In Vectorpark s Sandcastles, you build fantastic towers and watch the waves erase your work every 10 seconds. It s a very direct metaphor for the global climate crisis that threatens to flood coastal cities and exacerbate natural disasters. Sandcastles confronts us with our totally predictable watery doom, but we also find fun and expression in our totally foreseeable destruction. When the planet dies, at least we ll be entertained.

Before you commit to starving and drowning, you should probably understand how and why it ll happen. To imagine this nightmarish hellworld, readers can flip through climate fiction novels ( cli-fi ) and movie-goers can watch a big unprofitable climate disaster blockbuster every few years. But us mouse-clickers, we obviously don t read books or watch movies. Instead, we play with climate. Behold, the climate crisis game.

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Civilization VI: Rise and Fall wants to solve a problem. That problem is perpetual growth, and it plagues many 4X games. Whether your aim is world conquest or cultural hegemony, victory in Civilization and many of its cohorts depends on domination. However peacefully you try to play, you’re often straight-jacketed into a utilitarian-psychotic view where all resources and people are just raw material to be assimilated, Borg-like, until the whole map is monochrome.

But as the early excitement of exploration and expansion ebbs to late game stagnation, the fun runs out. Historically, stagnating empires tend to fragment and collapse. But in Civilization VI, like many games, you’re the star of the show and there’s nowhere to go but up.

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Back in 2011, climate change strategy game Fate of the World taught us that oh god, this is so difficult, we’re doomed. It was one of our favourite games on that year’s RPS advent calendar, which is how much fun we are at Christmas. Well, after another six years of the world going to heck, sequel Fate of the World Online [official site] is angling for crowdfunding cash to update the calamity and add online multiplayer. As a world leader, can you keep your country stable while fighting climate change? (more…)

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Would you like to learn about the Human Development Index and global fuel policy? No, I suppose not. What about playing a videogame where all your decisions lead to the entire earth becoming a slowly decaying barrel of human sadness? I thought so. Here s Fate of the World. … [visit site to read more]

When a wide-eyed young lad named Quintin Smith played Fate of the World, he learned that we’re all doomed but hopefully you and I will die before the world’s fully trashed. That’s my understanding of his lesson, anyway. It was a fascinating strategy game about big problems facing the world over the next century – dwindling resources, changing climate, growing population, famine, revolution, extinction, and so on – and how they’re all tangled in complicated ways.

Creator Red Redemption shut down a few years back, but another studio have picked up the rights to Fate of the World and announced a sequel with a few folks from the original onboard.

… [visit site to read more]

The second Indie Royale bundle has this second gone live. You’ll remember the first one from Adam telling you all about it. It’s the excitingly confusing system where the price goes up over time, but people paying more than that price cause it to go down. I think. Whatever it is, it works, and tens of thousands of people bought the first one, getting a splendid bargain. So what’s in the second collection?

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Edited to correct pricing details – thanks for pointing it out, folks!

It’s been a while since I’ve played Fate of the World, the game that tasks you with saving the world from mankind and itself in a terrifyingly realistic fashion. Quinns wrote a fine summation of it here, summed up by the phrase “You find out you’re an idiot”, which is precisely what I found out when playing as well. And for a while I played it far too much, so that every news report of a real life catastrophe I read would make me roll my eyes at the futility of all possible solutions. It might be time to go back and give it another go with the release of Fate of the World: Tipping Point, which adds new scenarios, cards, features and UI enhancements. It’s available at a 20% discount at present and can be purchased either through Steam, GamersGate or direct from Red Redemption. Both Steam and GamersGate are currently offering large discounts to owners of the original. There’s even a trailer!

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