![]() Furthermore, an eye-watering 17.1m tons of C02 were created over the course of its products’ life-cycles, with a further 1.4m tons emitted from the company’s business sites. Sony recently announced that it was accelerating its net zero commitments by 10 years, but 2020 emissions stemming from the use of its TVs and game consoles were the highest they’ve been since 2016, according to its 2021 sustainability report. When Sony pledges to plant trees for every “Reached the Daunt” trophy earned by players of Horizon: Forbidden West, an effort promoted as part of the 2022 Green Game Jam, it raises the spectre of greenwashing. Every cutting-edge console, graphics card, and processor is the product of many carbon-intensive processes, including the mining of rare earth minerals. ![]() However, there’s a dark contradiction at the heart of these blockbuster games: the very extraction that Terra Nil rallies against sustains players’ and the industry’s thirst for increasingly high-fidelity graphics. And dark climate dread looms in the primordial landscapes of Death Stranding. Creating monocultures depletes soil fertility, while overfishing destroys marine populations each demand on the environment carries a consequence that could decide a city’s fate.ĭavid Attenborough’s wonder for the natural world permeates the Horizon series, each immaculately rendered blade of grass or clump of moss a tiny act of veneration. Anno 1800’s ecological twist is an environment that reacts to the player’s expansionist actions. For deeper engagements with the brief, you have to look at titles such as snowsports utopia Riders Republic or another Ubisoft title, Anno 1800, the kind of grand city-builder that Terra Nil riffs on. In the hidden object game June’s Journey and arcade fighter Brawlhalla, these actions amount to purchasing in-game items whose proceeds are then donated to environmental charities such as Ecologi. With games, you get to be part of a story – you have a say in its outcome.” She sees two sides to what the organisation is calling “green content.” On the one hand, “It’s trying to help players understand these different subjects.” On the other hand, it’s giving them “agency to take action.” “Within other mediums, it’s more of a passive experience. “The idea of player agency is a really big piece ,” she says. Deborah Mensah-Bonsu, founder of partner organisation Games for Good and organiser of the jams, believes video games are perfectly placed to encourage changes in mindset and behaviour. Photograph: Free Lives/Devolver Digitalįor the past three years, a United Nations project called Playing for the Planet has catalysed these efforts with its annual Green Game Jam. Terra Nil’s simplicity is as beautiful as its visuals, offering the satisfaction of a colouring book while doling out a clear-eyed critique of environment-wrecking extraction. ![]() At light-speed, and with eye-massaging flushes of emerald green and azure blue, the environment transforms into lush vegetation. Starting with arid desert, it’s up to the player to rewild a landscape using various technologies – a toxin scrubber, for example, or a beehive. Dubbed a “city-builder in reverse”, it foregoes the consumption and expansion of genre classics such as Civilisation and SimCity to paint a picture of environmental restoration. Terra Nil, the video game that Alfred has been developing since 2019, is a response to these terrifying events. The situation even called for its own grim version of the Doomsday Clock: hour by hour, the city ticked ever closer to Day Zero, marking the end of its fresh water supply. Dams were unable to replenish themselves at the rate its inhabitants required. ![]() During 2018, the area surrounding South Africa’s second largest city suffered months of dwindling rainfall. It made you realise how, despite all the sophistication of modern society, we’re still reliant on water falling from the sky.” Sam Alfred, the lead designer at Cape Town-based video game studio Free Lives, vividly remembers his city nearly running out of water. ![]()
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