Climate change continues to demand solutions, but a unified global response remains elusive. Even among those who want to address the issue, debate about how rages on. We could cut consumption, increase alternative energy production, develop fusion power, implement population control, seed the atmosphere, block the sun… For every proposed solution, there is a counter-argument, an opportunity cost, or unintended consequences. And those don’t even begin to address the questions of how climate change itself will actually manifest – what kinds of changes and disasters will we have to mitigate with new technology, mass migration, or cultural and behavioral re-training?
Exploring all these interacting forces and possibilities might be a bit overwhelming, but if it also gets your creative, geoengineering juices flowing, there’s a video game you might want to look into. An Oxford based game design studio called Red Redemption will soon release Fate of the World, in which you as the player control a global environmental agency and play out the next 200 years:
Fate of the World is a dramatic global strategy game that puts all our futures in your hands. The game features a dramatic set of scenarios based on the latest science covering the next 200 years. You must manage a balancing act of protecting the Earth.s resources and climate versus the needs of an ever-growing world population, who are demanding ever more food, power, and living space.
The head of Oxford’s Climate Dynamics Group, Dr. Myles Allen has contributed to the climate modeling the game uses and Red Redemption are making a conscious effort to design this game as an engaging educational tool. By providing access to academic-quality climactic models in a strategic game format, they hope to better inform the public about the challenges climate change presents, as well as get people focused on finding solutions based on the best evidence available.
