Climate Challenge / Fate of the World

[Rii]

So I was reading about Red Redemption's upcoming Fate of the World which looks to be right up my alley:

Gobion Rowlands: So the year is 2020 and the world has done nothing significant to tackle the multitude of problems facing 21st century society, and then the first impacts strike and the nations create a new global organisation – the World Environment Organisation – and they put you in charge. But your past is murky and your motives mysterious. You can see that we need to tackle these issues, but frankly those are not your goals – they are the obstacles you need to overcome to create the future you want for humanity.

What you do in Fate of the World is through a mix of cunning, strategy and occasionally brute force with 12 global regions to get them to make the changes necessary to survive and prosper (or causing an apocalypse) over the next two hundred years. You interact with the system via the paradigm of playing cards (which unlock other cards, etc), and in response the world changes (the snow retreats, deserts shift, countries go to war, stuff happens) [....] We imagined covering the full human drama that climate change will cause – there will population issues, land issues, possibly resource wars, mass migration; a whole range of disasters and impacts, in fact.

[....]

Mixed in with the missions are the freeform elements in the form of the policies. So the player chooses which missions they want to attempt, but how they complete that task is very much freeform as there are many routes they can take in the policy and tech development. The policies themselves are presented as cards allowing you to compare and make choices between, for example, creating a new space programme, funding further fusion research, or rebuilding cities.

Behind the scenes we have a detailed model that tracks everything from population demographics, to GDP, Human Development Index, energy use and emissions. The model took 14 months for us to get right. The value of it is like having a good suspension model in a racing game: it’s not in your face making you think about things that make your brain hurt, but it ensures the feel of the gameplay is right. The narrative stays coherent and responds appropriately to what you do.

Ian Roberts: The world is divided into regions (each with their own problems and contributions to the system) and you push the regions to do things you want. Sometimes the things you try will have major side effects, sometimes the regions will push back, sometimes the climate will throw hell at you and sometimes you totally deserved it.

Great stuff. But it's not out yet. Fortunately, a couple years back they did a barebones, flash-based 'proof of concept': Climate Challenge.

Gobion Rowlands: In 2007 with the help of Myles Allan from the Oxford University Physics Department, we convinced the BBC to sponsor us to make a strategy game called “Climate Challenge” in Flash. Our concept was that you would run Europe for 100 years in the role of president with a mandate to tackle climate change. It had some pretty strict limits – it had to be for over 18s, had to be serious in tone and had to use real world data. This was a chance to make some fun gameplay out of a subject that hadn’t been tackled before.

I gave it a shot and it certainly whets my appetite for Fate of the World.

I scored high on environmental factors and moderately well on popularity, but left the economy in ruins. In my defence, most of that economic ruin and popularity slide came about in the last decade or two of the game, in which I was forced to take a chainsaw to Europe to meet emissions targets.

In terms of setting those targets I didn't negotiate with the rest of the world but rather let the chips fall where they may. IRL this would of course have placed domestic producers at an economic disadvantage, so I would've erected trade barriers had the game modeled such. Fuck 'em, civilisation is marching on whether the rest of the world comes along or not.

My biggest mistake was in funding a space program (and then not doing anything with it, but I think the mistake was in funding it in the first place) and I usually found that I was short on food but with an excess of energy. Unfortunately the model isn't nearly as sophisticated as it could be, there appears to be very little interaction between policies beyond those directly associated through a hierarchical system, they're just straight effects on the various resources. Hopefully this is something that will be addressed in FotW.

For those interested, Climate Challenge is playable here and Fate of the World is due out in August.

 

[Rii]

Well it's August now and Fate of the World isn't here, but fortunately it's only been pushed back a little way: street date of October 31st. I suspect that, amongst other things, the devs are looking to give themselves a little clearance from Civ 5 given that the two likely have similar - or at least significantly overlapping - demographic appeal.

Edge is running a story on the game (available here) for their September 2010 issue:

"If you go to the US and the first thing you do is implement a one-child policy and try banning meat, then they might just tell you to get out."

Incidentally, I'm intrigued by the world map they appear (per the Edge story) to be using. Dividing the world into a dozen regions certainly makes sense from a gameplay perspective, but I'm not sure if those regions are meant to represent actual political unification, perceived cultural commonalities, or what. I'd be interested to hear the designers' rationale for laying things out as they have. Some offhand observations: Oceania is by far the smallest region by population, Japan the smallest by area. Everything from Mexico to Argentina is apparently 'Latin America'. Everything from Ireland to Ukraine is 'Europe'. Both Koreas are part of China, as is Mongolia.