Simulated Climate in Ecological Games: Mediating Climate Change to Endow Players with Transformative Agency

The chapter introduces the reader to the challenges of using games as media for communicating climate change and to ecocritical work done on climate change games. It begins by summarizing the state of the wider field of media studies on ecological media and highlights the usefulness of games as thought experiments that promote systems thinking. The chapter then proceeds to give an intermedial account of how scientifically produced knowledge is transposed from the realm of fact to that of fiction, specifically, on how truth claims migrate to algorithmic environments. Understanding video games as tools for representing complexity, it then focuses on two classes of digital games, so-called god games and grand strategy games, and uses SimEarth and Sid Meier’s Civilization VI: Gathering Storm as case studies for discussing how game designers can use the medial properties of video games to simulate human agency’s effects on the climate system. Additionally, the chapter demonstrates the capabilities of modern hobby board gaming to provide a different perspective on the same representational problem, using mechanics more congenial to board gaming, such as negotiation. Using Kyoto, Keep Cool, Tipping Point, and CO2: Second Chance as illustrations, the chapter establishes ludo-textual analysis and ludic discourse analysis as key scholarly methods for investigating how scientific knowledge is transmitted in games but also for exposing the ideological assumptions behind various game mechanics.