Serious Games, Serious Gamers & Climate Change

Serious Games challenging us to play a better future

The scale of involvement in the day has been impressive, according to CNN: 10,000 bloggers around the world, reaching about 15,000,000 readers, have been writing about climate change for Blog Action Day 2009!

Earlier today, lead organizer Robin Beck shared with participants, via a "Blog Action Day is AMAZING so far!" message, quite a few breakthroughs, starting at the stroke of midnight when UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown surprised us with a Blog Action Day post on his blog saying that "climate change is the biggest threat to all our futures". The White House also sent us greetings from Washington by posting A Green Blog Action Day.

From there we have seen thousands of interesting posts from bloggers in 150 countries. Global Voices Web site -- a community of over 200 bloggers -- has also helped to promote the event in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe

Blog Action Day has been the top Google blog search today.

According to the organizers, this has already been an amazing day and the Blog Action Day team couldn’t be more impressed with how many bloggers from all parts of the globe have come together for such an important issue.

Niche Topic: Climate Change & Video Games

Mitu.nu - Adventures in Video Games, Research and Saving The World, addresses two interesting topics in today's earlier posts:

1. What About Popular, Successful, Commercial Games?

Okay, so we’ve seen games which are quite openly political/environmental. Some of them are really rather good. But, what about the games we play every day, though? What about popular, successful, commercial games? After all, these aren’t about climate change, and if they were, surely nobody would buy them anyway if they were about a ’serious’ issue?

What if games were to address climate change without being explicit about climate change?

Plenty of mainstream games refer to climate change in that they are set in a “near-future world ravaged by global warming”; however, in such games, “climate change is part of the background”. There are of course many, many games set in some kind of post-apocalyptic environment. However, these do not necessarily compel players to think about their real-world environment.

2. Why Gamers Would Be Rather Good at Fighting Climate Change and Saving the World

Moving aside from the old “gamers are used to saving the world all the time” thing (ha!), more seriously, one thing that countless years of playing video games does help you with is a) thinking strategically and b) resource management. These are potentially great tools which can be harnessed in the fight to mitigate climate change.

Robin Beck believes this coming together of otherwise incongruous bedfellows under the umbrella of climate change is a unique strength of the event. "It gives people who write about niche topics the chance to confront an issue of global importance with others around the world," Beck said.

Beck's ambitions for the day are straightforward. "For me," he said, "the best possible result would be spreading the conversation to places where it is never held."