World leaders are meeting in Copenhagen to talk about climate change, and generating a lot of carbon emissions in order to do so fashionably. It is in this context that we look at Gonzalo Frasca's newsgame on the subject, from earlier this year. Global Warming is a fairly simple Flash where you control a hot air balloon picking up and dropping objects in order to limit carbon emissions and prevent the penguin from becoming lonely.
Frasca was one of the first designers to push the button (or envelope?) of what games can do in terms of political persuasion. I thought his game September 12th was a real benchmark in game design, I played it when I was 18 and my design scope as well as concept of how the world really works were just being cracked out of the shell of fast food, cheap gameplay and Christianity - which combine into an Easter Egg hunt. September 12th demonstrated that you could balance timing and splash radius to create a feedback loop that confounds any amount of skille, it demonstrated that you could subvert the assumptions of a game to make a political point, though Greg had a differing perspective (you'll need to scroll down 3/4th of the page).
Global Warming does not seem to have the same lever of procedural rhetoric that Frasca's earlier work did, it works as a casual arcade game whose balance begins easy enough and becomes rather tight as the difficulty increases, you'll find yourself swinging to cap that last factory right as the ice caps buckle and the world is seconds away from flooding. But still, maybe I'm just kind of messed up in the head, I try to find meaning in it. What I come away with is a concern that this game is, no doubt unintentionally, abetting with distraction a scam that will not only not-solve our climate problems but enrich the usual suspects. The game's dynamic hinges on a cartoonish abstraction of what a future carbon-neutralized economy might portent, factories producing bikes, smog-filters and... firemen, and these things then saving the environment, cleaning up our transportation, and cleaning up the factories, including the factories that make the smog-filters. If you don't know much about the loopholes in this carbon credit game, here's a cheeky video.
By suggesting that rapid replacements of parts of our existing infrastructure, using cleantech-upgrades which in this case are funded by your clicks, but in the real world are funded by a great scam-o-la, I fear that Frasca may be drawing attention away from the real solutions. The music and graphics are lush, calming, like one of those wind turbine commercials British Petroleum was putting out in 2008. Games are good at demonstrating processes that imply arguments, perhaps, but they're just as good at making you feel complacent. If only we had more money, perhaps we could make more of the prior, we'll have to do work-for-hire for advergame clients and save up!
