The Green Game Jam: Can video games save the planet?
Deborah Mensah-Bonsu
Monday 4th July 2022
This is the first in a series in partnership with UNEP's Playing for the Planet Alliance (P4P), which delves into the different ways our industry is innovating for the good of the environment
Playing for the Planet Alliance was launched at the UN Headquarters in New York during the Climate Action Summit in 2019. Since then, members including Sony, Microsoft, Tencent, Niantic and 42 more have made commitments ranging from reducing their emissions to integrating green activations in games.
We're kicking off this series with the latter, and a movement that is quickly becoming an industry staple: The Green Game Jam.
The brief: Jam, hack and tweak your games to incorporate environmental themes your players can rally around.
The goal: Empower your players to change their world through the games they know and love.
Space Ape CEO John Earner dropped the idea in a brainstorming session following P4P's birth. Everyone was fired up and wanted to do more. The question was: how do we get studios who are historically very competitive to push in the same direction?
Harnessing that competitive spirit through a jam was the answer, but not a traditional jam focused on prototyping new games which may be published years down the line. Rather, the focus was innovating on games that already had existing, captive audiences we could reach now.
Earner and Sybo CEO Matthias Gredal Nørvig personally and relentlessly muscled and cajoled those first studios into taking part. The competitive spirit of our industry gave the Green Game Jam its start, but it was collaboration that gave that first jam heart, and has made it stick.
Since inception during the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 with 11 mobile studios and
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