The 2025 edition of the Climate Game Jam starts on Friday! We’ll kickoff at 6 PM Pacific with a keynote presentation from Isabel Carrera Zamanillo (Front and Centered).
The jam goes from June 13-July 18, and all skill levels are welcome! Last year we had 500 participants and nearly 50 games were created!
https://www.indiecade.com/climate-jam/
EarthGames would most definitely consider Polar Science Day to be a success!! Lots of the kids really loved the games, and lots of parents loved that their kids were learning at the same time. We got to teach over 100 different kids about albedo (Soot Out at the 0oC Corral) and permafrost (Erode Runner) and it was beyond a fulfilling experience. We set up QR codes for families to play the Soot Out game on their own devices, but it quickly became the way we directed parents to find the rest of the games.
We had a ton of fun, decided the Pacific Science Center may be the greatest thing ever, and have an intense sense of fulfillment after seeing so many kids learn important topics. Teaching may be the most important thing in life!
We’ll be back at Pacific Science Center for Polar Science Day! It’s April 12, 10 AM to 5 PM, and we’ll be showing our Arctic Trilogy Games. Hope to see you there!
Also stay tuned for info about this year’s Climate Jam on Earth Day!
Our annual Climate Game Jam, co-organized with IndieCade, kicked off one month ago… and it’s only now coming to an end! Instead of the weekend jams we used to host at Pacific Science Center or at UW, or our recent annual week-long virtual jams, this year we’re using the Greenlight Jam format. There are different week-long sprints, including ideation, prototyping, production, and marketing.
It’s turning out to be a huge success! Over 400 jammers have registered, and 67 prototypes were submitted during the second week sprint (59 are playable here). The amount of talent and creativity displayed among the jammers is just incredible! We can’t wait to see the final submissions soon.
In other news, a climate change version of the classic board game Catan was recently released, called Catan: New Energies. Grist recently interviewed Dargan for their article about the game, who said “It’s just more evidence that people have climate change at the top of their minds now… There’s demand for ways to think about it, deal with it, in fun ways.”
There were so many amazing games made in the IndieCade/Games for Our Future/UW EarthLab Climate Game Jam 2022! In honor of the Science Friday segment about the jam airing today, we made a twitter thread about 12 of our favorites, in such a wide range of genres. Hope you have as much fun with these games as we have!
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsIn honor of the @scifri segment on the Climate Game Jam airing today, here's a thread of some of our favorite games from the event!
— EarthGames (@EarthGamesUW) August 12, 2022
The winner was Row, an epic narrative RPG about coexisting after a flood. Can't wait for the new version coming this fall! https://t.co/F3Inru8ZHO pic.twitter.com/vntEHpBJaT
Check it out for free on itch.io! It should work in your browser and on mobile.
https://earthgamesuw.itch.io/future-climate
Future Climate is a science-based climate model that allows you to simulate future global warming. It starts with the world today, and calculates global-averaged temperature based on your choices.
There are three modes:
If you’re decreasing all emissions at once, temperatures will initially spike, due to the removal of aerosols, which block out the sun. Over the next few decades, methane decreases, and temperatures go back to where they were before you changed emissions. Carbon dioxide lasts an extremely long time in the atmosphere, so temperatures stabilize at around that same value.
The app simulates three different possible future in each mode: one with a high climate sensitivity and large negative aerosol forcing (the dark red line), the middle range (red, number displayed as well), and a low climate sensitivity and low aerosol forcing case (yellow).
This model is a simplified version of the FaIR v1.3 climate model.
We are once again inviting game creators from around the world to make games that explore solutions to address a rapidly changing planet. Together we can make a difference!
This year’s Climate Game Jam will be virtual, from April 22-May 1. The theme is Empathy and Equilibrium and we’re looking for games that explore this theme through the lens of
We’re co-sponsoring with IndieCade, Games for the Future, Seattle Indies and EarthLab. Check out more info on the website: https://www.indiecade.com/climate-jam/ or sign up at itch.io: https://itch.io/jam/climate-jam-2022.
Join us on Discord! – IGDA Climate SIG Discord – Our friends at the IGDA Climate Special Interest Group (SIG) are here to help us with our creations and have a lot of resources available for you to use during the jam and beyond. It is also an easy way to ask questions, chat and meet other jammers.
Interested in becoming a mentor? Sign up here!
We’re happy to announce some new interactive learning tools that will be a part of Dargan’s upcoming interactive book Climate, Justice and Energy Solutions. Check out a new version of the Future Climate, where you set emissions by gas or sector to see how temperatures increase.
An energy simulator, where you can replace all fossil fuel emissions with the clean electricity needed to power it all.
And a solar power simulator at the neighborhood scale, to see what kind of electricity demand can be satisfied with solar and storage alone.
Enjoy and keep an eye out for more interactive apps, including some that gather all of these modules together!
The most recent episode of the Cool Solutions radio show/podcast featured EarthGames director Dargan Frierson, Pandemic creator Matt Leacock, and Solutions designer Sam Levac-Levey talking about climate games! Listen below, and check out Deal, Climate Conversations, and support EarthGames here!
Here at EarthGames, we’ve been making a lot of interactive climate science tools with the Godot game engine recently. The first one is ready to share! It’s a simple climate model, with just a few equations underneath, tuned to emulate state of the art climate models.
It starts from today, and allows you to change total emissions relative to today with a single slider. Put in your preferred deep decarbonation pathway, and see whether global temperatures exceed thresholds like 2 C or 1.5 C.
Try it out by clicking here. Art by Rikki Parent.
If you like what we’re doing, you can support EarthGames by donating here.
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