professor English University in media and game studies fore game greening games video games in times of climate crisis for the floor is yours enjoy um thank you for the invitation it's a pleasure uh to be here with all of you as I said in the little warm-up uh discussion we had it reminds me a little bit of the um hybrid and online teaching a couple of years ago during the COVID pandemic i can only hope to keep you a little bit awake and uh I hope that we will have um lively discussions uh throughout um the talk i because most of you don't know me now thank you for the wonderful introduction uh Anna um I thought uh I'll give you a little bit of an idea at least into how I got uh into the topic of ecology or environmental sustainability uh and video games so a few years ago I was working with a few friends uh of mine on on an idea and it all started with that idea that back then did not have uh to do much with video games yet but with film uh we won the first award in the UT pip competition uh here in Berlin and uh what we wanted to do is we wanted to develop a an intuitive application that would help filmmakers to shoot films in in a more environmentally uh friendly way and in the world of film uh back in 2020 there was already a lot of talk about the so-called green production there were guidelines uh uh Germanwide uh depending on the um on the bundesant so there was a lot of material already to um to look into uh as you can imagine the award uh was very modest so we did not end up or we did not manage to turn this idea into a startup that we envisioned but uh during this process uh of thinking through uh this idea um I learned a lot and I always wondered what if uh uh some of those ideas were transplanted into the context of of games and uh in 2020 there was still very little um done in the area of video games in academia a little bit more there were colleagues of course writing at least in the English German and Polish speaking um academic discourse that I'm aware of there were colleagues who were writing about um video games ecology nature and by far not you know the first or one of the first people who did that but it was almost invisible outside of video games this means that the production of video games or the games industry or um uh game developer community did not really that much wake up until 20 or end of 2019 so those ideas that I had with uh Gita I brought into the first uh project that was running from 2021 to 2024 and it was called Greening Games the website is still alive and active so please feel free to um to explore if you um if you're interested this was a project within the framework of the Arasmos Plus uh this means that it was highly focused on dactics that is how how do we actually teach how do we put all that um plethora of knowledge across what does that mean you had a session last week uh with uh within the context of probably using games and uh serious games and um an ecology but um games and climate crisis or games and environmental issues are very interdicciplinary uh it's a web of relations so it's very hard to think from the perspective of teaching students and then it also depends in which department at Cologne Game Lab where I'm based at Tahak we are um teaching students who will be the future game developers mostly i am responsible for media and game studies so the humanities perspective other colleagues are teaching programming arts design and all those different perspectives comes with come with very different questions related to sustainability and this is what uh this project tried to to tackle this interdisciplinary of angles and and then producing reliable teaching materials for that and that finally brought me uh to the latest project and this one is uh very much in in the running right now it's a much bigger project this time really focused on um not on didactics but uh on research uh strategies sustainable transition for Europe's game industries and within that project I am leading a work package and our goal is not to look at games per se but to look at game developers European game developers so it's an ethnographic research with interviews surveys participant observation fieldwork to find out um what uh the biggest challenges barriers opportunities uh are uh what kind of awareness do the developers themselves have maybe also critique how is it actually looking on the ground looking beyond the PR um materials that are very often and these days very readily shared by especially bigger um game developer players so this is where um where it is right now but my interests in the the green aspects around and of video games are much larger than that so today I will try to give you um a little bit of a broader picture so not focusing on one specific uh aspect but picking three very different angles so my today's talk is an invitation to rethink video games and gaming within the context of the natural taking uh environmental sustainability in and of video games as an example and we will be looking at three different intersections they're all not they're all related with one another so in the first part uh of the talk I will um give you an insight into the so-called playing nature that is the practice of what I call nature playing in video games we will then move on to designing nature that is designing for climate awareness so kind of shifting the focus from you know putting being the the players inside of the game and trying to play green whatever that means uh to uh thinking about what kind of um tools or conceptual tools designers have to design for awareness that might be coinciding a little bit with what you have heard uh last week or at least that's a similar angle and then the third uh intersection will move us to exploiting nature so that's maybe the least uh uh optimistic uh part but also one that is um a ground part of environmental sustainability and games and video games specifically so we will be looking at the issues of materiality of digitality the questions related to the cost of making games okay and before I start with the first part I would like to just remind you that I will be stopping after each one of those intersections and then opening the floor for discussion hopefully keeping you a little bit more more alive and not falling asleep by the end we're done all right so playing nature let me start with a scenario a story so it was high summer 2022 and in many regions of Europe and worldwide temperatures reached record heights and unprecedented fires with over 62 hectares of flora burned by the end of August 2022 meanwhile the players of Riders Republic a major multiplayer sports video game developed and published by Ubisoft participated in something that was called digital reforestation so they planted virtual trees in dedicated locations of the map and brought to life an entirely new forested area that stayed in the game for others to experience long after the event had taken place and the writers republic event with digital reforestation as the central mission was hosted for two weeks in the summer of 2022 and it culminated in the first ever in-game climate march for which players were equipped with virtual green t-shirts banners and different assets that you see here on the image and the project was conceptualized in 2021 during the so-called green game jam organized by the playing for the planet alliance the environmental program of the United Nations that was brought to life in 2019 and has been quite active um ever since so at its core writers for public the game that I have just mentioned is a competitive multiplayer sports game it has nothing or very little to do with environmental messaging right it's not something that you would call an ecological game but it may also inspire a more contemplative mode of play one that puts the aesthetic experience of nature to the forefront and this is not a default practice in that game it has been designed with a challenge-based core gameplay dynamic however the breathtaking in-game vistas and settings literally mirroring landscapes and flora of six American nor North American national parks seem almost a natural fit for moments of something that we can call synthetic nature contemplation and this meditative touch behind the in-game natural settings is not a coincidence it's not a product of chance ubisoft studio the one that produced writers republic sits in anosi in France and is located as you can see here on that picture literally amid the French Alps so this deep connection to nature is almost inscribed into the daily lives of many members in the development team and it's not also something that I came up with this is something that came to me from the fieldwork let's say uh I had the pleasure to interview early on in the greening games project the first one that I the second one that I mentioned today um I had the chance to talk to Boris Manora who's the gameplay director behind the game and uh these are his words we are all passionate about the outdoors there's no real coincidence if you look outside of the studio you will see that it's surrounded by mountains you can't fight against that so technologically mediated landscapes may turn into settings for ecological awareness or simply spaces of nature appreciation even without dedicated climate crisis related events writers Republic exerts a powerful aesthetic effect on its players at least on me not on everybody and in the first part of my talk I want to present to you this phenomenon of connecting with technologically mediated nature through digital play and I will frame this practice as nature playing a contemplative mode of being in the game world nature plane does not see the surrounding natural terrain solely as a collection of optimized game levels but instead facilitates unspecified contemplative traversal through the game and maybe you are gaming yourselves probably a lot of you in this group are so try to think of um whether you have you know without naming it anything specific like nature playing whether you have ever been stunned by um in-game or game world nature whether um it has ever struck you that you know instead of following um a narrative or or fulfilling a quest that you kind of stopped and wandered around just you know to admire the beauty of uh what kind of surrounds you and this focus of mine on the contemplation of the natural world and writer's republic is a project that originally was inspired on the one hand by this conversation with the game developer Boris Manora that I just uh mentioned whom I interviewed in May 2022 on the other hand it was inspired by the the teaching I will mention it briefly in a few slides time of two colleagues of mine uh from the media studies department at Potam University during the Corona time and that seminar that they designed uh was specifically devoted to the so-called nature playing and nature writing you will see where I'm going with that in a sec so my point of departure for nature playing those of you who might have guessed uh based on the collocation is nature writing and nature writing is a form of practicing writing and it's also a literary genre whose goal is to connect with the natural world it is often defined by human perception and experience of it for instance for the comedy of the German award for nature writing yeah something like this exists it is the human perception and a concrete experience of nature rather than nature as such that define the genre for the writer David Reigns Wallace the nature of nature writing lies in its capacity to position nature as a subject and as a setting an element of of poetic sensibility and more recently the idea about nature writing has taken a more visibly ethical and political turn in a 2023 essay on the problem of nature writing Jonathan Frasen states "We live in a world where nature is rapidly receding from everyday life there's an urgent need to interest non-believers in nature to push them toward caring about what's left of the non-human world and you can think that video games you know or virtual environments are almost a natural fit for this kind of genre of convincing nature writing in games the sense of purpose is created not using literary devices or dramaturgic arc but by meaningful event and experience-driven game design so consider our u you know introductory example of digital reforestation in writers for public it was an event a time um bound event that lasted two weeks built in to the existing uh video games so video games can be it's not easy of course to achieve that but they can be or maybe perfect virtual stages for visually breathtaking natural setting which may become spaces for curated ecological events such as the writers republic reforestation event or as it was then in my case with nature playing personal aesthetic experiences i have another example from a very different game you may recognize it so appreciating the natural world may be inspired by contemplating its digitally mediated representation in one of the reviews of another game Ghost of Tsushima the author emphasizes the aesthetic seduction that the game world's designers cast over the players as they're confronted with quote lush meadow of crimson flowers lit with a perfect approximation of just before a rain shower sun or a cloud mountain looming far off in the distance also very poetic right so the way it's described this kind of experience of being in this synthetic world with of synthetic nature is in itself a genre of nature writing and this capacity of video games to depict and simulate nature extend nature writing originally born into a literary genre into the digital realm and as Alenda Chang writes games can offer a compelling way to reconcile a deep connection to nature and the non-human world with an equally important connection to technology in the virtual so I think it's a very powerful quotation is really thinking a bit more broadly about it it's not uh always about the fact that games are supposed to in the vein of you know behavioral psychology nudge you into something or that you're supposed to see uh shortterm effect in your you know everyday actions that's uh something that can be you know much more um gradual or or compelling and that's a uh this is the example of an example of student work i already mentioned that um I was inspired by the research didactic work of two media scholars friends of mine and and um his colleagues so Sebastian Muring and and Big Schneider and this inspired me to look a little bit deeper into the practice of of nature writing with relation to video games um in 2020 Ming and Schneider conceptualized and taught a course they called Flanneri nature writing in games and in reality by the way um this um collected volume slash zamlban that you see here on this slide uh is open access and it was fully edited and designed uh by the students who were attending that seminar so it's quite an amazing piece of work that came out of this uh well let's say intervention actually you know it was something on the verge of a classical seminar where you read and discuss but also an intervention they were nature playing and then writing about their experiences sometimes uh uh also watching uh others play so this is the the fruit uh of uh the collected volume is a fruit of of this seminar so all those you know different uh let's say uh points of departure inspiration kind of brought me into playing Riders for Public differently right uh playing it um and I enjoy the competitive mode a lot uh and performing the tricks inside of the game uh you can you know you can uh um you can ski there you can cycle uh you can also put devices that are a little bit more futuristic and closer to speculative design and by doing that you can traverse through the game world um but I decided to do something very different i was playing the game and this is the map that you see here in the so-called Zen mode so um I guess as the name suggests and and you can guess yourselves Zen mode does not allow you to compete also Zen mode does not put you in a multiplayer mode so I was alone it was also a very uh well let's say sublime or sometimes quite a weird experience to be inside of this huge world just on my own without um any other player there are no NPCs um there are um animals and plants and the animals are uh you know they kind of sometimes you can uh you can um you can see them but it's not very easy they're not the main focus of the game so sometimes you see a bird landing or but it takes a while to observe that and because it's not the focus of the game also those moments of looking for uh you know the floor and the fa uh are very adventurous in a way um the the game world of writers republic I I mentioned before is based on those six natural uh parks of North America and it's really stunning um and how well those worlds are simulated um they were using 3D satellites of terrain so this means that um the settings when you're there it seems that you know they're very it seems as if you were there i guess uh even more so uh for those people who actually went into those places i think the designers uh of the game also mentioned to me that the idea of of digital um uh tourism came across their mind because they had this feeling of let's say it's called digital memory of course for reference points they not only satellite scanned those terrains uh but they were also visiting the sites um to get the feeling right for uh for the natural while while designing it those terrains are um for design purposes slightly altered but only slightly this means that of course uh certain mountain peaks will be flattened for instance you know kind of making sure that that uh you have the right type of terrain for a competitive sport game on different types of sport equipment so you can actually use the terrain uh in a more you know gamelike um way but uh in writers republic uh maybe also to come back to Alenda Chang this quote permeability between game environments and real environments is almost tangible right due to the fact that you have especially if you know and you realize that the game worlds that you were um experiencing are based on quite accurate um terrain scans this also does something to your experience um of this kind of synthetic uh natural Uh Mark Bonner another colleague of mine uh who looked into environments and uh and the natural in game worlds um he discussed nature and wondering through landscapes and video games calling on the writings of John Mure might have heard of John Mure a Scottishborn American naturalist who in 19th uh uh century and early 20th century diagnosed wandering in the wilderness as a popularized practice of his time stemming from the need to step outside of the industrialized everyday and it's actually quite uh telling when you read what he writes a 100 years ago the tendency nowadays this is his his words to wander in the wilderness is delightful to see thousands of tired nerf shaken over civilized people are beginning to find out that going into the mountains is going home that wilderness is a necessity and of course you know this kind of parallel between going into the wilderness to regain calm and to slow down and going into the synthetic simulated wilderness especially in the times of COVID when again we had this chance where we were forced to slow down is something that um that struck me so the question is you know how does it feel to go into digitized wilderness and uh what I want to now share with you um to kind of round it up uh with digital uh with um with nature writing is a short piece of nature writing actually based on uh a session of nature playing so uh I was working on different types i called them contemplations and uh with each of them I focused on something else sometimes I was more focused on uh looking for animals sometimes I was trying to uh make my own herbarium so you know scanning the um the elements of nature uh projecting the game uh with a projector onto the wall and then scanning it um with an app that allowed me to actually um check what kind of um plants are are are in the game uh and kind of collect uh let's say in this kind of digital way uh those plants and the knowledge about them so this contemplation that I want to share with you or this example of nature writing as nature playing um is called digital wilderness wandering and capturing nature at the feet of El Captain that you also see here in the screenshot um a warm orange light descends into the Joy Valley as the sun sets below the simulation's horizon i'm standing in front of a gigantic in-game object that bursts a striking resemblance to the southwest face of our captain the largest granite monolith of the world meandering through occasional patches of melting snow I notice a bird of prey silhouette most probably belonging to a golden eagle standing out against a ponderazza pine tree snap penis ponderza in the game world with birds usually flying in the far distance this is a rare moment to cherish i lurked as slowly as I possibly can to be able to capture it snap golden Eagle something tells me that the chances of seeing this virtual bird land again are not high the orange light transformed into all shades of pink and purple as I turn around and inhale the atmosphere of the mild evening in front of me emerges a lush green grass patch with dazzling yellow flowers swaying to the rhythm of the virtual wind pausing the gameplay for a moment I take my phone with the terra incognita app ready to register the flowers of my in-game herbarium snap esta Californiaica more commonly known as the Californiaifornian puppy the evening and writer's republic must be unusually warm otherwise the Californiaifornian poppy should close its petals by now a few steps away a patch of deep purple scones invites me to a closer inspection snap loopus polifus lupins prefer mostly moisty habitats they must feel at home amidst the melting thin snow caps resting at the foot of our captain having stored my photos and notes I'm heading down the valley to roam through the poppy meadows so before completing this you know um intervention and there were more than this is just an example so I was actually spending hours uh uh during this you know exercise of nature playing you may think about it as something quite boring but it turned out to be very meditative and uh so before doing that I envisioned nature playing you know from a theoretical perspective in multiple ways i thought well it could be seen as a meditative practice as a self-conscious experience maybe as an act of aesthetic pleasure appreciation an ecological act maybe a mood setting device so there are many ways uh of thinking about this you know nature playing i also saw nature playing as a gameplay style that is characterized by walking waiting sitting down resting talking and contemplating this is how uh Navaro Ramasal a colleague a game studies colleague from from Spain uh talks about wondering in games and it seemed a relatively easy to task to embark on for the fir first when I thought about this and it's only after hours of roaming through those natural virtual settings that I became aware of the challenges and limitations of nature playing right so although the setting of the game is stunning it's not really easy to recreate the feeling of the sublime which so often accompanies real encounters with magnificent natural settings and perhaps this is a question of course this form of naturriven sensibility in virtual game worlds needs to be exercised learned but maybe it also some is something that we can uh acquire that can be newly acquired that of that is of course a question mark right so I guess to now you know um sum it up uh this mode of play or this practice of play um turned out to be something that made me on the one hand uh you know appreciate the the synthetic design of nature but on the other hand it made me very skeptical towards the capacity actually of the virtual worlds to really put us into this truly contemplative uh mode of of being in nature and um maybe that's something that we don't think about that much 5 years after co but back in the day there were a lot of texts not necessarily academic a lot of journalistic texts and a lot of uh practices or interventions like this and uh some of the colleagues I remember reading a guardian art the guardian article on you know going into the game world in order to have a walk because you can't in the real uh in the real world so so those uh this idea of going out into the digitizer synthetic nature and somehow experiencing it um aesthetically and poetically uh was quite strong a couple of years ago okay so we'll stop here before we move to designing nature a very different perspective with a very different set of questions and um if you want to please feel free to jump in i'm super happy to have a couple of minutes of uh a conversation and um yeah feel free to share anything maybe also your own experience of you know playing nature or wondering in in games or or being stunned by um by nature and in specific titles that you play um the floor is opened yeah fore foreign foreign alice while Fore sharing the VR [Music] um [Music] does Um Multiplayer Sport game fore game level so [Music] um medium film And now [Music] video games what do you think about putting nature in textbook or exercise sheets and simulate an adventure going through nature by going from task to task would it have the same effect as a video game okay I'm reading it what do you think about putting nature in textbooks sheetsating an adventure going through nature by going from task to task h I'm not sure if I uh follow I mean it's a narrative uh idea that um you seem to be uh putting through right I don't think will ever have the same effect uh it's the question is is it the question of effect in a way I asked this uh myself as well but with relation to a effect so that's why at the beginning I thought okay what will I feel I think this is something that made me very curious will I feel something and we we all know what it feels like right being in nature uh what it can kind of you know touch in us and then I was curious will that uh experience if I like change the vision and if I very uh it was a very curated experience i almost kind of forced myself to you know to be in the natural what will I feel what will it feel like and I think for me this feeling was something that was not easy that's why the question at the end is it something that we have to learn and acquire is it possible at all to feel you know it's very removed it doesn't touch many senses it's very visual and sure I mean the as you know from video games the the grass is swaying um you can hear the birds uh the sound is 3D of course um but somehow it doesn't touch all the senses so it feels quite um different accessibility I see another question and the opportunities that that's an interesting one I think uh this is where a a window maybe of opportunity opens and it kind of your question brings me back to what I've heard from the um design director of this game about um digital uh tourism generally as an idea not only this game is not meant for that but those ideas that kind of he and the team had um on the one hand maybe for people who can't go there on the other hand maybe even as means of protecting nature because you know all those national parks are actually again they are curated and highly romant romanticized settings also in nature and um this idea of you know a natural reserve or a park going back into the 19th century was actually there also by John Mureer that I mentioned today to protect nature against the capitalist forces of industrialization um so you can see that way and you know of course an accessibility not everybody can actually go there but again I mean it's it's not something that can uh replace it i don't think it's a question of replacement but maybe creating at least um yeah you know a tiny bit of opportunity there you mentioned Assassin's Creed um of course the Red Dead Redemption also one of the games that I remember um from the the feeling kind of of the natural i know that for Red Dead Redemption there's also this practice of vegan running you might have heard of uh this also highly interesting vegan runs so players refusing in Redemption to actually hunt and kill so you know people rep like players are very I think uh genenous in thinking of new play practices i don't even think it's all it doesn't have to be seen as a strategy it's a practice of um experiencing um the natural world that was not intended or not thought of by the designers far Cry i haven't played Far Cry maybe some other people have too game experts in the sh yeah monster Hunt Pokemon Ruby also pops up and the concept of walking simulator games The Vanishing of Ethan Carter dear Esther absolutely yes i mean I now in this part of the talk I did not touch upon it but of course when I mentioned wondering and walking you kind of uh it it woke a very um desired let's say um association um with you i think Sven yes uh absolutely i mean this is a genre which was uh around 2015 maybe slightly earlier i think dura was the first one it was um very projoratively uh pictured so as in you know through the lack of something as in you can't do anything there just just walk but this genre of walking simulator is quite interesting because you can't interact with assets objects and you know there's a little collision buil built in there it kind of forces you almost to uh contemplate more and to kind of walk through the game world in this more contemplative mode so my intervention of this kind of nature playing this is the frame I set to to what I was doing in the game has a lot to do with in a sense with walking simulators you know although they were not meant as simulators of walking uh but absolutely pixels generated real scenes I mean yeah well pixels they're all simulations you know at the end of the day I think what is really stunning and very interesting from a technical perspective about the writers republic that's why I took this as an example is this 3D scanned uh terrain uh technically speaking of course the 3D scanned terrain so it's it's it's a mashup of course of those uh six national parks the way they exist in the game they don't exist in reality they brought those six parts together and there are uh moments when you go from one until the other in a way that does not exist in reality but in a sense this you know 3D terrain scan ends up uh in the game engine and then it's uh you know it's it's more than pixels pixels is just a visual representation you're thinking um you have to think uh uh simulation actually and simulation of physics on top of a terrain um because if they didn't do it in this uh in this case I mean imagine how would you make sure that uh the the terrain that you're you're kind of dealing with the landscape is actually relatively close to uh what it is in reality would be a very laborious uh work you would have to take lots of pictures it's crazy so the technology of 3D scanning of course exists commercially that's why they used it but in other games it's not necessary if uh it's not this kind of you know um um closeness to the terrain that you're looking for i think it was also one of their selling points hogwarts Legacy just walking through those places from the movies that you would explore in my own way yeah i mean it's a similar feeling maybe to this kind of digital memory you your memory was a memory from a different medium from a film this experience that you had but then you could kind of um experience it uh in your own pace uh a little bit more uh let's say first person uh perspective okay let's maybe move to the second part um thank you for all those wonderful uh you know questions ideas exchanges games um so I'm going to turn off the chat for now okay so um now from this mindset of you know being in the game worlds as players and let's say experiencing them aesthetically and and thinking about the practice of play and those different contemplative types of play and encounters that we may have with natural with the natural i want to move uh to a very different perspective where we will put a little bit more the head of a designer on and um we will be thinking about what does it mean to design nature what does it mean to design for a certain effect maybe and so we're shifting the focus from the practice of playing nature to that of designing nature and creating awareness uh for climate issues in the players i want to stay for a bit uh within the realm of Ubisoft's writers republic because it provides us with really many interesting uh examples going beyond uh um the writers republic uh uh you know game itself and um those two projects that I want us to have a look at before we move on uh to theories or to certain types of resources on the so-called green design um those two projects have implemented the so-called green activations um so elements that had to do with the environment the climate issues the ethics and the politics of it um and it's really interesting how um how it was uh done um in this game so I mentioned the project rebirth this kind of two week uh refor digital reforestation event i want to point us to another one which is even more interesting i think it never actually took place it was just uh at the stage of um of concept it would have taken place a year later so it was thought of as an event i tried to reach out to the developers to ask if they actually implemented this because I couldn't find anything online but I have not received an answer nevertheless the idea itself is really interesting so another event or whether we call it you know green event or ecoactivation this doesn't matter that much but the idea here and the so-called project finenix was to bring the players attention into wildfires right i mentioned at the beginning uh of of this talk the wildfires of 2022 of course it's not something that just happened in 2022 this is this is just you know this kind of climax because it allowed me to it almost happened at the same time where the first uh green activation uh was published uh by the developers of this game so it's a very powerful coincidence of course um so a year later they're thinking about a project Phoenix uh in which parts of the map of the game world would be set on fire on purpose and by doing that they would actually um disallow players to actually enter into into those parts of the game world so they would be uh for a certain period of time out of uh out of reach and um here are just you know some of the examples of how they would do it the sky will be orange and there will be fire smoke fog players will be equipped with gas masks by default part of the map won't be accessible h and the most important idea uh here which I think is the strongest one was to do this one actually unannounced so that would be something that would actually take you by surprise while uh you're uh in the game world um this is a practice uh or or a design uh pattern that uh is called um forest discomfort and it can be it can be quite uh it can be quite powerful so it kind of confronts you with uh something that you're absolutely not expecting um in the given context you know it's an entertainment AAA game you're not uh really looking forward to part of the game we're literally well metaphorically of course burning and um and uh kind of not allowing you to to participate in so this is an example uh project Phoenix or project rebirth of using the actual the actually existing games and um and coming up with interventions uh inside of them that would raise awareness to a certain um nature ecology climate crisis related issue but there are of course other games that have been let's say designed from scratch with a little bit more um ecologically oriented uh um setting or or framework and there are plenty of examples i'm just really showing uh just a few so we're kind of scratching here uh the surface and one of such examples is Teranel and it's a game developed in 2023 by Free Lives a studio based in Cape Town and the goal here is to transform a barren wasteland into a thriving ecosystem and once that action is completed to leave it in a rocket this is what you see in the GIF so basically to to let it be without your human player um intervention um and and in the words of the designers Terrano is an intricate environmental strategy game about transforming a barren wasteland into a thriving balanced ecosystem bring life back to a lifeless world by purifying soil cleaning oceans planting trees and reintroducing a wildfire then leave without a trace um and I remember when I first learned about this game it was uh 2023 just before just after it was released at the uh GGC game developers conference and uh you know I'm I'm usually skeptical i kind of but I I heard the designer talk about this game and it was quite a revealing example because it turned out it was not something that they actually envisioned they were not planning to you know to to kind of build this type of game uh but at an early um development stage they released this on on Steam i think green light uh is uh this option is called and it came from the player community this kind of wish to have something that is a little bit more nature oriented in most games of this genre as you know it's usually you know treating um resources and natural resources which are endless so there's this very um industrial capitalist or exploitative um touch to it right i mean it is it can be you know quite fulfilling because it is a simulation so potentially you would think we can do that there's there's uh there's no limit there uh but it creates a certain uh of course vision of of the natural and of how um how you cultivate uh or or exploit it um so that's there's something different here that that happened in Terranil and it was the player base that actually somehow shifted this project to and kind of made it um what it became but if we think about something you know we could call it eco-critical game design or maybe you know ecologically informed uh game design what does that actually mean and uh in the discussion part uh you please like feel free to to exchange what you've learned from last uh week or two weeks ago um these are just you know some of the um the categories that we can think of so environmental themes this is probably one of the least powerful uh to put a theme into a game that has to you know to do with the environment it can be powerful though if you think that on a long term not on a short term it's not a magical touch of a wand you know that all of a sudden an eco game will change people's minds just because there are around three billion uh players around the game uh around the globe it's about creating new imaginaries and new narratives and that's a slow cultural process and games are well we always say relatively new medium but if you think about the 70s as the beginning of the you know the first commercial um games uh slowly entering into the living room they have been there for a while but this awareness and uh uh this kind of um awareness of what they come with and how they can create those new imaginary narrative is something relatively new they can be powerful games can picture of course different relationships between human and nature and there are certain design patterns so it's a process that can be a design process it can be more conscious and there are the so-called design patterns sometimes called design tactics i don't like the the militaristic metaphor here that support uh the ecological message what are these actually what does that mean you know to think conceptually now about those design tactics or patterns a lot of them uh uh have been um singled out in in this um playbook in this textbook and I mention it because it's a fascinating project it's not a standard textbook it's not a book that has been you know published by an academic publisher this is really and truly um fruit of collaborative work between game developers mostly some researchers but mostly game developers game designers worldwide and um they collaborated on it uh on this document live and at some point in uh early uh 2022 they kind of you know brought it into uh into the community um you can still access this this is uh free and and open uh work and then what they try to do there is they try to give the designers um not only a language to kind of you know talk uh uh with about uh let's say games for change or games for impact but concrete uh scenarios they call it them tactics or patterns concrete ideas of how to do it and they always uh bring in an example of a game so it's a it's not a it's it's quite an easy read uh but very useful read so forest discomfort I already mentioned today this is one of those tactics that they mention It's a design tactic a design pattern in which players are placed in situations that create unease annoyance anxiety on purpose and of course in games you do not do it you're I mean you can do it with language but you do it uh with a certain type of event that is built into meaningful event that is built into uh the game world a larger narrative depends on what kind of uh game uh or genre you're dealing with and that's why I brought this not realized project Phoenix as one of our examples project Phoenix so this kind of you know burning potentially burning parts of the map and writers republic is an example of force discomfort this is the kind of tactic that's what what we're talking about the other tools um again coming uh all of that work is really coming from the developer community this one by Ano Fayol who's a um it's been working a while for Ubisoft as an art director and at some point uh he was so invested into the topics of um of of designing uh games for uh creating more awareness for climate crisis that he ended up doing just that work within that company and also beyond um in let's say international game developer community and uh years of work went into it and this is kind of his contribution as an artist and designer uh to the question of design patterns or how to where do we look what do we focus on when we think about um well he calls it climate game toolkit so you as you can see here and it's really quite interesting because if you can if you know you think academically these categories make so much sense the aesthetic dimension is there right the aesthetic dimension going back into nature playing the beginning of this talk it was a lot of it was about aesthetic actually and emotional impact visual visualization um slightly less about the message so what you can achieve with uh with visual aesthetic what kind of message you can carry across uh with the story what uh what you can do with gameplay they call it here you have behavior transference is actually nothing else than thinking well how do I create those events and situations in game that could potentially go beyond creating awareness how do I make people change their behavior outside of the game that's a really tricky question of course and in that small community or maybe not that small of climate conscious game uh developers they call it behavioral transference and the questions of tech here have to do more with optimization something like green coding for instance how do I optimize my code make it more effective so that the software aka game running on a machine let's say PlayStation 4 runs uh uses less energy So so there are very different questions as you can see that I brought here under one hood right the aesthetic of the game itself and the effectiveness of of software running on hardware um and uh this I will not discuss this don't worry this is actually how how complicated it gets if you're interested in those issues uh you can follow uh his work you can find there there are a lot of talks on YouTube um in which uh Arro is actually unpacking this model this this uh tools uh climate game toolkit uh so you can you know devote around an hour listen to one of those talks um and um I just want to kind of put you let's say into a certain direction if it's the design aspect that uh that you're fascinated with And um something that uh I found quite powerful when I talked to Arnov uh Fol about games and climate and environment um this is what u amongst many other things is what he told me i realized that video games have the power to reshape popular culture by reaching billions of players and giving them a vision of what a desirable future looks like if you didn't know the context or uh you would think oh this you know sounds quite elevated right um it's also something that you see a lot in in PR uh materials produced by uh big game companies but in this case uh it actually is uh really interesting was really interesting to listen to that in a larger context um coming from a person who's very ecologically aware and also in his private life and really believing that and doubting sometimes you know that whether it's possible to change something within such a big structure as Yubisoft but then actually kind of holding on to it and and deciding to stay and work together with uh a lot of other people um and believing that we c that we can to a certain degree reshape uh culture values through games it's not about the fact that you know we that those people will reach three billion players that's impossible not everybody will care but if you think about uh especially you know bigger productions like video games we really have to think about them as it's it's mass entertainment product mass entertainment products like you know Hollywood films of course they will on a long term exert a certain influence so the values that they depict not in terms of behavioral transference or magically I will change all of a sudden but they have a lot of power in reaching you emotionally and the more uh you know certain types of values are are kind of depicted in those games maybe the more certain topics and and um sensibilities are kind of landing uh with a relatively broad audience i think that's how we should uh read that point okay I will stop here for a couple of minutes and uh open the discussion on yeah on the design or aspect of um games or I don't know call it designing for change or impact games or there's a lot of names for that um so please feel free the floor is open [Music] and after uh I'll try to be quick so that we have uh again a couple of minutes uh to reflect and this third part now moves us away from design or the experience of games and um into the realm of the materiality of the medium sorry I had to be I had to move some of the of the images because I they were covering my slides so video games are not only drivers of climate positivity as we saw here or simulations of stunning natural settings they are perhaps you know sadly as much objects of culture is what we saw in the last hour as they are of nature and as virtual and immaterial and clean as they are portrayed within the framework of post-industrial capitalism they're literally made out of natural resources and that's something I want us to unpack what does that mean games are made out of you know natural resources you mentioned today that they are made out of pixels Right so I guess maybe what I want to say here in this third part is that pixels are not virtual pixels are something that is very tangible and very material let me unpack this and show you on a kind of in a few examples how is this possible what is she talking about so we can think of video games uh thinking with uh Shan Kubit uh a media theoretician as finite resources in the closed system of planet earth i guess that's something maybe that should kind of stick with us now for the rest of this talk games as video games in this case as finite resources as material resources and navigating you know those material interdependencies can be quite challenging and tracking down this kind of material those material aspects of games so I guess perhaps the first crucial step is to rethink the relationship by breaking the enchantment that inflames the passion for media technologies and what would that mean so we can break that entment for instance by going beyond thinking about video games as you know hiding or hidden or thinking what hides let's say behind playful interfaces and shiny screens this is just you know an image that kind of illustrates uh what we usually think of we think uh about this visual representational layer we think about the images when we think about video games so disenchanting technology and video games can be done by telling stories of resource extraction for instance and exploitation it's a question uh a more rhetorical question now what like think before I reveal think what you see here um on this slide I give you a few seconds maybe you'll guess it's a mine of sorts uh what is mine there cobalt and cobalt is needed in every single piece of device that has a lithium battery right including gaming hardware so we can disenchant in a way video games by thinking about enslaving work as well so it's material resources but also human resources of artisana cobalt miners and this is one of the uh of ethno like most powerful ethnographic work on cobalt uh mines uh in the republic of Congo we can also think of the overwhelming production and consumption of data and this is just you know couple of examples and some of them already very old if you think about the digital realm 2019 uh that's something that becomes a lot more material right million dates a week 2.7 billions of hours of Twitch content these things are not flying up the air right multiplayer games uh neither they're sitting on infrastructure that looks like this and still on the left side of the picture it's quite you know quite a nice tech and sleek uh colorful vision but it's actually you know um data um or electrical signals that are flowing through veraterial infrastructures of cables mostly and computers uh that we need you know in order to play or or process that data are also machines that are made out of highly processed of course but natural uh resources so these are just a few more examples and uh this dimension of this material dimension of the technologies and the internet is something that's very revealing um in report by Greenpeace from 2016 uh 17 sorry clicking clean uh where they call data centers as the factories of the digital age and it's a very powerful metaphor in the industrial era you know something else was produced in the factories and in many ways uh the same infrastructures that were back then used for producing other things are not turned also into uh into digital centers but this is what we're in the developed part of the world at least or many other um you know it doesn't have to be the western part of the world China is also leading uh in this these are the factories um of the digital age and they're very real material and very tangible I have here as well um from that report it's another very strong image if you think about data and games are also data especially multiplayer games played via network that's why I'm bringing those examples here to play up to 2003 as a global community we had accumulated five exabytes of digital content it's quite abstract but it's the relation I think that's interesting here five exabytes up to 2003 for the first let's say 13 years of the internet today and that today was said in 2019 we consume 10,000 exabytes not five every couple of days right with the ideas of the metaverse you probably all have heard from meta from you know Facebook coming a year and a half ago this huge vision video with Mark Zukenberg the idea of making internet a 3D uh VR world means basically generating much more data and that data has to sit somewhere and run through a very material infrastructure so it's all really related in a way you can think about it in the sense that it's all earthly and resting literally on earthly matter it requires resources energy human labor um one of the most interesting examples of this kind of materiality of of gaming hardware is a piece of journalist work you can um read this um it's it's open access in the Verge um and um the journalist uh invited two material scholars from the University of Cambridge to literally dismantle a PlayStation 4 bit by bit open it look under the hood and try to uh you know think and deconstruct let's say um the materials that are part of it from the plastic case something that requires oil basically it's oil industry one of the products of the oil industry through uh the different compon electronic components inside and the kind of metal uh metals that uh that they require this is just a a quotation from from that article it's really uh interesting and powerful and here gold and tin are are mentioned as classified so-called conflict minerals a term that refers to resources originating from Congo and its neighboring countries this region has faced ongoing violence for the past 30 years funded in part by complex factors um mineral wealth uh which is estimated in 24 um,000 trillion i think also you know thinking more broadly again geopolitically what's happening today uh with something that you have been confronted with in the news of um um US global geopolitics and the Ukrainian war this uh focus on the minerals is not a coincidence of course these are the minerals that you need in order to again power you know the 21st century a digital uh I don't want to call it revolution but we need more and more of those resources and uh they uh become a point of um a very strategic um a point maybe even sometimes pushing you know um different countries and different powers um uh to to um to different types of actions this is another uh piece of information this time again from the report done by done by the uh by the greenpiece and this one is telling us that if we think about gaming hardware or any electronic hardware green according to greenpiece 70 to 80% of the energy footprint of personal electronic devices occurs during the manufacturing phase and I'm just bringing this to our attention because usually when you read um guides and guidelines that are done by the game industry for the game industry you will read the exactly the opposite that's interesting i'm not judging right now i'm just kind of putting this up there so in those uh materials you will read that it is the personal use of the device that creates the biggest um emission footprint and I bring this uh thing to our attention to kind of it goes back into this individualistic framework that I mentioned in discussion earlier on putting back or shifting a focus on the individual consumer instead of on you know the manufacturing of of the devices so there are a lot of conflicting there's a lot of conflicting data out there greenpeace is uh an independent um body um the data produced by um many of in many of those games guides is not produced by any independent body it's actually produced by uh the bigger comp the biggest companies Sony Microsoft and Nintendo we will not have time now to go into details uh just uh as a point to illustrate so this is from a green games guide and as you can see raw materials in this iconography components and game system manufacturing and data centers and networks something I mentioned are also mentioned there but they're not unpacked they're not touched these are of course very uncomfortable realities those those realities that are not only material they are also you know geopolitical where things are produced in what conditions how um the raw materials are mined who's mining them in what conditions who's buying them who's consuming and uh and so on so forth so that brings me to the end actually and I wanted to end with two things on the one hand with a very powerful quotation again coming from uh from a developer we need to do politics as game developers and this is actually something coming not from an avanguard game de designer is coming from a AAA company developer and we need to find a balance of how to do it i think it's interesting this kind of awareness uh that games are also they're not only you know um media of politics they're part of uh a larger geopolitical problems and as I told you I will end with one game coming from uh a vanguard scene that problematizes the materiality of the medium itself and it was taken down from the app store immediately after it was released it's a game called Phone Story by um Laindustra Industri there's a one person behind it Paulo Pedini who's a developer and he says about himself uh that he's designing radical games most of it all of his games actually are highly political touch of uncomfortable issues and this one was designed more than 10 years ago now for mobile phones and it was about the production of um mobile phones and this here um this image here depicts the uh child uh labor um by um digging out and extracting raw materials that are then needed for producing electronics so this is has been um this very uncomfortable and shocking uh fact was actually touched upon in a video game very quickly taken down not many people know about this because you have to be kind of you know interested in the avang guard scene to stumble upon it you can play an emulation of it but I guess this uh is you know maybe a bit of a disheartening example for the end at the same time I think uplifting because it also shows that you have you know if app store is taking it down you have kind of the power in that medium to um tackle very uncomfortable uh topics topics that are usually you know tackled by maybe documentary films reportages um um investigative journalism and so on and so forth so thank you for your attention and I think we have just maybe a few minutes left not many and if you still want to uh ask a question make a comment or contribute in any way to part three or any of the other parts of the talk um please feel free to do so thank you so much