Climate change is often seen as a distant problem, a burden for future generations to bear. This comes as no surprise; the sheer scale of destruction that human activity has brought upon the planet since the middle of last century is overwhelming. Earth has heated dramatically. Islands and coastlines have begun to sink into the rising seas. Extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, storms, and floods, have drastically increased in frequency, displacing and taking the lives of thousands of people each year. Ecosystems have begun to collapse. Extinction has become a daily event. And all these problems are accelerating. Right now. The climate future is already upon us.

The solution to our climate crisis will require immense social and political transformations. Rebellion and civil disobedience – what we demand as non-negotiable to governments – will also be key in shaping the future of our planet. We are already seeing promising early signs of this in vital protest movements like Extinction Rebellion and YouthStrike4Climate. But there is another piece to the puzzle.

The 15 Hardest Contemporary Games 16 IMAGES

I am not about to suggest that a single piece of art will save us, but rather that cultural shifts in how we talk about our climate emergency are vital to confronting our planetary present and future. Art and society inform one another. You can glean a great deal about a period of history in a society from its art alone, particularly via culturally dominant storytelling forms such as the novel or film, and historically also the popular theatre. But art can also, in special cases, direct society towards change. We might look specifically here to: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which was seminal in emboldening anti-slavery sentiments, prior to the civil war; or the Jonathan Demme movie, Philadelphia (1993), which, though not groundbreaking by today’s standards, is widely credited as playing a crucial part in de-stigmatsing HIV in mainstream America; or Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), the renewed relevance of which, alongside its timely adaptation to television, is disturbingly clear today.

With their oft-cited two billion users and emergence as a new storytelling medium, a claim to such cultural relevance should theoretically extend now to video games. And yet, video games – particularly the big ones, the kind we drool over during E3 announcements – have not engaged with human-made climate change on a serious level, at least not to the same degree as other storytelling media, such as the blooming literary genre of ‘cli-fi’ (climate fiction), which has spawned hundreds of novels about climate change in recent decades.

Loading

I am left to wonder: when are video games going to begin to say something about the defining crisis of our time?

Squint, and you might just make out the initial traces of climate change discussion in simulation and strategy games of the early 90s. SimEarth (1990) and Civilisation (1991) incorporated pollution and global warming into their game design, with the former going so far as to include melting ice caps and rising sea levels, rising temperatures, extreme weather events and ecosystem collapse. But the intervening decades did not witness an increase in the development of games that reflected intensifying public concern around climate change. It would seem, then, that as climate politics grew ever more complex and heated in the real world, video games, willingly or not, drifted into more tepid waters.

Loading

It’s not like nobody is trying. Strange Loop Games’ Eco, an ambitious society simulator that encourages players to work together toward collective sustainability, exemplifies such endeavor. Certainly, more climate-focused games are coming out nowadays, particularly in the educational and fast-paced indie spaces. Educational games, often targeted at younger audiences, are great in principle. They have a place. However, as researchers Benjamin Abraham and Darshana Jayemanne observe, games like NASA’s Climate Kids ‘lack both the artistry and mainstream engagement sufficient to make contributions to the public understanding of the issues wrapped up in our current climate challenge in the way that cli-fi does.’

Indie games, on the other hand, have undoubtedly offered artful visions of climate-changed environments in recent years. But these backdrops rarely connect explicitly to human-made climate change. A clear example of this tendency is Earth Atlantis, a 2D side-scrolling shooter, the opening titles of which read:

“The ‘Great Climate Shift’ struck at the end of the 21st century. Ninety-six percent of the earth’s surface is underwater.

Loading

Human civilization has fallen. Machines have adopted the shape and form of marine animals. The ocean is full of creature-machine hybrid monsters.You are a ‘Hunter’ and the new journey begins!!”While games like these might encourage us to explore and play in changed environments, it would be a stretch to describe them as having any kind of commentary on climate change processes or the plight of our planet.

As a doctoral researcher, focussing primarily on how climate change is communicated within fiction, I am often asked: ‘What are some good climate change video games to play?’ It’s a thorny one; I am still asking myself that exact same question.

To be blunt, considering how many video games feature post-apocalyptic settings, there aren’t many. As we race uncontrollably towards countless irreversible ends, when one million species teeter on the edge of extinction, when Earth’s great marvels – the polar ice, the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon – are vanishing, when the planet is increasingly being deprived of all it needs to support life, video games are still throwing us into zombie apocalypses, pestilent plagues or nuclear holocausts.

Loading

There is so much creative potential here to envision a better world and how we might problem-solve our way there, or a powerful warning of what is to come if we do not act now. Video games’ capacity for setting rich and detailed stories in extensive open-worlds (potentially modeled in deeper, geological timescales) are well suited to the demands of carrying a topic as complex as climate change.

Video games have long explored climate aesthetics, but not climate politics. Floods, fires and all manner of catastrophes and wasteland visions abound, but they are rarely linked to our current emergency. I don’t think this is due to a failure of imagination, or because developers don’t care. It is telling, however, that Dennis Shirk, the lead producer on Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, whose expansion pack Gathering Storm affords players the chance to work with climate change modeling and scenarios, has stated that: ‘No, I don’t think that’s about making a political statement … We just like to have our gameplay reflect current science.’ While it’s possible that big publishers might currently view a climate change game as too niche and too politically risky an investment, we can only hope that, sooner rather than later, we will begin to see climate change feature more seriously in major video games. Who knows? Perhaps Cyberpunk 2077 will do precisely this.

I have been careful not to state categorically that there are no climate change games in the triple-A echelon, only to highlight that they are disappointingly scarce. There is one major exception: Horizon Zero Dawn.

On the surface, it is easy to dismiss HZD (because … well … it has really cool robot dinosaurs) but it would be wrong to do so. Without going into spoilerific detail, Guerilla Games’ exquisite RPG is ultimately unequivocal that we – the ‘Old Ones’ in our time of rampant techno-capitalism – are complicit in the climate apocalypse. Perhaps this is HZD’s greatest trick: its relatable backstory of climate breakdown is revealed slowly and in pieces, not all at once. We are emotionally invested in young protagonist Aloy well before we can fully comprehend her bleak world and what led to it. But the game also does so much more. It has a utopian pulse and deep moral core, a belief that radical transformations are still possible and that there is something worth fighting for today.

HZD marks a critical step towards bringing climate change to the fore of the global gaming community and carving a space out for more overtly climate-focused games to thrive. To date, HZD has sold over ten million copies worldwide and is one of the most successful new intellectual properties on PlayStation 4. It comes as no surprise that a sequel is in development. There is clearly a huge demand for this type of blockbuster.

Maybe it’s just that I see my three-year-old daughter in Aloy, but something about HZD moved me deeply. It is a damn good story, filled with nuance and poignant detail, whose shimmering world invokes sublime feeling. It reminds us of what we should truly value. It’s somewhat abstract, but by whatever narrative alchemy, HZD makes me want to make the world a better place, to leave it better than I came into it. It is a rare and precious artifact, and perhaps, one way or another, a sign of things to come. We need more games like it.

JR Burgmann is an Australian writer and editor. He is completing his PhD at Monash University, where he teaches and is a member of the Climate Change Communication Research Hub. He is writing a novel. You can follow him on Twitter @JBurgmannMilner