Terra Nil: The $200 Billion Video Game Industry Is a Huge Global Climate Opportunity

tech.hindustantimes.com:

 The video game begins with a disturbing scene: a city almost entirely underwater. The city's developers must reclaim land from the sea in order to build new infrastructure, but too much digging will trigger earthquakes and raw materials are scarce. Survival is contingent on finding workarounds, and on installing tidal turbines and other technologies that can harness renewable energy. Squaring such big circles might not sound like a fun way to spend a Saturday. But when Terra Nil — a city-building strategy game from Cape Town-based Free Lives — hit the market last year, players from all over the globe signed up to give it a go. Within a week of the game's debut, more than 300,000 people played it. 

That success is music to the ears of gamers, policymakers, and researchers who say that video games have the potential to boost climate messaging. In 2019, the United Nations even formed an alliance with dozens of gaming companies across the $200 billion industry. One of its initiatives, an annual campaign known as the Green Game Jam, challenges studios to incorporate environmental themes into their most popular titles. Last year, for example, nature conservation was thematically implemented into 41 games, including Angry Birds, Asphalt and Pac-man. 

There's some research to back up the idea that these efforts will bear fruit. In 2022, researchers at Yale University surveyed more than 2,000 gamers in the US on their opinions about climate change. Roughly one in five said they watched or heard about climate change via game play or streaming, and one in eight said they took action in real life based on what they'd learned.

“Games have the power to help us imagine a different and better future at a massive scale, and to reinforce a