World leaders have done a positively crummy job solving climate change. Maybe you -- sitting right there in that very chair looking at this very monitor -- could do better? That, at least, is the challenge posed by the newly released video game Fate of the World.
Now I'm not a gamer myself. Not because I'm too cool, nor because I think they rot brains, but because I know from limited experience as a child obsessively playing Kings Quest, SimCity, and Shadow President that if I were to dip my toes into the waters of Civilization or Spore or any of these other awesome simulation games, I would immediately be threatening my sleep, health, sanity, and relationship. So I won't be able to offer a first person review here, but the game's trailer (yes, video games now have trailers) looks interesting:
The basic premise here seems to be that you're running some future WTO-like body established to combat climate change. You need to navigate the precarious geo-political waters of economic growth, population, resource depletion, and, of course, a changing climate.
The company behind the game, Red Redemption (not to be confused with the wildly popular Rockstar game Red Dead Redemption) describe it as such:
Fate of the World is a dramatic global strategy game that puts all our futures in your hands. The game features a dramatic set of scenarios based on the latest science covering the next 200 years. You must manage a balancing act of protecting the Earth's resources and climate versus the needs of an ever-growing world population, who are demanding ever more food, power, and living space. Will you help the whole planet or will you be an agent of destruction?
The game designers had a predeccesor to Fate of the World in Climate Challenge, a lightweight climate change simulation for the BBC that has been played more than a million times. For both versions, game designers worked closely with Dr. Myles Allen, the head of climate dynamics at Oxford University, and integrated reams of real-world climate data.
Allen was, in fact, the reason the game came into being at all. Gobion Rowlands, head of Red Redemption, offered the Guardian this creation tale: "My wife was working on Allen's Climateprediction.net project [a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data], when he took me out for dinner. We got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change."
Last year, while following the U.N. climate talks in the run up to COP15 in Copenhagen, I spent more time than I care to remember in sterile convention centers buzzing with buttoned-down diplomats -- a community entirely aloof of real-world, mainstream thought, and a process entirely obscured from real-world, mainstream view. Very few climate-concerned citizens, through no fault of their own, have any idea just how tricky a balancing act these international climate negoations are. Perhaps this game can help change that.
The risk, if you can call it that, is that anyone can sit down and move a mouse for a couple of weeks and think that they could solve the climate crisis. That avoiding the worst fates of climate change could be as simple as tweaking the clean energy R&D knob and planting carbon capture and sequestration nodes all across China. If only it were that simple.
A beta version of "Fate of the World" is available for download today for PC, and should be ready for Mac by March 2011.
