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!
Not so extreme
I agree that this game is a very simple, and possibly distracting, view of climate change. But I disagree with your political views. I think you are confusing a class discussion (big companies making too much money) with a climate discussion (reducing carbon emissions). The main complaint I see is that all the profits from fixing climate change go to big companies.
I am sorry to play the devil here, but I don't think you can get around that. They may be evil, but large companies get things done (when it is profitable). If converting to cleaner energy can be made profitable, I think that is a good thing.
As for the question of who makes money, of course large companies are going to make money. How else could they be convinced to comply? Personally, I would like to see some stronger anti-trust action, but as for increases in fuel prices, isn't that exactly what we want? People don't stand up and change their habits on a whim, they need a reason. Increasing the cost of fuels, even if only indirectly, should do just that.
Maybe I missed the point, but I feel like both sides of your argument have now been presented to me in an overly simplistic fashion, which just fills me with useless knowledge and anger. If I could get a more informative, less dooms-day and less cutesy explanation (in game or video or any other form) I would be much happier.
My criticism isn't that
My criticism isn't that companies can make money fixing climate change, its that they'll be making money in a way that cannot, by definition, fix climate change. An alternative that might work would be to introduce an equity market in renewable energy capacity or in grass-based farming co-ops and reducing/sinking carbon from the bottom up, rather than imposing a debt-market with gov-corporate loopholes to cap carbon from the top-down. Markets exist to transfer risk and, I've heard, facilitate investment, the carbon credit markets only serve to transfer the risk that at the price you paid for the credit, you won't be able to redeem it at par come tax-time. It in no way transfers the risk of environmental catastrophe, that's absurd.
Anyway I'm sure Frasca doesn't think of himself as inadvertently abetting a grand scam, what I'm emphasizing is that we need our games, of both persuasive and market meta-genres, to dig into some real processes that facilitate critical discussion of solutions. Cap-n-trade does not do that, it just screws the average person over to profit bankers and polluters.