Author: earthgamesuw

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!

In 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!

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

— EarthGames (@EarthGamesUW) August 12, 2022

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: 

• Simple mode allows you to change all pollutants (carbon dioxide, methane and aerosols) at once. 
• Sector mode lets you change each economic sector separately: electricity, transportation, industry, agriculture and buildings. 
• Gas mode allows you to change carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and aerosols individually. 

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

• Media, Storytelling and Misinformation
• Nature and Health
• Green Energy
• Food and Food Systems
• Climate Optimism

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!

An E-bike Loaves and Fishes Tale: From 13 to 13,000 – Cool Solutions: Stories of climate action from the bottom up

"When I read in 2020 that Colorado ran a pilot program to give away just 13 e-bikes, I scoffed. What difference could that possibly make? Now I have to eat my bike helmet." – Wendy Ring, Cool Solutions Producer and Host.  Turns out that mini-pilot laid the foundation for Denver's wildly successful e-bike program by proving that e-bikes cut car trips and emissions and that low income folks want to ride them. Denver's program became the model for a statewide program.  That "e" also stands for equity, as removing economic barriers to bikes builds pressure to address unsafe streets in low income neighborhoods.  Guests: Christian Willis, Colorado Energy Office Rachel Hultin, Bicycle Colorado Frieda Mitchell & Darnell Robinson, Can Do CO participants Mike Salisbury Denver Office of Climate Action Sustainability and Resilience Ash Lovell, People for Bikes

1. An E-bike Loaves and Fishes Tale: From 13 to 13,000 28:01
2. Throwing Shade: Some crops thrive under solar panels 28:01
3. Community Owned Solar 28:01
4. A Garment Worker Victory: Slowing Fast Fashion, Part 2 28:01
5. It's Getting Hot, Let's Wear Less Clothes: Slowing Fast Fashion, Part 1 28:01

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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Support for bold climate action is strongest it’s ever been! The road to the Green New Deal is still going to be difficult but we’re making a lot of progress.

That’s why we’ve made our notoriously difficult game Deal: A Green New Election a little bit easier! We’ve also added description of the real-world campaign that this game is inspired by, and improved the user interfaces of the game. Check out Deal version 2.0 on iOS or Android!

We’ve also made a few more EarthGames available to play in your browser on itch.io. The new uploads are

• Dark Side of the Earth
• Climate Quest
• Soot Out at the 0^oC Corral
• Deal: A Green New Election

The first three should give you a similar experience to the previously available mobile versions. Deal is not optimized for browsers, so we recommend you play it on a phone or tablet using the app store links above if possible. We hope that these free browser-based versions of the games will help make them accessible to even more players!

Our new project, an interactive improvised storytelling role-playing game called Destination Wedding 2070 kicks off tomorrow!  Join us as we marry family disasters with the climate crisis!  You can play along by blogging as a character, or just follow along with what everyone’s writing on reddit.  Check out the main site for all the details!  This netprov runs from Nov 3-11, 2019.

Destination Wedding 2070 is an attempt to make data about climate change more comprehensible. Although climatologists have strong models of the decades to come, they typically report it via graphs and charts.  DW70 goes beyond visualization by bringing the data to life in data dramatization as participants experience the effects in a speculative future scenario.

The data for this data dramatization netprov has been brought to you by EarthGames and was based on simulations from the CanESM5 model under SSP585, a high emissions scenario that represents substantial increases in fossil fuel use in the coming decades.  Climate model data is usually presented in terms of averages, but each simulation creates weather across the globe. The forecasts from each city are adapted from particular Saturdays in 2070. The maps show the model data across the globe for max/min temperature, precipitation and humidity, and city forecasts are taken from the nearest gridbox or from a heuristic downscaling approach.

We made forecasts for 5 sublime wedding locations: Issaquah, Washington (near Seattle); Neemrana Fort Palace, India (near Dehli); Mar del Plata, Argentina; The Bund, Shanghai, China and Key Biscayne, (Miami) Florida, USA.  Each site faces a unique climate catastrophe as a backdrop.  

The creators of Destination Wedding 2070 are Samara Hayley Steele, Mark Marino, Rob Wittig, and Dargan Frierson.  Joining us are a team of storytellers, which you can be a part of!  The improvisational narrative of the weddings will head in all kinds of unexpected directions as netprov participants read and respond to each others diary entries using the improv principle of “yes, and…”!

Andrew’s on the front page of uwb.edu!!  Read about the great work he did on mosquito/NET this summer in this article by Douglas Esser.

Have you tried out his new version of mosquito/NET yet?  Read about the project here, and download for free for iOS and Android.  The new app is not just about mosquitoes.  It allows you to track sightings of animals, insects, and birds as well, as well as experiencing some fun new gamification methods.

It’s almost Election Day, and your ballot initiative is clinging to a narrow lead in the polls. Voters are concerned about effects on jobs and cost of living, and the press is waiting for answers about difficult policy questions. An angry fossil fuel CEO has contacted you with a proposal that sounds an awful lot like a threat. And do I smell smoke??

In honor of this historic day of climate action, we’re proud to release our newest game, Deal: A Green New Election!  It’s available for free for iPhone/iPad and Android (Google Play).  You can play it on your phone on the way to the climate strike!  Although mobile is the preferred platform, we’ve also created a version that you can play in your browser.

We here at EarthGames are so inspired by the movement building around the Green New Deal.  In this game, you’re part of a team trying to pass a ballot initiative which will be voted on directly by the the voters in your state.

The Green New Deal would mobilize the workforce to build clean energy and resilient infrastructure, while addressing environmental justice and income inequality along the way.  But do you have the passion and skill to get your initiative passed?

Over the 15 week campaign (which can be played through in just 5-10 minutes), you’ll

• Make decisions about what voters to target and messaging
• Meet cool characters based on real-world climate activists
• Respond to difficult interview questions
• Witness fossil fuel infrastructure disasters
• Encounter angry CEOs
• Learn about environmental justice
• Probably face some pretty harsh opposition
• And much more…

When making this game, we were inspired by real-life heroes of the Green New Deal, and hope you’re inspired to join their organizations, like the Sunrise Movement, Zero Hour, and 350.org.  A list of some of our Green New Deal heroes is on this page  — we hope you’ll listen to their speeches and read their words about the Green New Deal!

The team who made Deal: A Green New Election includes:

Dargan Frierson
Jasmine Leung
Arman Kazi
Sisir Kadiveti
Rikki Parent
Erik Huang
Judy Twedt
Andrew McDonald

Thanks to all the play testers and climate activists we worked with as well!