ABSTRACT
In the 1970s, a select audience of computer nerds, economists, and museumgoers had the opportunity to engage with the original “Ecogame.” Designed by the Computer Arts Society, Ecogame (1970) was a video game as well as an art installation and a multimedia information architecture (Stott 2021). The game simulated a national economy, allowing players to make decisions regarding resource allocation, showing them the consequences of their actions via slides projected onto the walls, indicating the mood of the nation. Depending on your performance, they might show “dole queues, civic unrest, and environmental degradation” (Stott 2021, 47). Two decades later the audience for these sorts of playful experiments would be vastly expanded. Writing from Australia in 1994, McKenzie Wark recounts turning to the early internet in her struggle to keep the biosphere safe from both global warming and nuclear winter in playthroughs of SimEarth (Maxis 1990), a game that allows players to tinker with the parameters that determine life on Earth. Ecogames were no longer confined to museums and conferences, they had come home, and were living inside people’s desktops. In the twenty-first century, ecogames are even more prevalent, not just because you can choose to play a quick game of Beecarbonize (Charles Games 2023, see Figure 0.1) on your mobile phone on your way home from work, but because themes of climate collapse and environmental engagement have begun to dominate mainstream media, showing up in games more generally, both digital and analog. This book collects scholarship on this subject, exploring the themes, politics, and aesthetics of ecogames; the material and discursive contexts in which they operate; as well as the ways in which players experiment with and negotiate environmental issues in gameplay.
