What does Tetris have in common with renewable energy innovation?

Your latest digest of video game and climate change news from the past two weeks.

Welcome to the latest edition of Play Anthropocene!

Today is Tuesday, February 21st, and we’re covering the latest developments in the world of video games and climate change. Happy reading!

Terra Nil exemplifies the joys of rewilding in a genre famous for illustrating the opposite

Last month, Sam Alfred, lead designer at indie studio Free Lives, spoke to The Guardian about bringing “climate positivity” to video games via its upcoming “reverse city builder”, Terra Nil.

This, as you can imagine, was already music to my ears, and now that the studio has just released a new trailer for the game, I have all the excuses I need to give it the spotlight for today’s Play Anthropocene.

Terra Nil is a meditative strategy game where you restore Earth’s habitats back to health. Starting with a barren patch of polluted planet (the kind of landscape we’re sadly all too used to seeing around us in reality), Free Lives’ environmental sandbox gives you access to amazing eco-tech designed to revive soil health, plant forests, purify water, and much more. Play for long enough, and you’ll eventually end up with a vibrant ecosystem teeming with flora and fauna.

This is, of course, a neat subversion on the classic city-builder model, which has generally perpetuated the illusion that urban development must dominate and control nature in order to succeed. Games like SimCity or Cities: Skylines begin with untouched, idyllic pastures, before then forcing players to suffocate it under miles of tarmac in the name of economic growth.

While these games do provide the option to develop clean technology, their interactions with nature are generally reserved to the isolated parks you can plonk in the middle of your concrete jungles. Not only are these pockets of green measured purely in terms of the value they bring to the city, but such imagery presents a model of urban development that contains nature, rather than one that can work in partnership with it.

Terra Nil instead offers an alternative question; what might the world look like if we allowed our environment the opportunity to bounce back? This is the core mindset behind the hundreds of rewilding projects operating around the world, working to release nature from the grip of human development, and uncover the manifold benefits.

More than just a genre twist, however, Free Lives’ latest title is also a wonderfully tranquil experience in and of itself, with ambient sound effects and a painterly palette designed to make the process of cleaning up the Earth feel like a warm comfort, rather than a challenging chore. Making an experience that’s enjoyable for the player might sound like game design 101, but that philosophy - and the subtext behind it - holds greater weight in this context.

Avoiding and addressing climate breakdown is going to be difficult and, at times, exhausting. But it’s also not going to be the tortuous, Sisyphean climb that some pundits make it out to be. The process of restoring our planet to a place of abundance - real, trans-monetary abundance - is a project of human fulfilment; one marked by soul-replenishing joy in amidst the moments of hardship. Terra Nil might be going out of its way to illustrate this, but is it really that much of a surprise? The path to restoring our planet is, after all, quite literally the stuff of life.

Terra Nil is due out later this year, (with a portion of its Steam profits going to the Endangered Wildlife Trust), and you can try out the demo on PC here.

Beecarbonize proves we already have the perfect hand to beat climate change

If you can’t wait for Terra Nil to get your interactive cli-fi fix, might I instead suggest Beecarbonize? The new digital card game from Czech developer Charles Games is out in just a week’s time, and the latest trailer gives you a decent glimpse into how it plays.

Funded by the European Union in association with climate campaigning coalition 1 Planet 4 All, Beecarbonize asks you to fight the climate crisis via the familiar framing of the turn-based card battle format.

The cards in your deck represent the many weird and wonderful solutions to the climate emergency, from carbon taxes on the highest polluters to regenerative agriculture methods dismantling the industrialised farming complex.

Playing these cards onto Beecarbonize’s digital board all have an impact on one of four sectors of society presented in the game; industry, ecosystems, people, and science. These same sectors are also all contributing to the global carbon emissions that continue to rise as you play, turning Beecarbonize into a race between humanity’s transition away from fossil fuels, and the devastating impact of our existing dependency upon them.

The sheer number of Beecarbonize’s cards (120 in total), and the relationships between them, are designed to encourage players to experiment with different strategies. Perhaps you invest heavily in carbon capture technology at the expense of climate adaptation? Or maybe you take a hearts and minds approach, cultivating the social capital to change the political climate first?

Beecarbonize doesn’t explicitly communicate that one strategy is necessarily better than another, but suffice to say that there’s no simple fix; beating your opponent (a.k.a. climate breakdown) requires both an understanding of the complexity of the problem, and a recognition of the need to deploy an equally multilateral set of countermeasures, ones which address emissions reduction across every layer of civilisation.

It’s an idea nearly summarised by sci-fi writer Octavia Butler when describing an exchange she has with a student at a signing for one of her books:

“Okay,” the young man challenged. “So what’s the answer?”

“There isn’t one,” I told him.

“No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?”

“No,” I said. “I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers – at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

While Beecarbonize doesn’t gloss over the threat of climate change, gamifying important variables such as tipping points and negative feedback loops, it’s also a wonderful showcase of just how many amazing solutions to the crisis are already out there.

To borrowed an overused quote from The Six Million Dollar Man, we have the technology. The only thing stopping us from scaling it up to a suitable level is ourselves. Beecarbonize is out for PC, iOS, and Android on Wednesday, March 1st.

Random but cool: The hero of the new Tetris movie is now spearheading Hawaii’s transition to net zero

And now for something completely different.

A trailer for the new Tetris movie dropped last week, offering a glimpse into Apple’s upcoming dramatization of the story of Henk Rogers, who managed to secure the rights to the iconic Russian video game for Nintendo amidst the backdrop of the Cold War.

What does this have to do with the climate crisis? Well, Rogers is now something of an environmental champion, founder of both The Blue Planet Foundation and Hawaiian energy storage company Blue Planet Energy, which has developed a uniqe, raw earth material-free battery designed as a sustainable source of renewable energy.

In a new interview with Canary Media, Rogers talks about his journey from the world of video game licensing to environmental campaigning, and the instrumental role he’s played in getting his resident state of Hawaii to become the first U.S. state to commit to 100% renewable energy.

Here’s just one quote from that interview that I particularly appreciate:

“My message to everyone is about solving the climate crisis: We are doing this. We are doing this. This is not like we may do it or we hope we’ll do it. People ask me if I have hope. The answer is no, I do not have hope. I have determination. In order to solve this problem, we have to have determination. And if we do, it’ll be solved way ahead of time.”

We may be inclined to roll our eyes at governments such as Hawaii’s announcing these kinds of net zero mandates, as they often turn out to be empty promises of hollow words, and little genuine action. But thanks to the likes of Blue Planet Foundation working with the state legislature, Hawaii has already reached its 2030 goal of 40% renewable energy, putting it well on track to reach those net zero ambitions.

Rogers is the real deal when it comes to climate work, in other words, and not just another self-serving business tycoon full of more hot air than our atmospheric prediction models for the next half century.

The full interview with Rogers is absolutely worth a read, and you can learn more about his story when Tetris (the movie, that is) hits Apple TV Plus on March 31st.

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