Green Media Mediography – Utrecht University

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of the most popular Nintendo game series. You play as Link in the open world of Hyrule and try to find Princess Zelda, who mysteriously disappeared. Along the way, you fight enemies, solve puzzles, explore different regions, collect materials you find in the world to

Netelland

Netelland, created by composer Eva Beunk and installation artist Adrian Gutzelnig in collaboration with the Gaudeamus Festival and Stichting Op Wacht, is an immersive, site-specific performance set in the speculative year 2169. Staged at Fort Maarsseveen in Maarssen near Utrecht, which in the performance’s narrative has become an isolated island due to climate change and

Spirit Island

Spirit Island is widely recognized not just as a well designed cooperative strategy game but as a deliberate counter-narrative to the neo-colonial exploration and exploitation gameplay inherent in classic games like Catan. By shifting the player’s perspective from the colonizing “pioneer” to the island itself, the game presents human-nature relations in an unusual and inspiring

Hero of the Kingdom (series)

While not explicitly framed as an ‘ecogame’, the Hero of the Kingdom series (developed by Lonely Troops) offers an interesting and sometimes surprising representation of human-nature relations in a fantastical but grounded setting. It lacks political urgency or systemic, macro-level climate simulations but succeeds on a more micro level, training players to closely observe its

Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Heart of the Forest

Released in 2020 by the Polish indie studio Different Tales (co-founded by former The Witcher designers), Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Heart of the Forest is a narrative-driven visual novel RPG. The game’s setting is its most important feature: the real-world Białowieża Forest on the border of Poland and Belarus. It is one of the last

Blue Planet (TTRPG series)

Originally published in 1997 by Biohazard Games and recently revived with Blue Planet: Recontact, Blue Planet is widely considered a pioneering and successful example of ‘hard’ eco-science fiction in the tabletop RPG space. The game is set in 2199 on Poseidon, an alien waterworld that humanity has fled to following a devastating, 70-year ecological collapse

Eco Lifestyle Careers and NPCs (The Sims 4)

In the base game of The Sims 4 withe the Eco Lifestyle expansion, the environmental systems sometimes feel more like a top-down macro-level simulation. The ecological footprint meter and regulatory NPCs like the Eco Inspector reflect the state of the players’s lot but don’t afford much input or self-expression. Gauntlet101010’s Eco Lifestyle Careers and NPCs

Laundry Day (The Sims 4)

The Sims 4: Laundry Day Stuff pack emerged out of a community vote originally pitched under the working title “Eco Living”. While the more systemic, macro-level mechanics like politics (e.g. via Neighborhood actions plans) and carbon footprints were later realized in the Eco Lifestyle expansion pack, Laundry Day tackles sustainability at a more local, domestic

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 cooperative 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 the planet hits a tipping point of

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

Heatwave

HeatWave by Perimeter Games, already announced in 2020 and potentially in development limbo, is a non-linear sandbox guerrilla group simulator that frames global temperatur escalation not just as an environmental disaster, but as a catalyst for severe geopolitical and humanitarian breakdown. Set in Alaska in the year 2080, the game uses a blend of survival,

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

Darkwood

Darkwood can be classified as an eco-horror game; while most survival games feed into an anthropocentric fantasy, dropping the player into the wilderness to chop down trees, exploit resources, and build a ‘fortress’, Darkwood rejects this gameplay framework. It presents a human-nature relationship where nature is not a passive backdrop to be exploited, but an

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