AN INCONVENIENT VIDEO GAME

[Paul Rogat Loeb]

AN INCONVENIENT VIDEO GAME
By Paul Rogat Loeb

Someone should make a video game of The Inconvenient Truth. The generation of most game-players will inherit global warming’s escalating march, and many won’t see any documentary, even an excellent one. Inconvenient Truth is, after all, a lecture and slide show, mixed with a strong personal story, some nice Matt Groening animation, and more humor and hope than you’d expect from a film on the subject. We need to get everyone we can into the theater seats, buying tickets for friends, colleagues, and neighbors, paying the way for those on the fence to at least give it a look. I’d love to see schools negotiate daytime matinees in normally empty weekday theaters, so their students can attend at radically discounted prices. But some--especially those swayed by the Bush administration’s propaganda against science, thinking, and other “reality-based” pursuits--will still find it too much of a high-brow lecture.

Given that we need to reach more people, how about an Inconvenient Video Game, a Sim World where players learn about the issues surrounding global warming, choose paths of action to address it, and link to real-world external websites? The goal would be to navigate America (and help navigate the planet) through what it will take to emerge without disaster. Players could research the facts, make good or bad choices, and see the consequences of various actions taken. The game could even include some modeling of political advocacy, so players could take the role of ordinary citizens, since our efforts will ultimately decide whether America ever does really addresses one of the most complex and urgent crises in human history.

The game could build on Gore’s existing movie, slide show, and website, adapting whatever elements were useful, but also making the process more interactive, more engaging for an audience for whom games are a prime language. Why not put people in the role of climate scientists assessing the evidence, governmental and corporate decision makers, citizens trying to keep our society from driving off a cliff? Why not let them try out different ways of acting?

There’s actually one existing model called A Force More Powerful: The Game of Nonviolent Strategy Developed by The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) (from their book and PBS documentary of the same name), along with media firm York Zimmerman Inc. and game designers at BreakAway Ltd., the game explores strategies and tactics used successfully in ten historical nonviolent struggles to win freedom and secure human rights against dictators, occupiers, colonizers, and corrupt regimes. It’s part simulation, part strategy game for scholars, activists, and anyone interested in alternative paths to change. I’m not a gamer, but I found it provocative and challenging. An Inconvenient Video Game could draw on its lessons.

I’d love to see a climate change game distributed and promoted for free as an internet download. The goal wouldn’t be to make money—it never was with the film. It would be to draw in as many people as possible to grapple with the threat we now face, taking advantage of every possible medium. And by giving away the game online, and promoting it with viral marketing, it would have a chance to reach the widest possible audience.

There’s a danger of course, that all people will do is play the video. But that exists any time we’re sitting watching screens. If we wanted to get really creative, the program could even ask repeat users to log on with whatever they’d done that week to help address the issue. Our top game designers can now create and destroy complex virtual worlds, that entrance us in powerful ways. They could do the same to save the habitability of the world we actually inhabit.



Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, winner of the 2005 Nautilus Award for the best book on social change, and Soul of a Citizen See www.paulloeb.org. To get his articles directly, email [email protected] with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

[skids]

1. Or it could just let you blow up Hummers.

I'm all for using video games for education and increasing their learning content.

But I think really what they are capable of teaching us lies more on a cognitive science level than on subject matter, memes, or material. Not to say that you can't work a meme into the plot of a videogame effectively (e.g. a sort of "product placement" approach,) but if the meme is all the plot consists of, the game will likely flop. It has to be a good plot to start with.

I do think that since games are interactive the "product placement" approach can in fact be used more effectively than in passive media, as it can embellish an activity rather than a stimulus.

If we really want to realize the full potential of videogames for education, though, we should be looking at how they help create the more basic building blocks of thought, action, and attitude -- way below the level of a particular subject matter.

For example, if a game were trying to teach attitudes towards credit/debt/savings the game would most definitely not be called "Accountant Adventures" but would rather subtly introduce them as a component in, say, a Final Fantasy type setting.

Or to tackle this directly, if we want to address attitudes towards energy and environmental impact, the right game would probably not be "Sim Earth-- Power Grid" as interesting as that may be to some here. It would rather subtly introduce an allegory for energy/environment geopolitics into, say, an RTS game like StarCraft.

[YOY]

2. Just out of curiousity Paul...

Do you actually play video games? or do you just make assumptions that those who do are unaware of such issues as global warming.

[cprise]

3. "one of the most complex and urgent crises in human history"

And you want to just whip-up an interactive videogame for that?

If simmulation/modeling interests you, try joining the BBC climate modeling project (click on the link in my sig). It's not interactive, but there is a course associated with it.

The only thing that approaches what you ask for is the Earth Simulator in Japan. It occupies a couple of office buildings worth of space.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

4. It's a great idea, Paul, but...

Do you know anything of the economics of creating a state-of-the-art 3D videogame?

It ain't exactly cheap.

[Prophet 451]

5. Good idea but...

There's a problem with it.
Although the technology is there to do something like this, the money isn't. Making a full game, using current technology is highly expensive and teh video games industry, like many industries, will usually only invest in something certain to turn a profit (that's why you get yearly iterations of football games and The Sims and why genuinely innovative or creative games (i.e. Uplink, Perimeter, Republic: The Revolution) tend to come from smaller or indie studios). There are exceptions, if you can get a big name interested, someone like Will Wright or Sid Meir, the money might come with them (and Meir is interested in climate change, his Civ games were the first to introduce enviromental change).

Also, unless you're talking about a franchise game (where each installment is just a minor change to old code), making a game takes time, especially if you're designing a whole new system from teh ground up.

That's not to say it's impossible. Avenues like Steam (a digital content delivery system) are making it cheaper to produce games but you're still looking at an uphill battle.