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

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

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

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

Immergency AR

Sliced Bread Animation, together with the Immergency team, created a collaborative game in AR that educates players on climate change policies, and the importance of working together to reduce carbon emissions as part of a XR competition. The game works as a virtual ‘escape room’, in which players go through a series of puzzles and

Last War (Greenification Mechanic in Season 3)

Greenification is the core mechanic for revealing Desert Artifacts in Season 3 of the mobile strategy game Last War. It is possible to greenify map tiles starting from day 3 of week 1 as soon as a city gets captured; captured cities will be surrounded by green tiles and selecting any location adjacent to those

Lumino City

Lumino City is a BAFTA award-winning puzzle game that addresses the topic of renewable energy. The game represents renewable energy as a functional necessity within the gameplay. To progress, the player must learn how natural forces like wind, water and the sun can be harnessed to power a small community. For example, in one early

Sustainability City (Minecraft Education)

The lesson pack “Sustainability City” for Minecraft Education frames sustainability as a process integrating elements like urban planning, consumer behavior, and responsible resource management. It does not fucs only on environmental protection, but on enhancing economic modes of production and quality of life by reducing waste and using renewable energy.The mod breaks down sustainability into

Carbon City Zero

Carbon City Zero: World Edition is a collaborative deck-building game for 1-4 people (aged 8+), in which players develop a sustainable city by greening transport, transforming industries, getting citizens on board, and showing world leaders how it’s done. Each player starts with an identical deck, buying additional cards from a shared marketplace to create a

Mission Amazonia

Adapted from BGG: “Mission Amazonia is a strategic deckbuilding board game, in which players are part of a Brazilian team of rainforest protectors. From their headquarters (e.g. Pôrto Velho) they go on different missions north and south of the Amazon to curb the illegal exploitation of the rainforest. The poaching of exotic animal species, the

Daybreak

Daybreak is a cooperative board game that models technological, political and social responses to climate change. It was designed by Pandemic creator Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace. Throughout the game, the Earth’s temperature begins to rise. Simultaneously, players must contend with crisis events, such as droughts, wildfires, rising sea levels, each exacerbated by Earth’s rising

Beecarbonize

The free-to-play strategy game Beecarbonize challenges players do plan and choreograph climate policies and sustainable sociotechnical developments. Players can prioritize between industrial reforms, nature conservation or people initiatives. From the Steam page: “There are many ways to solve climate change and reduce pollution. But saving the planet is not an easy task. The more carbon