Green Media Mediography – Utrecht University

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

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

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

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

Reduce, Reuse, Revolt

From the itch.io website: “The news doesn’t even mention it anymore. The rising temperatures, mass migrations, dirty water, acid rain–none of it. It’s all bought and paid for by corporations, those entities which press down upon the people, grinding them into the pavement until nothing but a husk is left. Everyone is angry, sick, and

Minecraft Ecology (Minecraft)

The Minecraft Ecology Mod simulates environmental and ecological phenomena by turning the player’s core survival behavior into an active driver of pollution, which then triggers realistic environmental feedback loops. Rather than treating the environment as the usual infinite, consequence-free resource sandbox, the mod tracks pollution dynamically across the map, forcing players to think about their

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

Earth Rising: 20 Years to Transform Our World

Earth Rising: 20 Years to Transform Our World is a cooperative board game for 1 to 6 players. Each player takes on a role such as activist, scientist, politician, or innovator, working together to achieve sustainability before time runs out. The game lasts for twenty rounds, each representing a year. During this time, players must

JNR’s Climate Balance (Civilization VI)

JNR’s Climate Balance frames the climate crisis as a high-stakes, delayed-impact catastrophe rather than the relatively quick and comparatively easily manageable gameplay cycle in the original Civilization VI: Gathering Storm expansion. It shifts the focus from immediate consequences to hitting later in the game but disproportionately harder, i.e. the window for prevention is wider, but

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

Monopoly

Monopoly. Elizabeth J. Magie and Charles Darrow. Hasbro, 1935. 2-8 players | 60-180 mins | Age 8+ Monopoly is a game that sees players take the role of land owners who buy and develop land, growing their property portfolios and financially ruining their rivals in an often bitter battle of financial domination. Its rules are

Eternagram

In order to measure individual propensity to climate communication, a team led by the City University of Hong Kong created a text-adventure game that allows players to explore a non-Earth world guided by a ChatGPT-based in-game character. The researchers collected in-game dialogues of players conversing freely with the character, and player choices from designed game

Posthuman Saga

Gordon Calleja. Art by Edu Valls. Mighty Boards & Taverna Ludica Games, 2019. 1–4 players | 90–180 minutes | Age 14+ Game Review by Diana Dörfling Posthuman Saga is a post-apocalyptic adventure game where you take on the role of one of the last human survivors, sent out from the safety of the last human

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a 2023 action-adventure game developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft. The game is part of the Avatar franchise, and was released for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S on December 7, 2023.

Earth 2053: Tipping Point

In the board game Earth 2053: Tipping Point, 1-4 players represent countries that work together to prevent a global climate catastrophe. The main scoring is based on a physical seesaw board where "prevention" tokens are placed on one side and "pollution" tokens on the other.

Dune (2021)

Dune (2021) is the second movie adaption of Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel from 1965. The movie follows young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) as his family takes stewardship of the desert planet Arrakis and is dragged into a war for the valuable resource known as “spice”, which makes intergalactic travel possible.

Energy Czar

Energy Czar is an early educational simulation game where the president of the United States gives the player full power to guide the country through a 1980s energy crisis. The player has full control over eight energy resources: coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, hydroelectric power, solar power, wind power and biomass. It is possible to promote

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

MSP Challenge Board Game

Lazzaro Felice

“This is the tale of a meeting between Lazzaro, a young peasant so good that he is often mistaken for simple-minded, and Tancredi, a young nobleman cursed by his imagination. Life in their isolated pastoral village Inviolata is dominated by the terrible Marchesa Alfonsina de Luna, the queen of cigarettes. A loyal bond is sealed