Today is Blog Action Day! The theme, as you may have gathered, is climate change; which means that today, I’ll be blogging about video games & climate change.

Video games are, as we know,  a potentially persuasive medium, and have the power to do good in the world. There’s lots & lots of very awesome people who’ve written about this already, and are furthermore actively working on games to do just that, so I hope I don’t need to explain myself any further. Instead, I will use this opportunity to promote some games addressing the theme of climate change in some way. I’ll also talk about games and climate change in a broader scope later.

On this hopefully auspicious day, I’m not going to make any assertions about which games are good, and what isn’t; after all, I personally think it’s awesome enough that people are taking the time/investing the money to make these in the first place. Instead, I will try to mostly link to any and all games that you can play for free, online, in your browser now.  I hope, if you’re the sort of person that likes to kill a few minutes playing games at work or wherever (trust me, I know who you are – especially if we’re Facebook friends!) then at least just for today, you’ll consider some of these games instead.

Without further ado, here is the first batch of games which address climate change in some way – I hope you’ll play! I’ll post more throughout the day.

Windfall

Windfall is a game by Persuasive Games (co-founded by Ian Bogost); it’s a strategy game about building wind farms to create clean energy profitably. From the website:

Fulfill a specified energy offset goal as quickly as possible by building turbines smartly. Research locations carefully for the best wind conditions, and to avoid upsetting the local citizens by building turbines in undesirable places.

Build turbines in key locations and connect them to the energy grid. Sell the energy you create energy as renewable energy credits to earn profits to grow your farm.

But be careful—nobody wants to have a big, ugly wind turbine in their back yard. Research land value and average wind speeds to generate as much energy as possible with as little political consequence. When protesters start distrupting your plans, you’ll have to devote some of your income to the costs of political backpedaling.

Interested? Then go check it out and play Windfall now!

Backflow

Backflow is a mobile game from GAMBIT (yay!), and was a finalist in the 2008 Independent Games Festival. From the website:

Backflow is casual-style puzzle game for mobile phones. In the game you take control of the waste disposal infrastructure for a city. It’s your job to make sure each type
of waste goes to the right place. By flipping switches on pipe intersection points you direct the flow of waste to processing facilities at the bottom of the screen. Earn points by sending recyclables to the right bins. Create combos by sorting correctly consecutively and look out for power ups to help you along the way.

But put things in the wrong place and you’ll break your combo and increase the pollution in your city!

As your city grows in population, waste comes out faster and more frequently.Try to manage the biggest city without getting buried in the garbage!

Sounds awesome, right? Well then, click here to play it now!

BBC Climate Challenge

Climate Challenge was developed by Red Redemption, though commissioned by the BBC.  In this  resource-management sim, you play the president of the “European Nations”. From the website:

Players must respond to catastrophic events caused by climate change as well as natural and manmade events, which may or may not be linked to climate change. This aspect of the game is meant to give some idea of what could happen as the Earth’s climate changes and also introduce the unpredictable nature of some natural events.

You can play Climate Challenge now!

Super Energy Apocalypse

Another flash game, this time by Lars A. Doucet. Incidentally, it also won 2nd place in the Jayisgames 5th Casual Gameplay Design Competition. I think he explains it best himself:

“It’s a game about sustainable energy use and blowing the crap out of mutant alien zombies.”

What could be better right? Click here to play Super Energy Apocalypse now!

EarthBeat

WHAT? Yes, alright. I know I said I wouldn’t be making any assertions about what’s good and what isn’t, but this is one I made, so I’ll make an exception. EarthBeat is a game prototype which I made for the MTV Positive Change Awards, and it admittedly isn’t necessarily all that original, but was really an experiment (fingers still crossed on that front for me though, by the the way!). I’ve talked about it before, so I won’t go into it, except to mention that you can download it here.

I’ll post more games later! If you know of any other games about climate change you’d like to see here, or indeed, if you have such a game that you’d like to promote here, please leave a comment and let me know!

I’ll also talk about games and climate change in a broader sense too, and also mention other types of climate change games later in the day, including those which might not be so explicitly about climate change, though seem to exprses the issue in some way anyway.