09 | Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure – Green Media Mediography

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.

Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction

Be it evolution and apocalypse during the Golden Age of Science Fiction or the imperialism of New Wave Sci-Fi: Ecological themes in science fiction have always been present within the genre. This collection of essays touches on the connection between sci-fi works and the environmental changes we have been and are currently experiencing ourselves. By

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

Indie City-Building Games Finally Reckon With Climate Change

City- and empire-builders like Cities: Skylines totally simplify the climate crisis, if they address it at all. A new wave of titles are far more complex.

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

Explained: The Future of Meat

Explained is a Netflix documentary series, tackeling different topics each week. This episode delves into meat production and explores sustainable alternatives.

Okja

Okja (2017) is a film made by filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho, who is also known for his environmental film Snowpiercer (2013). Okja tells the story of Mija and her genetically modified pet animal, Okja. Okja was created by the Mirando Corporation, who created a line of superpigs to try to solve world hunger and meat shortages.

F1: driving towards a greener future

The Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) has announced that Formula 1 is aiming to field a generation of a new power unit by 2025. Since growing concerns about the impact of human activity on the environment emerged from fans and critics, the FIA has launched an initiative to develop a 100% sustainable fuel. Their aim

Surviving Mars: Green Planet

“Build a sustainable colony in space.” The premise of Surviving Mars (2018) is simple, but the challenges presented in the game are not; the Red Planet is unforgiving and full of dangers. Your colonists are only safe in glass domes; both oxygen and water have to be gathered, refined and stored in metal structures; food

The Monolith of Inhumanity

The Monolith of Inhumanity is a music album which frames climate change and environmental disaster as inevitable and man-made. This album therefore challenges the current academic perspective on music as green media, as the belief is that music is too engrained in consumer capitalism to engage is any meaningful activism.

Costing the Earth

Costing the Earth is a environmental radio broadcast that airs on BBC Radio 4. The series describes itself as "Fresh ideas from the sharpest minds working toward a cleaner, greener planet".

The handmaids tale

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian tale has re-entered the public more than three decades after its 1985 premiere, thanks to a praised Hulu series. The red dress and white hat have become recognisable in resistance movements all across the world as a result of recent legal crackdowns on reproductive freedoms. However, Atwood’s story contains more than just

Sleepless / Repeat Until Death

A Mongolian miner takes his sick daughter away from the heavily polluted city to see the shaman. Upon finding a new home with the reindeer herders in the forest, he learns that this world too, is changing. To convey the message of global warming, the music video incorporates the image and tale of the native

Avatar

Avatar is a science-fiction film set on the distant moon Pandora, where a team of humans has come establish a mining colony. The film uses the image of the Na'vi and their relationship with nature to put forward a message of environmentalism.

Fairphone

Fairphone is a company that builds smartphones using responsibly sourced material. The project offers a way to study the Empire of digital culture through a decolonial lens that addresses the longer histories of oppression and exploitation.