the goals are unlimited. A country’s leader refuses to bow to peace talks? Then why not hire a gang of insurgents to take him out. There is even a Dr Apocalypse mode in which your goal is to raise global temperatures as much as possible without loosing political support.

Environmental groups have so far applauded the game. Head of climate at Friends of the Earth, Mike Childs, said that “using climate change as inspiration for entertainment shows the issue has permeated global culture, which can only be a good thing”. Senior sustainability advisor at Forum for the Future said that creative industries working with issues like climate change can provide powerful results that help us understand what a sustainable future looks like.

Rowlands is more pragmatic. “We didn’t just want it to be about climate change. Its an interesting subject but there’s much more going on”. So even though options like killing everyone over the age of 30 may not be a good idea in real life, in a game you should be able to try it. Why? Because causing destruction within the system is a lot more fun.