By Marie Dealessandri

For the past seven years, UN-backed Playing for the Planet has steered the industry towards more environmentally conscious approaches, from its annual game jam to decarbonisation plans. With over 50 members committed to its mission to champion ecology in game creation, from major triple-A studios to trade organisations, the organisation has now published a guide about embedding environmental themes into game stories.

Called Beyond the Endgame: How Climate and Nature Enhance Game Narrative, it was written in collaboration with Context Collaborative (behind the Hollywood Climate Summit) and NRDC's Rewrite the Future.

"The opportunity is really [strong] for games when it comes to exploring this topic in a way that film and TV are limited from, just due to the [interactive] nature of the medium," project manager Alex Avard tells Knowledge.

The guidance is rooted in Playing for the Planet's highly popular Green Game Jam, which encourages studios to create "green activations": a new piece in the game to engage playerbases with environmental topics.

"In speaking to our members, I felt there was an opportunity to do more beyond green game design – storytelling came up quite a lot," Avard explains. "This was twinned with the fact that, in film and TV, a lot of work is going on looking at how to explore, depict, reflect, and engage on climate topics in a way that's healthy and good practice. You're already seeing the fruits of that in things like Don't Look Up. There have been good examples in games that come up organically, but nothing particularly tangible. So we felt like that was a good area for us to step into as an evolution of our mission."

Primarily, the guide targets storytellers – writers, narrative designers, creative directors – to help them understand the questions they can ask themselves about what their game is saying about the environment. The idea isn't to push climate themes into an unrelated narrative, but to land on a depiction that's organic and aligned with the existing creative vision.

Avard compares the approach to the Bechdel test: simple questions you can ask yourself about how your story presents the topic in an authentic way (which you can easily find in the guidance's executive summary).

"It's about looking at the 'green areas' in their game and thinking about what they can do to present them in a more holistic way. The first [aspect] is world building. We've noticed that a lot of games – particularly future-facing speculative fiction – present the future as an inevitable dystopia. Not only that, they trivialise the dystopia to the point where it's just a playground to be enjoyed rather than feared. This approach can be a good alarm bell to get people to wake up to our current trajectory as a planet, but when they're over-abundant, people feel like they have no power to change that trajectory.

"What we recommend is getting people to start thinking about the futures that we want to live in, and how we can put players in them in a way that makes them feel like they can be agents toward generating those futures. That's a profound and ambitious suggestion for developers, but we wanted to put it out there for those in the early conceptualisation stages of their games."

At a smaller scale, the guidance encourages developers to scrutinise their systems and mechanics, as well as how they support underlying narrative about their world. One example given by Avard is Another Crab's Treasure, which uses microplastics as in-game currency.

"There's not a huge deal made about it – it’s just there. I think that is what can bypass the idea of being preachy, when you just have a system in the game that supports the world. This gets people thinking: 'What does it say about that world if the most abundant item to be used as a currency is microplastics?'

"We try to have this sliding scale of ambition: from really big-picture stuff that can inspire others to feel like they're agents of change in the real world, to the micro-systems that can help nudge people and get them thinking about the world around them."

Avard highlights common assumptions about climate fiction not being commercially viable. This has of course been proven wrong in the game space by successes such as Sony's Horizon franchise, or Final Fantasy VII – which Avard describes as "the most explicitly environmentally charged game," with 15 million units sold.

"[Another] example is Wooga, a Berlin-based studio that made June's Journey," Avard adds. "[It] ostensibly doesn't have anything to do with [climate change] but they participated in the jam last year and the activation did really well for them, to the point where they pointed to it as a key driver of revenue in their quarterly results."

Playing for the Planet also wants to dispel the misconception that if studios want to say something about climate in their games, it has to be explicit eco-fiction.

"Our hope is that we destigmatise climate storytelling in games. I feel like there is this sense that it's a risk for studios to engage in this work, but we want it to feel commonplace. There are so many games saying something about climate and nature, without even meaning to. All it requires is awareness on the studio's part to amplify that. There’s an untapped audience we could be accessing – and film and TV are proving that it's ready to see more of those stories."