The storm is closing in quickly as a ponytailed woman with the handle ClimateScientist glides into view on a multicolored umbrella. She lands and runs into a house. Wielding a comically large wrench, she begins to smash the house’s kitchen to pieces.

As she does this, an older man — username SuperDad64 — provides narration over voice chat as he scavenges for supplies elsewhere on the map: “If the Democrats win, they will basically be able to stop, sort of, the climate policies of Trump.”

Abruptly, a young boy interrupts. He’s focused on the game, specifically a llama nearby that contains useful supplies. “If any — um, don’t… don’t open the llama just yet!” he says. “I know a bug where if you use a shockwave grenade on it, you can double everything that’s inside it.” Another boyish voice agrees. SuperDad64, heading out into the storm to find the elusive llama, talks about congressional politics and midterms as he does so.

This, of course, is Fortnite — but not as you know it

“I think the Democrats will take the House, and then they’ll have a lot of hearings into Trump’s activities, and that’ll cause him to go insane,” SuperDad64 says. At the same time, ClimateScientist explains that he’s on the way to where the llama was. (The voice makes it clear that although it’s a female avatar, the player is male.)

This, of course, is Fortnite — but not as you know it.

SuperDad64 is Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. The two younger voices belong to his 13-year-old sons. Henri Drake, a doctoral student in physical oceanography at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is ClimateScientist. The group is part of the Climate Fortnite Squad, perhaps the quirkiest science communication outfit in the land.

Fortnite is the world’s most popular video game, with hundreds of millions of players worldwide. (In August, a record 78.3 million played the game.) The premise is a lot like the Japanese movie Battle Royale: 100 people land on an island, only one person or team can win, and victory is obtained by murdering everyone else. To make things more exciting, a toxic storm slowly begins to compress the map so that the players are forced into the same areas. As in The Hunger Games, special caches, including crates and llamas, are dropped to encourage players to go to the same areas. It is fast-paced, fantastical, and utterly ludicrous — and, perhaps, a great platform to talk about climate change.

It’s especially difficult to talk about climate science in the US where wealthy interest groups, from the coal mining conglomerate Murray Energy to oil colossus ExxonMobil, have lobbied for decades to suggest climate modeling is inaccurate, and humans aren’t to blame. Sometimes, the lobbying message is different: action against climate change is too expensive, unnecessary, or impossible.

There’s another challenge: public apathy

There’s another challenge that’s proving difficult to surmount: public apathy. It could be said that too many scientists discuss climate change as an abstract issue that most ordinary people struggle to connect with. The result is that while around three-quarters of Americans believe climate change is real, just over half of the public think it’s mostly driven by human activity. Around 28 percent of Americans don’t believe climate change will personally affect them. Getting any real climate change legislation through Congress will require engaged voters, and most people aren’t there yet.

One reason scientists struggle to connect is because of their limited understanding of how to reach the public. Most scientists think that outreach is limited to a handful of options: public talks, social media, or blogging, says Katharine Hayhoe, a renowned climatologist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. But all those options require a public that already wants to engage in climate change discussion, which means they’re not the best way to reach the apathetic. Hayhoe has tried to branch out: knitting projects with patterns that display rising temperatures, for instance.

Then, unexpectedly, Fortnite entered her life.

Hayhoe had just recorded a webinar on climate change that proved to be particularly popular. A few days later, her son, Gavin, was playing Fortnite, and he uploaded a video to the streaming service Twitch. “The climate science webinar I uploaded to YouTube last week has 1k views,” a subsequent tweet from Hayhoe reads. “The Fortnite FPP video my eleven-year-old uploaded yesterday has 10k views.”

The climate science webinar I uploaded to @YouTube last week has 1k views. The Fortnite FPP video my eleven year old uploaded yesterday has 10k views. #keepingmereal #isthereaclimateversionoffortnite — Katharine Hayhoe (@KHayhoe) July 18, 2018

Gavin’s best Fortnite video got 18,000 views, he says, and he’s not even on the high end: some Fortnite streamers have over 16 million subscribers on YouTube. Hayhoe sensed an opportunity to make climate communication more fun for a much broader audience — crucially, an audience that wasn’t already invested in climate change.

One of the people who saw Hayhoe’s tweet was Henri Drake, who’d just started playing Fortnite. He had an epiphany: combining virtual battles with climate science was now, finally, a possibility. A serious gamer since he was eight, he was thrilled about the chance to, as he puts it, “make the time I’d spent gaming useful.” Drake quickly contacted Hayhoe via Twitter, and this past summer, the Climate Fortnite Squad was born.

Every Sunday for two hours, Drake jumps into Fortnite, bringing climate-themed guests — such as Dessler and Peter Griffith, the founding director of NASA’s Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Office — with him. While they play (and stream to Twitch), they chat about climate change. The three-month-old squad has set out to make climate change information accessible to Fortnite fans.

The setup is akin to a TV chat show with virtual gunplay: the squad hopes their streams will be watched by climate-curious gamers who can send in questions for them to answer midgame. The sessions are invite-only, so the chat is private until the streams are uploaded. Right now, the only thing the squad exchanges with other gamers is gunfire. You must view the videos in order to hear the climate banter.

Chatting about climate change while trying to murder other players in the game isn’t easy. In an early match, Dessler wonders whether telling people that the world has become a degree warmer since the Industrial Revolution is the best way to win hearts and minds compared to, say, talking about how climate change might impact crimes rates or incomes. Drake, about to reply, is distracted: he’s attempting to unload a shotgun into someone’s face. Soon after, they’re scrambling for resources, and Dessler and one of his sons argue about the timing for jumping from the Battle Bus. Climate chat doesn’t resume for some time.

“At first, we were really bad at it. We’d lose the conversation as soon as one of us got shot, so it took a while to get used to,” Drake says. “Now, we’d maybe drop the conversation for 40 seconds or so and engage in a super quick battle.”

During the same session, Drake talks about a study that estimated the effect that climate change would have on Hurricane Florence before it made landfall, as his avatar smashes through a house’s wall with a crowbar. In between all the resource gathering, llama hunting, and enemy takedowns, Dessler wonders what use such a study might have. “Attribution is really important, but not 72 hours before the storm hits,” he says.

Figuring out how to talk and play simultaneously took time — and learning gameplay took the squad even longer. But early death isn’t much of a concern for the Climate Squad since the Fortnite dead can speak without interruption, Drake says. They can, in theory, provide “surreal soliloquies of science.” In reality, however, when a squad member goes down, the deceased tend to spend their time shouting encouragements at the surviving members instead of talking about carbon footprints.

The difficulty of gameplay sometimes becomes clear when the Climate Squad invites guests to join them. Brian Kahn, a senior reporter from Earther, was invited to join the stream, so he played from his iPhone. Over the course of five games, “he went from dying instantly to, by the end, almost shooting at people,” Drake says.

The conversation only really flows when the group avoids other players, says squad member Christopher Gaulin, an Army captain and climate and security graduate student at Boston University. Climate discussion can also make the gaming muddled. Gaulin wanted to discuss how climate change can worsen military conflicts; as a result, he accidentally left all his in-game items behind. On one occasion, the team ended up losing track of the storm and perishing in it.

Chatting about climate change while trying to murder other players in the game isn’t easy

Dessler proved to be the biggest surprise. “Dessler and his sons are really good at Fortnite. I was surprised, to be honest. I was expecting him to suck,” Drake says. It’s all relative, of course. At one point, Dessler — who was talking about serving on the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) — was reminded by his somewhat-exasperated sons that green weapons aren’t as good as purple ones.

If it’s difficult for Climate Squad members to play well while they chat, it may also prove difficult to attract a large audience. What most people watch on Twitch streams is exemplary gameplay, and that has often eluded the squad.

But the scientists like the novelty of the medium, and they hope it might lead them to a brand-new audience. More than 60 percent of Fortnite players are ages 18 to 24, according to Verto Analytics, a market research firm. That younger audience is ideal for the Climate Squad’s purposes since these players will be most affected by climate change, Dessler says. And Fortnite gives the scientists an opportunity to bond with their audience over a shared activity, making it easier to connect, Hayhoe says.

But the area that might prove most fruitful for bonding with the public — interactions midgame with other players who are randomly placed on their squad — are still rare. At present, squad members are invited by Drake, and they tend to be science communicators or journalists who asked to add their name to a waiting list to join future matches.

Playing in a one solo session, Drake was randomly matched with a climate change denier in a small team. The denier spotted Drake’s ClimateScientist username, and asked: “Wait, so are you actually a climate scientist?”

“Wait, so are you actually a climate scientist?”

Yes, Drake said. That’s when the other player began to suggest that the Little Ice Age “disproves anthropogenic global warming” while misrepresenting temperature changes over time. The two argued while they fought for resources and sought shelter from the oncoming storm. Drake and the denier ended up being some of the last players left alive.

They played a few more games together, and Drake thought he was really getting somewhere. But when that player was added to the squad in a subsequent match, something changed. Maybe it was just that he was outnumbered by climate scientists or that he was suddenly being streamed live online, but he reverted to aggressively denying climate science.

It was, nevertheless, an “interesting insight into the psyche of a climate denier,” Drake says. He hopes that these online moments can help people realize that climate scientists are, well, human.

Drake hopes the squad will grow, though, at some point, the climate scientists may have to learn new games. Fortnite’s popularity won’t last forever. (Gavin suggests Overwatch as another platform for the scientists.)

For now, though, Fortnite is the squad’s home. At the end of a recent session, Drake, Gaulin, Dessler, and his sons were faced with several guided missile strikes. They took cover in an improvised wooden tower, dodged them with ease, and effortlessly took out a few more hostiles. Dessler scoffed as the enemy squad split up, calling it a “terrible strategy.” When it was just them and one other squad, Drake said he was “feeling it, guys.”

Their instincts are correct. Taking the high ground, ClimateScientist distracted the enemy as SuperDad64 and company rushed in and took out the second to last enemy player. Advancing as a collective on the last outpost, they gunned down the final player. The match was over: the squad achieved its very first victory.

Sadly, due to the intense coordination and concentration this feat took, the players forgot to talk about climate change at all during this climactic battle. But their win had a payoff: a clip of this stream has been viewed several thousand times, far more than their other videos. Now, they just have to learn to chat about climate science while they win.