Can video games raise environmental awareness?

“The planet is dying, Cloud! “, shouts Barret, one of the player’s companions. The small troop of heroes is about to blow up a factory of the Shinra Electric Power Company, a sort of virtual equivalent of Areva. A strong ecological act, which opens Final Fantasy VII, a role-playing game reissued on March 26 on Switch, originally released on PlayStation in… 1997.

The return of this video game monument underlines an unknown truth: while it is readily reduced to a low-politicized consumerist medium, the world of pixels has long been plagued by environmental issues. A point stressed by Alenda Chang, associate professor of cinema and media at the University of Santa Barbara (California), author of Playing Nature (to be published in 2019):

“For previous generations, video games were more of a subculture than a culture, but we have entered an era where they have overtaken literature, cinema and even television. However, like any cultural object, games give us indications of our progress, whether on the role of men and women in society or on the visibility of ecological problems. »

Two decades for a rapprochement

Commercial video games and modern political ecology share the same date of birth, 1971. But it took two decades for the former to become interested in the latter. The turning point comes after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a context of the end of the Cold War, the awareness linked to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the debates on the ozone layer and the first international conferences on the planet aroused general mobilization. "The period between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s is a moment similar to the one we are going through", resituates Alexis Vrignon, associate researcher at the Center for Research in International and Atlantic History and author of The Birth of Ecology politics in France (PUF, 2017).

Almost overnight, the usually very innocent action games are colored with environmental concerns. Thus of Sonic the Hedgehog, in 1991. Its initial scenario took again the good old string of the princess to be saved. But under the influence of two of its leaders, Diane Fornasier and Michealene Cristini Risley, the Sega of America studio redirects the scenario towards an ecological theme: the protection of animals.

Green issues ran through many other productions at the time: protection of the seabed in Ecco the Dolphin (1992), defense of the poles and the tropical forest in Awesome Possum (1993), hunt for tourists destroying the planet in ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron (1993), repairing a pollution vacuum machine in Boogerman (1994), etc.

Some productions even make an unexpected art of subversion. Like Global Gladiators, a 1993 advertising game stamped with the McDonald's logo, which confronts the heroes with polluting machines, oil mutants or even selective sorting tests. “Greenwashing”? Not really. This green positioning is the idea of ​​its designer David Perry, already author of the aptly named Captain Planet, who slips it into the game without the knowledge of the burger giant, then mired in a lawsuit against environmental activists. "McDo's pundits were mad with rage when they discovered Global Gladiators," says Régis Monterrin, co-author of several video game history books published by Pix'n Love and Omake Books.

A wave without a future

The popularity of these first "green" games gradually faded in the middle of the decade, before almost disappearing at the dawn of the new millennium. In 2002, Super Mario Sunshine, in which the plumber turns into a tar-like stain cleaner, is the last of them. When it was released, it was considered to be a game that was too colorful, too moralizing, far from the new concerns of players, who had become adults and were less receptive to ecological discourse perceived as infantilizing.

It is true that in a dozen years these leaping, light and consensual action games have only overlooked the problem. “In retrospect, these titles are entertaining and their focus on the environment is commendable. But we must admit that their point of view on sustainable development and environmental policies is rather simplistic”, regrets Colin Milburn, author of Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life (Gamers, hackers and technogenic life, untranslated).

“When these first ecological games appeared, we had the idea of ​​protecting or repairing nature, as if the pollution came from outside. There are also very identified bad polluters, who just have to be beaten to solve the problem. There is no analysis of the systemic nature of the environmental issue,” confirms Alexis Vrignon. However, this dimension is not absent from “video game” production. But it is in another register – management, and on other types of platforms – personal computers – that we find it exploited.

Management games, a systemic approach to the problem

“The level of pollution is very high! Dr. Wright ignites, as if the green color of his erect hair leaves some doubt about the quality of the air. Since 1989, the player of Sim City must, in an attempt to satisfy the citizens of his city, monitor very closely the level of pollution of this one.

“The games of Will Wright [its creator] reflect his interest in the functioning of systems. He himself looked into popular scientific hypotheses at the time, ”recalls Alenda Chang. Like the Gaia hypothesis – the idea that the planet is like a self-regulating organism.

This curiosity then crosses several complex video game simulations, such as SimEarth and Balance of Planet (developed on the occasion of World Earth Day), or the famous series Civilization, in which the choice of an overly productive economy will, for example, reinforce the greenhouse effect, making certain squares on the world map almost unusable.

“What is interesting in these games is that we are on a computer and not on a console: the public is considered to be more adult, more mature, notes Alexis Vrignon. But this maturity does not imply a political or militant approach: we take on pollution in an almost playful way. It is an element that we integrate into the game, among others. »

She thus becomes an ally, in Starcraft (1998), where the organic waste generated by the zerg aliens makes it possible to extend her base. In Civilization: Call to Power (1999), the player can pollute enemy cities in an attempt to politically destabilize or destroy them. The same year, Alpha Centauri allows an even weaker strategy: voluntarily cause a greenhouse effect... which will raise the level of the sea, and will eliminate the competing civilizations installed on the coasts.

This cynicism does not prevent them from being interesting, points out Colin Milburn:

“Many post-apocalyptic titles like the Fallout series point to the environmental issues of damaged worlds, along with other political and technological issues. They show how interconnected everything is. »

The anti-heroism of the 2000s

The 2000s saw the question of the fate of the planet almost completely disappear from mainstream productions. If it remains, it is in a more veiled way, through new iconoclastic proposals.

In Katamari Damacy (2004), in a diversion of the society of overconsumption, the player piles up objects and debris in a ball ravaging everything in its path. In Shadow of the Colossus (2005), to resurrect his beloved, a Faustian knight puts to death giants who are one with nature. These titles are rarely considered ecological, but, for Colin Milburn, they are formidable in terms of awareness:

“Perversely enough, they blame the player for the destruction of the natural world. They suggest that we video gamers are part of the environmental problem – like everyone else. These games don't rely on clichés like saving the world through heroic actions, instead they show that our decisions can lead to devastation and ruin. »

Omerta and counter-narratives in the industry

Sector giants, such as Sony, are however very reluctant to promote this level of reading. It must be said that its range of PlayStation consoles gave its name to the deadly conflict that is being played out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over access to the gold, coltan, cobalt or even tantalum mines, necessary for their construction as to that of many high-tech products.

So, it is a new branch of video games, “serious gaming”, which assumes the role of pedagogy. Produced by NGOs, public institutions, militant studios or committed companies, Energyville (2008), Clim'City (2008), Power Planets (2011) attempt to raise awareness of energy saving and urban management "green" when the video game manufacturers turned away from it.

Some were into “green washing”, such as Planet Green Game, financed by Starbucks, a brand that is quick to communicate about its sense of responsibility but accused by the NGO Stand.earth of cutting down a million trees a year to produce its non-recyclable cups. Conversely, others have seized on the unspoken in the sector, such as the memorable Phone Story (2011): one of the mini-games consists of extracting coltan, an ore used in the manufacture of smartphones, by children from an underdeveloped country. Vitriol criticism of Apple, it is no longer available on the AppStore.

“These games reflected the growing concern for sustainable development – ​​even if their intentions were perhaps a little too didactic”, nuances Colin Milburn. Not playful enough, they often went unnoticed.

An ambivalent relationship with nature

Since the mid-2010s, thanks to the awareness of the reality of global warming, independent developers have finally taken up the torch.

But the relationship between video games and the environment remains ambiguous. In most popular productions that put the player in touch with nature, it is above all a question of survival, whether in Don't Starve (2013), No Man's Sky (2016) or Subnautica (2018). The appropriation of resources then remains the only way to extend one's game, even if they are rare, regrets Alexis Vrignon.

“It’s the classic American cliché of the authentic man who forms himself with the raw nature, “wildness”. Survival games are part of this trend: the player must love this nature, be ecstatic, but also be wary of its dangers, and if not dominate it, at least take advantage of it. We are as much in a relationship of cooperation as of antagonism. But maybe this is the only possible…”

"Green games"

In recent years, genuine "green games", as some American researchers have already dubbed them, have nonetheless appeared, still on the independent scene. They explore the relationship between man and the planet in Fate of the World (2011), Little Inferno (2012), Mountain (2014), and especially the most quoted of them, Eco (2018), a construction game green.

Some offer original, fun and educational interactions. Like Factorio (2014), an independent game in which the level of pollution is indexed to the speed at which enemies appear. The environmental message is extremely effective: by polluting, man himself chooses to take up the difficulty. In Oxygen Not Included (2017), the question of the purity of the air is also crucial: at the head of a human colony having found refuge inside a drifting astral body, the player must take care to not to let its little people suffocate under the weight of its own production of CO₂.

“A number of developers continue to imagine ways to convey green ideas through video games,” explains Colin Milburn. And even though electronics are a big part of our petroculture today, which is unsustainable, some games recognize this irony and try to advocate for something better, encouraging us to believe that change is possible. »

Video games are a hobby with a heavy impact. According to a 2014 study by the Journal of Industrial Ecology, the carbon footprint of video game sales is catastrophic: each copy sold generated the equivalent of 21 to 27.5 kg of CO₂ . The industry would have generated, in 2013, eight million kilos of plastic.