The Role of Gaming in Climate Activism: Can Games Save the Planet?

The Role of Gaming in Climate Activism: Can Games Save the Planet?

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Gaming has outgrown its initial location of an only fun activity and turned into a powerful tool for social change and education in the modern digital landscape. The Bitsky platforms have shown how such games are az effective tool for the people to become more aware and cooperate for action on the global problems and, for example, climate change. However, this industry can do a lot if young people who are the most devotees of the world of video games get involved in various programs for the protection of the environment, or are they just passing fads?
How Games Can Promote Climate Awareness
The unique opportunity of video games to capture the participants' feelings and involve them in environments where they can be the first persons to feel, see and experience the consequences of environmental destruction is equally significant. A majority of video game developers are leveraging this media to sensitize the population on the issues related to climate in an interactive way.
For instance, games like Eco and Terra Nil ask players to reconstruct ecosystems, while ones such as Beyond Blue take them on a journey to the bottom of the ocean for a very insightful exploration of marine conservation. These games do not only provide entertainment but they also serve as a digital classroom that gives the players an opportunity to learn about such issues as sustainability, conservation, and the human impact on the planet.
In addition, some studios go further in honoring their commitment by using environment-friendly development practices, such as introducing carbon-neutral servers, selling eco-friendly merchandise and organizing in-game events to back up real environmental issues.
The Seven Sins of Gaming and Climate Responsibility
Despite being the least reliable power source, gaming industry still has powerless in ethical field. The industry has several moral dilemmas that need to be cleared comparable to the 7 Sins:
Greed – Societal consciousness is placed over production of excessive hardware, energy-intensive servers, and disposable merchandise by many businesses bringing up problems of overconsumption.
Wrath – Some eco-conscious messages, when seen as artificial or political, can result in negative response from a small group of gaming communities.
Sloth – On the other hand, there are those game developers that simply do not engage in meaningful action alongside climate issues, although they admit the problems.
Pride – Talking of such companies, boasting about a few projects that improve the environment by a small percentage, no major reform is accomplished, so they are just engaging in greenwashing.
Lust – Only a few of the players’ love for high-end graphic and powerful hardware results in increasing carbon footprints by energy consumption.
Envy – On the other hand, the competition is motivated by the shedding of old hardware which is turned into electronic waste, thus, the industry becomes the producer of electronic waste.
Gluttony – The onset of the digitalized world, with the overconsumption of digital content, daily updates, and the overwhelming amount of data storage, has been aggravating the situation.

Gamifying Climate Action
One of the green-lights of gaming in the climate activism field lies in the fact that it can transfer points into pop-up messages that suggest positive action to take. Someone developers have started incorporating real-life situations in their games by means of in-game events based on that the results are visible in nature. For example:
Minecraft’s Coral Crafters initiative gave birth to the real coral reef restoration that has been achieved.
Pokémon Go’s Earth Day events attracted the participation of millions of players in the cleanups held in local areas.
Fortnite’s in-game concerts were able to gather money for environmental charities through that.