Green Mediography

Global Warming (Factorio)

The Factorio base game already tentatively addresses ecological impact. By default, it treats environmental degradation as a localized trigger for hostile environmental reactions, i.e. if players pollute, trees absorb the pollution until they die, and the local fauna (called ‘biters’) evolve and attack the factory walls. This frames ecology in adversarial terms, i.e. the planet

The Edge of Water

BigMood’s indie adventure The Edge of Water avoids mechanics of environmental exploitation for gameplay systems built around stewardship, multi-species kinship, and ecological harmony. The game works most visibly by defamiliarizing our relationship with water and marine life, offering a serene but also notably romanticized experience of human-nature relations. The game’s lore states that long ago,

Machine Dreams: Rainforest

Refik Anadol’s Machine Dreams: Rainforest, the headlining debut exhibition at Anadol’s Los Angeles museum Dataland, is a highly ambitious attempt at using AI and immersive projection techniques in the service of sustainability and climate communication. The exhibit aims to prove to skeptics that machine learning can offer something radically different from generic ‘slop’ by dedicating

Climate Cooldown

Climate Cooldown is a cooperativeCooperation This is a dummy entry about cooperation. educational board game designed for 2–4 players (though the game is scalable for larger groups in classrooms). Over the course of up to five rounds, players must coordinate their actions to slash global emissions, build green energy grids, and heal damaged ecosystems before

Post Growth Toolkit: The Game

Developed by the art and research collective Disnovation.org, Post Growth Toolkit: The Game is a tactical intervention into how we conceptualize the climate crisis. Most commercial environmental simulation games like SimCity or more recent ‘green-tech’ city builders operate within a neoliberal framework, challenging players to optimize resources, deploy eco-friendly upgrades, and manage carbon metrics, all

Thrifty Business

Thrifty Business by Spellgarden Games is not explicitly framed as an ‘ecogame’ – neither by players nor the developers – but it has some interesting characteristics for climate communication and sustainable behavior as it revisits the recently popularized shopkeeper simulation (sub) genre but focuses instead on topics like community care and material circularity. Rather than

Silt

While often categorized by players primarily within the horror genre, the indie game Silt foregrounds environment and ecological systems as central components of its gameplay. Rather than treating the setting as a passive backdrop, Silt embeds ecological themes into its formal design structures, shaping player interaction through environmental constraints and engagement with nonhuman entities. Silt

Plastic Island

Plastic Island, developed by the Indonesia-based “Ecogames” collective, is an educational board game that thematizes combating plastic pollution. Participants clean and upcycle trash, enhancing the ocean’s health; the game (like every title designed by the Ecogames collective) is created by local artisans in Bali, at least partly from upcycled materials like recycled wood, canvas, and

Mulaka

Developed by the Mexican studio Lienzo, Mulaka is a 3D action-adventure game that focuses on Indigenous storytelling. Set in a poly-poly rendition of the landscapes of northern Mexico, the game draws from the mythology, culture, and worldview of the Rarámuri (Tarahumara) people. While players might approach it as a Zelda-inspired action game, Mulaka uses mechanics,

Future Energy

Future Energy, designed by Emanuele Ornella and published by Queen Games, is officially part of Queen Games’ Green Planet series, a line of games explicitly dedicated to themes of sustainability and ecological transformation. In most traditional resource-management games, players build factories on blank spaces or ‘extract’ resources from the in-game environment. Future Energy presents a

Canopy: Evergreen

While its predecessor, Canopy, focused on the lush, dense tropical rainforest, Evergreen shifts the focus to a temperate forest ecosystem. In a functioning ecosystem, plants and animals rely on each other to survive and reproduce. Evergreen models the interdependence of trophic levels via a mechanical pairing system between the forest habitat and its wildlife. Players

Circular City – the board game

Conceived and developed through a cross-border partnership between the municipality of Prato (Italy), the municipality of Taichung (Taiwan), and ARCO (Action Research for Co-Development) at the University of Florence, “Circular City – the board game” is an educational, non-profit serious game designed to model the real-world complexities of transitioning toward a sustainable future. Rather than

Habitactics

Habitactics is a ‘serious’ educational puzzle game developed by Zachtronics as part of the Amplify digital curriculum (https://amplify.com/). Rather than adopting Zachtronics’ traditional complex engineering or programming mechanics, for which the developer has accumulated a ‘cult following’, Habitactics uses a modified Match-3 puzzle mechanic to model trophic levels, food webs, and ecosystem stability. The game

Beyond Blue

Developed by E-Line Media, the creators behind Never Alone in partnership with BBC Studios, Beyond Blue (2020) draws heavy inspiration from the footage and eco-philosophies of Blue Planet II. The game frames its environmental representation through a near-future narrative starring Mirai, a deep-sea biologist leading a small, high-tech research team. Beyond Blue presents a relationship

David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet

“My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future”. The British filmmaker and naturalist, David Attenborough, has devoted his career to educating people about nature and, more recently, the climate crisis. The 2020 documentary David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet weights in on the climate crisis by aiming to subvert the traditional nature documentary

STRATEGIES is funded by the European Union under grant agreement No 101094373 and the UK Research and Innovation. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or UK Research and Innovation. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them..