adding climate risk
Glasco said the pressures and effects of climate change are already making their way into a growing range of commercial videogames – giving some of the world’s estimated 3 billion videogamers an almost direct first-hand experience with them.
Floodland, a survival game set in a world engulfed by climate change, launched last month, for example, and SimCity, a long-running world-building game, added up to the effects of climate change a decade ago.
Martial Arts Tycoon is a game developed by Glasco’s Private Studio that lets players manage a martial arts gym, training on the rooftops of Brazil’s infamous slums.
As temperatures warm, fighters being trained have a greater chance of becoming heat exhausted, which hurts their agility. But investing in shed cover and giving fighters plenty of water limits damage.
In the game heatwaves are given names and ratings – the way hurricanes and tropical storms are currently named globally – Arsh-Rock hopes to bring awareness to the risks of rapidly worsening extreme heat in the real world Is.
Glasco said the idea is not to make a climate-change videogame, but to make climate change a reality in games in a way that creates awareness of similar changes happening in the outside world.
“If a million people play the game and are familiar with the Heatwave ranking system, once the rankings are posted on the news, they’ll be like, ‘Hey, I should be in,'” a senior partner at Arsh-Rock said. Glasco said. ,
The Miami 2040 prototype game was put together cheaply in under three months, but high-spec games can cost upwards of $100,000 or millions for a commercial product, he said.
Still, Arsht-Rock thinks the technology’s ability to powerfully actualize the risks and opportunities of climate change will spur investment in similar games by government bodies, businesses, nonprofits and others.
It has launched a gaming center aimed at creating its own games and helping other organizations expand the genre, as part of a wider push to drive effective climate policy and build resilience to impacts.
“We want every policymaker to try this,” Upadhyay said at Arsh-Rock. He said many people now know the risks of climate change are increasing, “but this is a quick way to educate them”.
Glasco said he’s starting to wonder how much power the new virtual reality games actually have.
The first time they showed up to the Miami 2040 game, on a trip to Washington D.C., Hurricane Ian slammed into their home in the Florida city of Orlando, forcing them to return to their wet home by jet-skiing through flooded streets.
A month and a half later, on the day he began demonstrating videogames at COP27 in Egypt, another storm hit his home.
“It could be a weather manipulation game,” he joked. “If it’s more timely I may have to throw it off my roof – and save Florida.”