The $200 Billion Video Game Industry Is a Climate Opportunity
Games are good at illustrating “this idea of progression,” says Deborah Mensah-Bonsu, founder of Games for Good, in a Q&A with Bloomberg Green.
Gamers sample games at the Gamescon trade fair in Cologne, Germany, on Aug. 23, 2023.
Photographer: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg
It begins with a disturbing scene: a city almost entirely underwater. The city’s developers must reclaim land from the sea in order to build new infrastructure, but too much digging will trigger earthquakes and raw materials are scarce. Survival is contingent on finding workarounds, and on installing tidal turbines and other technologies that can harness renewable energy.
Squaring such big circles might not sound like a fun way to spend a Saturday. But when Terra Nil — a city-building strategy game from Cape Town-based Free Lives — hit the market last year, players from all over the globe signed up to give it a go. Within a week of the game’s debut, more than 300,000 people played it.