Category: Blog

Sliced bread. Skippable cutscenes. Slowing down the pace of this blog so I can waste more time playing The Great Ace Attorney. Now we can add yet another great idea to this list of my favourite ideas – Climate Cafes! 

Not familiar with climate cafes? Click this sentence for a handy primer. Essentially, they’re friendly, constructive places – both virtual and physical – where you can discuss the climate crisis with others who are just as keen to vent their frustrations about it as you are.

We’ve said constantly since the beginning of Climate Replay that no one should take on this climate fight alone (it’s essentially one of Climate Replay’s catchphrases, along with “what game can we use to make talking about this subject less depressing?” and “where’s the blog post you promised a week ago?”). Anyway, if you’d like to engage in a more constructive climate conversation, head to our Discord and join our virtual Climate Replay cafe!

The Climate Replay Cafe will be a voice channel on our delightful Discord where you can talk about how you’re feeling and what’s on your mind. We’ll be hosting it this Saturday, August 21st at 11am EST (click this link to go to a handy time zone converter that’ll tell you what time that is in your part of the world!). We’ll have facilitators to help guide the conversations, but the goal here will be to focus on our thoughts and feelings about climate change rather than what we’re doing about it. Of course the latter is important too, but we want this to be a great social space to let people vent their climate anxieties with like-minded people! We’re doing this because we know thinking about the climate crisis can be incredibly mentally draining. Why do you think I keep crowbarring in references to that lovely new Ace Attorney game every two sentences just to restore my faith in mankind? 

Having somewhere to share your feelings about what’s happening to our planet is super important. That’s why we’re using our lovely Discord community to put a virtual cafe together! Giving you somewhere to yell things like this:

So why not head over to our Discord to join our Climate Cafe? Or why not head to this site and learn more about Climate Cafes, and find one local to you? Or why don’t you google ‘how to do an accent over the ‘e’’ so you can go back and fix up all the times you didn’t write ‘cafe’ in this blog post properly? Or why don’t you decide the word ‘cafe’ is perfectly acceptable without an accented ‘e’ so you can go play more of that beautifully daft lawyer game? 

Oh, and though this is a one-off event, we’re not ruling out hosting more climate cafes in the future. Stick around after and hang out with our Discord community! They don’t bite! And even when they do, it’s usually into a Vegan meal that uses climate-conscious packaging. What a nice bunch.

That swan-hatted woman is almost definitely breaking a few of the community guidelines we’ll have for our cafe and that you’ll find in our Discord, so be sure to check those out too. See you at the cafe! 

*For boring legal reasons, I should probably clarify that Herlock Sholmes and Ryunosuke Naruhodo are fictional characters who probably haven’t endorsed our Climate Cafe (at time of writing). Although the irony of us being sued by the lawyer game is almost too good to resist…

Have you joined the Climate Replay Discord server? It’s great! Well, aside from the fact that Discord keeps ratting me out to everyone that I’m playing Mixolumia when I’m supposed to be writing this article… otherwise, it’s a fun way to hang out with the delightful Climate Replay community. Now’s the perfect time to join, too, because we just launched Climate Quests.

Every two weeks, we’re posting a new set of quests for you to complete in our Discord. These quests are fun, very achievable, and a great way to gain new climate-friendly habits and hobbies. Essentially they help you live a more climate-friendly lifestyle AND gamify your life in a gloriously green way. Nice!

Each quest comes with a frequency (the number of times per week you can do the quest before we beg you to stop) and a value (how many ‘leaves’ you’ll earn for completing the quest). The more leaves you have, the higher you’ll go up the leaderboard, just like how leaves work IRL. Kinda. 

Wait, did I write ‘leaderboard’? I meant leaferboard! A pun so brilliant/controversial that my autocorrect just changed it back to ‘leaderboard’ four times in a row. Well, everyone’s a critic.

One of our first Climate Quests is to make a Climate Friendly Meal! You get one leaf for a vegetarian meal, and a whopping two leaves for a vegan one. Let’s see if I can complete it now with a photo of my lunch:

My depressing diet aside, these Climate Quests are a fun gateway into making greener lifestyle choices, and to encourage you to try more green games. We currently have quests for taking awesome screenshots of nature in your games and for listening to a fantastic climate podcast. Why not head over to our Discord server, by clicking this very sentence, to check out the quests and try completing some yourself? Best of luck, adventurer!

Welcome to the third Play Games, Save the Planet! This is our somewhat-regular where we rave about great games that support good causes, depict the climate fight in interesting ways, or have a fantastic message. This week, thanks to the excellent Twitter account Plant Based Gaming, I found a delightful demo that’s well worth your time. Upcoming green-em-up, Terra Nil.

The game’s steam page describes it as ‘a reverse city builder’. To my initial disappointment, this doesn’t mean it’s a game where you play a city trying to build a person. No, This is all about restoring a tarnished environment and going even further until it’s a tropical paradise. Like transforming an oil spill into a kitten made of hugs, but more scientifically plausible, and less like the kind of example you come up with when you write the Climate Replay blog post at 4am again.

As someone who often replaces the word ‘hello’ with ‘I failed to find the bathroom in time’, I’m not one to judge when it comes to making a bad first impression. Good thing too, because Terra Nil starts you off with a barren wasteland that looks more like the start of an early Fallout game. 

Luckily, this doesn’t last long. Lay down a turbine to get some wind power, then place a toxin scrubber and voila:

Marvel as all that dirt becomes less dirty! I mean… more dirty? Wait, that sounds even worse. Let’s go with ‘detoxified’. Trust us when we say that watching all that sickly grey turn into beautiful brown is immensely satisfying. But that’s got nothing on placing your first Irrigator. These magical machines instantly turn all that newly-healed soil into luscious green grass.

Essentially Terra Nil is about the joy of turning dismal, boring landscape into greenery so gorgeous I can barely tear my eyes from it to make sure I’m ending this sentence properl

Even just in demo form, Terra Nil is an absorbing, pleasingly calming game that got us thinking more about real world irrigation. I would love it if there was a machine like the game’s irrigator which we could switch on that would solve all our environmental problems for us. Then we could close down Climate Replay and I could get back to writing my Succession fan fiction (Logan Roy marries me! It’s disgusting!). 

But in real life, irrigation is unfortunately a lot more complicated. It’s great that we have options to grow food even when conditions aren’t optimal. But, of course, humanity has a way of taking our new toys and kind of missing the point. We aren’t great at making sure that we are growing foods that are more appropriate for the climate or having variety that would promote a healthier ecosystem. We are just so OBSESSED with corn…And, as a global community, we’ve been eating more and more meat. 

What does this have to do with irrigation? Well, we have to grow more food for the animals to eat, so WE can eat them rather than eating the plants directly. If we ate less meat, this wouldn’t be as big of a problem, but overall the scale is getting out of control and we are running out of land and water to keep this trend up with a growing population. This fun report from the Princeton Environmental Institute explains how increasing reliance on irrigation (vital to meet growing demands in food supply as the world’s population increases) will likely involve “a far greater strain on aquifers, an increased expansion of agriculture into natural ecosystems, and an amplification of climate change through the production and operation of irrigation machinery.”

Irrigation has obvious benefits too, and in no way is Terra Nil suggesting that healing an ecosystem is as simple as right-clicking a machine then right-clicking on a piece of soil then running off to the bar to celebrate solving every problem ever. But it is a more interesting game when it starts introducing machinery which isn’t so utopian, and that instead demands you make trade-offs and take risks. Like the Excavator.

An Excavator can create a new riverbed, which is definitely something you want. However, it will also poison the land around it. Build wisely and the trade-off is worth it, but it’s certainly a risk you have to factor in. Much as I enjoy Terra Nill’s relaxing vibe, with its lovely piano soundtrack and charming art style, I’m still hoping for more tricky choices like this one in the main game. And not just because the laser animation when you use the excavator looks really, really cool and mentally I’m apparently still about five years old.

In the demo alone, healing these wastelands is an addictive delight, like popping the world’s prettiest pile of bubble wrap. Our favorite feature so far is the water pump that fills the riverbeds, initially as dry and depressing as stale crackers, with beautiful blue waters. You enjoy stale crackers? Don’t expect an apology. Seriously, what is wrong with you?

Once you’ve made the land grassy green enough, you can start building machines and placing stuff that increases the biodiversity. Like adding beehives to trees! Oh no. I legitimately have a crippling phobia of bees. I have ruined several picnics through cowardly screaming due to the presence of just a single bee, and I would do it all again. This is pretty unfortunate, considering how crucial bees are for the environment. Nonetheless, when I eventually faced my fears and got my shaking hand to move the mouse far enough to place a beehive in a tree, Terra Nil rewarded me with these:

Honestly, it’s just refreshing to play a game about helping repair an environment rather than blowing one up. And it’s being published by Devolver Digital! Usually I associate Devolver ‘Hotline Miami’ Digital with games so violent that I just broke every bone in my body thinking about them. It’s great to see a publisher like them releasing a green game like this. More of this please! 

Why not try the Terra Nil demo yourself by clicking this very sentence and heading to their Steam page? Sounds like more fun than clicking this sentence which won’t take you anywhere. Or clicking this one, which takes you to a photo of a typically scary bee. I genuinely feel horrible after looking up that bee image, so I’m going to lie down now. Bye!

Food scarcity! Now I’ve got your attention, let’s talk about… oh. Food scarcity. Really? 

Sure we can’t talk about a videogame instead? How about Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator?

Nope, we’re going to tear our eyes away from these delightful dads for a few minutes so we can tell you about an excellent new community garden fundraiser to help fight food scarcity. Maybe that will finally impress Damian…

Let me introduce you to something far less heartbreaking. Meet $eed Money.

$eed money isn’t just a typo I’ve subconsciously made because of all the money I’ve blown on hot dad dates. Of course not. That would be silly. They’re actually a Maine-based nonprofit which provides grants, crowdfunding opportunities and training to food garden projects around the world. 

One of the campaigns they’re currently running is tackling food deserts. A food desert is when a community lacks either affordable or nearby healthy food options, forcing them to travel great lengths, often at unaffordable costs, just to get a balanced diet. 

Now I could try and explain it in our usual hilarious/obnoxious/thirsty way. But why don’t we just watch this excellent video of Alex Haraus explaining it infinitely more clearly? Let’s!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROyrZXxR6ec

As Alex just explained without a single laboured reference to Dream Daddy (each to their own) a great way to combat food deserts is through Community Gardens. Not only do they become a fantastic source of fresh, healthy food, they’re also good for the environment, encourage community togetherness, help mental and physical health, and would be the perfect place to take a flaming-hot father on a date (hypothetical example).

Here at Climate Replay, we don’t want to just fill your weekends with doom and gloom. We like solutions! And hot dads! But mainly solutions! On average in the United States, it costs about $1000 to get a community garden going. You might have noticed that that number is $999 more than my headline promised. You might be shrieking “CLICKBAIT!” from your frothing-mouth right now while planning to dox me out of revenge (don’t waste your time – as this article is proving, I’m way too open about what I’m into. Send me dads please).

But the reason we said it cost only a dollar is because – it does! One thing that makes this $eed Money fundraiser interesting is that they’ve capped donations at one dollar. You CAN’T donate more than a dollar, even if you want to. This may seem unnecessarily limiting, but they’re making a great point here. You don’t help people by having more money (extreme wealth inequality, after all, is one of the reasons we’re in this food desert mess in the first place). You help by getting more people involved. Donate your dollar then spread the word! Just like we’re doing! Not that we’re bragging or anything (do you think Damien noticed? Did he?!)

At time of writing they’ve raised $441. If you donate and tell your friends, and they tell some friends, and they tell some other friends, and those friends say “go away, I’m playing Dream Daddy” but then they feel bad for snapping at you, so they donate out of guilt, and then tell their friends, who also pause Dream Daddy and donate… well we could get a garden funded in no time!

To make your donation or spread the word, click this very sentence to be taken to the fundraiser. You can also find more info about community gardens and all sorts of great initiatives that $eed Money are supporting on that site too.

Climate Replay is not affiliated with Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator or $eed Money. We’re just creepy fans of both. 

You know the great thing about the internet? Besides the fact I can download SpiderMan: Miles Morales and spend the whole week playing that instead of writing this on time? Er, I mean, the great thing about the internet is that it’s full of fantastic coverage of games, the climate crisis, green issues, and stories that elegantly combine all three. This week we’ve decided to highlight a few recent articles, Twitter feeds, and eco-friendly-misery-geese that we think are well worth your time. Enjoy! 

1. Horrible Goose Comes in Great Package

Untitled Goose Game was one of the best games about being an awful bird in years, letting you live the dream of being a real jerk chicken. Yes, I’m somewhat aware that geese aren’t chickens, but I can’t think of a better joke so here we are. Last year the game got a physical release. Physical game boxes, with their heavy reliance on plastic, are unsurprisingly dreadful for the environment (here’s an excellent Eurogamer piece about the game industry’s overreliance on plastic). But delightfully, Untitled Goose Game’s physical Lovely Edition PS4 release honked obnoxiously at that depressing trend by coming in 100% environmentally friendly packaging!

Loads of game sites covered this story and featured great interviews with iam8bit, the company responsible for this release (you can read Arstechinca’s here). My personal favorite is this one on packaging-gateway.com, simply because I was so delighted to discover that there’s a website dedicated entirely to packaging (they do some good un-goose-related pieces about packaging and the environment too).

In all their interviews, Amanda White and Jon Gibson of iam8bit are terrific at telling the story of how they made an eco-friendly physical release. They’re also super inspiring about how they hope this is just the beginning of a wider trend in the games industry. They tell packaging-gateway.com: “Everyone cares about the health of the planet, but unless a choice to be more environmentally responsible is very clearly laid out, it’s really difficult to find your own path. We think fans have been enthusiastic because we’re being really transparent about our approach and our wanting to make a difference. There isn’t a barrier to entry if you want to sample a healthier path for packaging. It’s a tiny glimpse into the crystal ball of the future so, with the support of fans, we can start to change the overall conversation and convert lots of publishers over to more eco-friendly pursuits.”

Hear hear! Or should that be, honk honk? I’m starting to think I should never be allowed to write about geese again. Go read the whole piece here. Honk!

2. Go Grow Plant Based Gaming’s Followers!

Games don’t grow on trees, something I’ve known since I was a child teenager OK fine I learnt this yesterday. But despite not originating from the ground, games can still be heavily plant-based and nature themed. Those games are the focus of this terrific little Twitter account, Plant Based Gaming!

Plant Based Gaming promotes games that focus on nature, conservation & oh wait you just saw all that in the screenshot directly above this paragraph didn’t you. Well anyway, they’re great! A quick scroll through their feed and I’d already found a ton of great new green games I wanted to try, and a few games I already love getting a shoutout (Alba! YASSSSSSSSS!).

This account is an instant follow for me! Or at least it would be, if I was on Twitter. Curse my undying loyalty to MySpace. Anyway, learn from my mistakes and follow @PlantBasedGamin so you can fill your feed with excellent-looking green games.

Do we have time for one more? *checks if Terra Nil has finished downloading* Oh, very well…

3. Man Makes ‘Pandemic’ board game. Decides That Not Depressing Enough?

The New York Times has a good profile on Matt Leacock, the creator of the hit board game Pandemic. Considering what we’ve been through for the last couple of years, you’d think the creator of a game called Pandemic might follow that up with something like Super Just Hang Out With Some Kittens For a While Adventure. But Leacock is made of sterner stuff, and is working on a game called Climate Crisis. Spoiler alert: it’s not about kittens.

Here at Climate Replay, we’re more about the virtual games than the mysterious board-based ones that confuse and frighten us. But Leacock’s ambitions to make a game that is scientifically accurate, doesn’t undermine the realities of the climate crisis, but is also still fun to play, is a fascinating dilemma, one we’re hoping more game developers tackle head-on as enthusiastically as he has. Find out what several climate experts thought of his game when they playtested it.

Have you seen a good story that we should shout about? Tell us about it on the Climate Replay Discord server – then stick around and hang out with us after! HONK.

Sometimes I need to balance out my bright and happy summer activities with a good ol’ brood – and my favorite way to do that is with one of my favorite eco-dystopian classics: Final Fantasy VII. A great game that also unknowingly teaches us a lot of different lessons about how unchecked environmental exploitation can lead to a world that doesn’t look so great. Like, Cloud’s-hair-not-great.

If its been a while since you played the game or you were too distracted by the love triangle in the remake, you may have not even realized that an overarching conflict of the game is based on a basic principle that we see all the time in the real world: The Tragedy of the Commons.

What’s that then? The subtitle of the 5,989,777th spin-off of Final Fantasy 7? Nope! Well, at time of writing. The Tragedy of the Commons is actually the name of an economic theory that describes how humans tend to behave when different people or groups are dependent on the same “common” natural resource. It says that without any social structure or rules, people will tend to act in their self-interest (big surprise there) and take what they need from the “common” resource regardless of what other people are doing. 

The problem? Well, this usually means that the resource is then overexploited and either temporarily or permanently damaged. It is ultimately mutually destructive for everyone in the long run unless everyone cooperates which usually means less short term personal gain. (For anyone who is familiar, Tragedy of the Commons is considered an example of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, because it is a social problem based on collective action).

As an example, let’s think about the universe of FF7 and our favorite evil corporation: the Shinra Electric Power Company.

Shinra started its humble beginnings in weapons manufacturing (like all good, honest corporations do) but then discovered a way to harvest the planet’s *lifestream* and refine it into an energy source called Mako. The lifestream is considered the spiritual energy of the planet and is described as the collective knowledge and emotional memory bank of all life that has existed and is needed to create new life. So, Shinra is taking it and making it into Mako and selling it. Because everyone needs energy and Shinra is the only company that makes Mako, they don’t just make money, they make A LOT of it. They use that power to get more power and end up basically controlling everything.

How is this a Tragedy of the Commons? Well. The lifestream isn’t “owned” by any one person. But it is important to EVERYone. However, one party – in this case Shinra – is harvesting more than their fair share and endangering the very existence of the lifestream. Not only that, but they are selling it back to the very people that it collectively belongs to and making a profit. They know that they will run out of lifestream and are actively searching for new sources, but I won’t elaborate in case there are any of you who live under a rock and don’t already know the story. Or you’re waiting for Square Enix to release the next part of the remake. In which case, enjoy finding out how the story ends in 2322!

The result leads to a world where all the characters, even the villains, have been negatively impacted by the ecological, social, or economic backlash of the Shinra corps. Even Sephiroth (*cue One Winged Angel theme*) owes his tortured back story to Shinra. You may think, “ok great but that would NEVER happen in the real world.” But sadly it does! Even though we all seem to have brains, we don’t always use them in a way that makes a lot of sense.

Think about the Earth’s atmosphere. Doesn’t all of humanity and all life depend on it? But we are also actively mucking it up. By pumping greenhouse gases and toxins into our atmosphere, we damage or fundamentally change it in a way that is worse for EVERYONE. If we know this, why does it keep happening? Because individuals have something to gain – usually short-term economic profit of some kind.  We all benefit from creating less greenhouse gases, but it entails collective action that isn’t always easy.

Ultimately, the concept of the Tragedy of the Commons can seem basic and easy to overcome but it gives us a glimpse at how seemingly simple problems unfold to become very complex based on ecological, social, and economic structures. FF7 creates a whole world filled with characters with very different motivations and reactions to the terrible situations they’re in, but the true source of the conflict often leads straight back to the Shinra Electric Power Company and their monopoly on society. Including its source of life – the lifestream.

How can we combat this existential dread in our own lives? Well in addition to learning the latin lyrics to One Winged Angel (ok that’s voluntary) you can learn more about where you get your important resources, like food and clean water. It sounds inconsequential, but if you know where you get your food or clothes or water then you are one step closer to understanding if those systems are unsustainable. Then you can advocate for better systems or choose better options (if they exist)! You can also support organizations that try to make better systems. Some like Kiss the Ground or Greenwave try to create food systems that can provide enough food for a growing world all while not harming the environment – which makes sense since we need the environment to make any food in the first place. 

That, and keep following Climate Replay for fun articles and events. No really, please hang out with us, this stuff can get depressing. Why did I choose FF7 as my summer game again? Take me back, Animal Crossing! Endlessly repeated sea bass joke, all is forgiven.

Have you played Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney? It’s an excellent game where you play a defense lawyer who exposes lies in the most dramatic way possible. You do this by carefully reading witness statements, finding contradictory evidence, and then pointing in their big lying faces while yelling “OBJECTION!” at the top of your lungs. It’s excellent. And also surprisingly good training for spotting real-world lies. Like this one:

What does my inherent laziness have to do with greenwashing? Well, these methods can also be handy for verifying too-good-to-be-true statements from corporations who appear to be helping fight the climate crisis and reduce their emissions. Statements like ‘we aim to be net-zero by 2050’ or ‘we’re working hard to produce sustainable plastic by year X’ or ‘don’t worry, this toxic waste we’re dumping in the ocean is just a birthday present for the dolphins ;D’. Statements that sound good on paper but don’t hold up to scrutiny, and have us yelling, Phoenix Wright-style:

So this week, we thought we’d apply some Phoenix Wright logic (er, minus all the stuff where you talk to ghosts – it’s a long story) to some of our ‘favourite’ pieces of greenwashing PR. Here’s some increasingly common lies to look out for.

“We aim to be X by 2050” without any concrete steps or accountability actions.

A modern classic! According to several scientists we contacted for this article, 2050 is still 29 years away. While some major green initiatives obviously take a lot of time, 29 years is a suspiciously distant deadline that could easily be used to justify complacency when more immediate action is vital. Like, say, an oil company that says it’s aiming to be sustainable by 2050 but is still drilling for new oil and gas.

Imagine if I’d been given 29 years to finish this article. it would have looked like this for 28.9 of them:

One of the most devious bits of greenwashing involves a symbol you probably see on a lot of your food packaging:

Hey, that looks like a recycling symbol! And ‘looks like’ is exactly what the pro-plastics lobbying group who created this symbol were going for. This ‘resin identification code’ actually identifies what type of plastic it is. The product it’s on can potentially be recycled. but whether it actually will be is completely dependent on the plastic recycling infrastructure in your area. Those arrows are deliberately misleading, designed to make you think that you can just chuck the packaging in the recycling without a second thought and then brag to all your friends about how you’re basically Ghandi 2. This excellent video by Climate Town is a hilarious primer about the whole depressing history of this. Recommended!

We’re more likely to buy something if we think we can easily recycle it, which is essentially greenwashing 101; lying that something is good for the environment or sustainable to boost sales. The truth is that the amount of plastic that is recyclable is shockingly low. We’ve only recycled 8-9% of all the plastic in the world that’s ever been produced. Plus, when plastic is recycled, it’s a lower grade. Recycled food grade plastic can’t be used for food grade plastic again, for example, because it no longer meets a certain health requirement. 

Sometimes you might see bio or compostable plastics – but, again, these are still plastic. Bio plastics source from “bio” materials like corn which would probably be better served as food for hungry people…but we still end up with the same plastic products that live indefinitely in the environment or landfills. Compostable plastics can technically degrade, but require industrial scale compost facilities that don’t exist in all cities. Do you have industrial compost options where you live?. Because chances are, you don’t. Which means it won’t be recycled. 

Obviously we’re not anti-recycling here at Climate Replay. Wait, are we? *checks Climate Replay constitution* Nope. Phew! But recycling is being exploited here by private companies falsely implying that we can keep mass producing plastics because recycling is the solution. It isn’t! Again, only 8-9% of all the plastic in the world got recycled! Would you read this article if I’d only spelt 8-9% of the words correctly? Exacctly!

Plastics are made from oil and gas products but don’t carry the negative PR of oil or other fossil fuels. That’s why fossil fuel companies are pushing them more and more with these misleading claims that they’re easily recyclable and fully endorsed by puppies and God or whatever. But plastic is about as closely linked with sustainability as this article is with Phoenix Wright (don’t worry, I’ll crowbar in a few more forced references soon, I promise x). You should just avoid using plastic as much as possible. Isn’t that right, Phoenix?

Thanks, Phoenix!

“Waste to Energy”. What if we could just set fire to all the trash and it would transform into a great source of energy? That sounds good! Too good! Too good to be true! Oh, darn…

Yep, what the three words of a buzzy phrase like ‘waste to energy’ fail to mention is that the energy conversion is very inefficient. Plus, there are still toxic byproducts. We also don’t want to create a supply chain for burning garbage, especially because burning things is pretty horrible for the environment.

“Creating a circular economy”

This one is a little tricky because the idea of making a circular economy for all our products is a cool goal. The idea is that a product should have a circular life cycle rather than one that ends up in a landfill/the environment. However, some companies will use this language to distract the conversation. They will say they “support a circular economy” but not talk about how they will actually, say, reduce their plastic production. They may even fight *against* systems that promote a circular economy like bottle deposits or refill stations for products like liquid soaps. It’s also another great example of pushing recycling as a magical fix to the entire problem, which it definitely is not.

You can find some outstanding circular economy flexing on the site of Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company. Look, it’s got a fun picture and a photo of a scientist and everything! And it’s not like an oil company would ever do something actively misleading. I’m winking as I type this. Just letting you know in case you can’t see me.

These are just a few examples of greenwashing, but sadly there’s tons more out there. If you see statements from businesses bragging about how green they are, try searching the terms they use and see what comes up from trustworthy news sources. If it’s a load of greenwashing nonsense, call it out! Fake green initiatives designed solely to generate good PR absolutely deserve to be countered with negative PR.

If you see greenwashing, and can prove it’s greenwashing, yell at them for greenwashing! Shame is the only reason a lot of these companies are having to pretend they’ve gone green in the first place. If a little more shame is what it’s going to take to get them to actually go green, then shame away! For example, I’m still so ashamed of that ‘LIE-O plastic joke’ from earlier that I’m off to make a donation to eclologi. Bye!

Authors: Frances Withrow and Tom Stone.

I’ve always dreamed of being able to fly, even though I’m so unhealthy that I sometimes pass out just from thinking about walking. Luckily for slobs like me, mankind recently invented something called the ‘airplane’, a mysterious metal tube that can fly me all over the world if I ask it nicely. Hooray!

But unfortunately, flying is about as good for the environment as deep-frying the polar ice caps. That’s why I decided to play possibly the greatest piece of anti-flying art ever made, a ‘game’ called Airplane Mode.

This is a flight simulator that doesn’t let you anywhere near the cockpit. Because it’s trying to simulate the feeling of being a passenger on a commercial flight. Get ready to experience a two-and-a-half-hour fake flight in real time!

Once seated, you can engage in the usual pre-flight activities. Like admiring the runway, fiddling with the arm rests, turning the fans over your seat on, and trying to remember why you pitched putting yourself through this for a Climate Replay blog post. All while the captain apologizes for a delayed take-off. Delayed? Oh marvelous.

Let’s pass the endless time by looking at why flying is miserable for the environment, even though some of the statistics you can find make it seem not that bad. Like how air travel accounts for just 2.5% of global carbon dioxide emissions. But that’s only because a lot of people can’t afford to fly, due to our stupid inequality-riddled planet. It’s the 20% of the world’s population who can and do fly that are to blame for that 2.5% – and 2.5% is still bad!

According to this jolly BBC News article, “a return flight from London to San Francisco emits around 5.5 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) per person – more than twice the emissions produced by a family car in a year, and about half of the average carbon footprint of someone living in Britain.” Oh no! I live in Britain! Wait, that’s not why that information is depressing.

Speaking of depressing, I decided to try and entertain myself in Airplane Mode by seeing what the screen in front of me has to offer. But I suddenly get interrupted by an unskippable safety video. I bought New Pokemon Snap on the weekend. It’s unopened. I’m ‘playing’ this instead:

Is the safety demonstration video short? No. It is not. Shall we learn more about why flying isn’t good for the planet instead of watching it? LET’S.

The struggle to decarbonize air travel is something we haven’t made nearly enough progress in. There are some interesting-sounding solutions on the way, like how Airbus have announced plans to have the first zero-emission aircraft by 2035, using hydrogen fuel cells. Nice idea, but according to several calendar experts I consulted for this story, 2035 is still 14 years away.  Electric planes will also likely be limited to very small aircraft due to the limitations of battery technologies and capacity. But you know what? That’s fine! Make a plane so tiny I can chuck it in the garbage! Because look what I’m still watching:

Finally, we take off. I find my bag under my seat, which contains a book, some headphones, and a packet of pills. I immediately take one of the pills without checking what it is, just in case you were curious about what level of geniuses are writing for this website. 

The bag notably doesn’t contain a Nintendo Switch, so I guess I won’t be spending my two+ hours taking candid photos of Pikachu throwing up outside a nightclub and selling them to the tabloids (is that what you do in New Pokemon Snap? Again, I wouldn’t know). Instead, I have to settle for the games available on the screen in front of me:

I sit back and do a Sudoku in the in-game magazine while listening to one of the in-game podcasts and actually start… enjoying… myself? No, really! I’d be lying if I said the experience wasn’t oddly relaxing. Airplane Mode definitely captures that boring-long-flight sensation of being held hostage by the few entertainment choices you have, so you actually give them a chance. 

Is that an achievement? Absolutely! Do I ever want to play it again? Um…

Speaking of the sky and legal grey areas, did you know that the international aviation sector was not included in the Paris Agreement on climate change? 65% of the aviation sector’s CO2 emissions are in international airspace and, therefore, do not necessarily “belong” to individual nation states. But without tackling aviation (oh, and shipping, another sector with international emissions) meeting the 2C or 1.5C warming limits of the agreement is going to be more difficult. That’s another win for the ‘don’t fly’ column.

And here’s another MASSIVE one – I missed the bit in Airplane Mode where someone gives me my virtual orange juice because I was too busy getting stuck on the sudoku puzzle. Is this the worst moment of my entire life? It’s certainly a contender.

I think the sleeping pill I took earlier is about to kick in, so let’s wrap this up. Flying is horrible for the planet and you should avoid doing it when you can. That, and we need to hold airlines accountable to reduce their greenhouse gas production. A lot of airlines have been promoting carbon offsetting, wherein customers can ‘offset’ the emissions their flight causes by supporting green projects that theoretically cancel those emissions out. While offsets have potential and support great projects, they also reek of greenwashing PR. They make airlines look like they’re doing a lot more than they actually are/should be, with investigations finding offsetting not nearly effective enough. There’s no such thing as a green flight and you should limit or avoid flying whenever possible.

Covid-19 has forced a lot of the games industry’s biggest events, like the Game Developers Conference, to move online. This doesn’t just dramatically reduce the amount of flying involved. It also lowers the barrier for entry for developers who might not be able to afford a flight and accommodation in San Francisco. That’s great news! We should be encouraging more of this.

Am I implying that I’m pro-Covid-19? Of course not. That’s just the sleeping pill talking. But I am pro “breaking down income barriers for gaming conferences” (try it! It’s a fun corner to stand in!).

Airplane Mode is available on Steam now. Give it a go, and permanently cure your love of flying! 

HOPE. DISCONTENT.  Now we’ve got your attention, welcome to the second entry in our world-famous series, Play Games, Save the Planet! This is where we rave about great games that support good causes, depict the climate fight in interesting ways, or have a fantastic message. Last time, we talked about Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, a delightful, warm hug of a game! This time we’re looking at Frostpunk, which is more like receiving a hug so someone can stab you in the back with an icicle. Uh, great?

You’re the leader of a group of settlers in a dismal, frost-flavored future where the world is a barren, icy wasteland. You know those terrible ice levels in platform games where the floor gets stupidly slippery and all the fun you were having slides away? It’s like civilization is living in one of those. Yippee!

It’s a city-building game where you don’t have enough materials to build a city. Instead, you have to quickly instruct your hungry, freezing survivors to gather the worryingly finite amount of nearby resources, build shelters, ways of cooking and gathering food, and a medical outpost for when everyone inevitably catches a cold. Oh, or frostbite. Why did I pick this game to play again? Did I decide living through a global pandemic was too uplifting?

Oh, yeah! Because the bleakness is exactly why it’s worth playing. After a few hours of Frostpunk, I paused to take a walk outside on a pleasant sunny day, breathing a sigh of relief that I don’t live in a chilly hellscape. I’d quite like to keep doing that! I do not thrive in a chilly hellscape! Because remember at the start of this paragraph, when we were both young and optimistic, and I told you that I ‘paused’ the game? Well, that wasn’t quite true.

I was actually banished:

Frostpunk is either very tough or I am very stupid. For now, let’s assume the former. This is a game about desperately gathering resources, carefully managing the ones you have, and getting your workers to fetch you more and keep the whole settlement running without mutinying against you. Within two in-game days, Frostpunk was tantalising a very nasty part of me with an offer to let me sign a law that would make my people work 24 hour shifts. Not even a could-you-stay-an-extra-hour-and-I’ll-get-the-donuts-tomorrow middle ground, Frostpunk?

This blog post is full of what we’ll charitably call ‘jokes’. Frostpunk hates jokes. This is a dour, serious game, from the soundtrack that sounds like a violin bursting into tears, to the endless whining of your populace (yes yes, I’m sure burying your friends is pretty tiring when you’re starving to death because of my incompetence, but come on – we all have problems). That’s particularly galling since the two main bars you have to watch throughout are these:

Hope? Hope? How am I supposed to do that in a game that doesn’t even have a ‘recommend Alba’ button? Apparently one of the ways you can raise hope is by building a Propaganda Centre. Yeah, it’s fair to say that the makers of Frostpunk think about as highly of humanity as I do of the Koch brothers.

So the game’s about as welcoming as someone beating you with an exit sign. But it is undeniably compelling. 11 Bit Studios get our weeping respect for committing to an incredibly grim vision of the future and sticking to it 100%. You can build propaganda in-game, but there’s no room to blast climate change denial here. This game makes it clear that living in a videogame’s ice level will be horrible.

Most video games try to be fun, for obvious reasons. But some of the biggest sleeper hits in this medium have shown that games are surprisingly good at exploring the darker side of humanity. Silent Hill 2 isn’t ‘fun’, but is a horrifying and fascinating exploration of guilt and grief. Dark Souls’ combat is entertaining, true, but that’s just a thin layer of joy wrapped around a world trapped in an endless cycle of pain and despair. It’s the sort of thing I imagine the makers of Frostpunk play when they fancy a laugh.

We should be proud of games that commit to a grim vision and entice players to immerse themselves in it. Frostpunk isn’t explicitly a ‘climate change game’ (the cause of the world’s cold snap is more sci-fi based) but the parallels with climate change are obvious. The game’s exploration of what’ll happen if we let the world fall into such a state of icy ruin, and how cutthroat humanity could become, makes for a fantastic, galvanizing experience. One that should make anyone who just shrugs and accepts climate change as inevitable (and therefore not worth trying to stop) realise that’s truly not an option.

We said this series would cover games that had a ‘fantastic message’. This might be a slightly darker interpretation of the word ‘fantastic’ than you were expecting, but Frostpunk’s dire warning of the struggle to survive in a colder tomorrow is still a message well worth heeding. Just try not to shoot the depressing messenger, eh? Although we are running out of food and shelter…

It might not be the game I turn to when I fancy an uplifting evening of gaming, but I’m glad I get to play things like this, instead of some patronizing platformer funded by the oil industry. Something like ‘Frostfun’ (which, thankfully, I’ve just made up) where you play an irresponsible snowman who happily bounces around HappyHappyIceLandHooray, encouraging children to use fossil fuels to help all the elves learn to smile again. Wait, why am I not pitching this? I could be so rich…

Frostpunk is available on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Xbox Game Pass for PC and Xbox. Give it a try this weekend and see why a future where we don’t stop using fossil fuels will basically be a LIVING HELL. Happy Friday everyone! 😀

My favorite way to prep for hot girl summer is to visit my long-neglected weed-infested island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In the year-plus-change since we all collectively had a mental breakdown and turned to Animal Crossing to dull the existential dread, I’ve realized this game has taught me two important things. 1. No matter who says they don’t like drama, we ALL love to arbitrarily judge island villagers, and 2. Seasons matter.

For a game where so little happens, Animal Crossing has an irresistible hook to keep you crawling back. Every month there’s something new! The trees, bushes, fish, insects, and weather all change throughout the year and sometimes even throughout the day. Not only does this keep the game fresh, but it’s also based on real life natural systems. Neat idea, but one that’s going to get a lot trickier due to humans playing games (see what I did there?) with the climate.

Where different trees grow and when they bloom, or where different fish live and when, depend on things like temperature, available nutrients or prey, and the amount of sunlight. Climate change is disrupting the balance of these things at alarming rates. Even some of our favorite things in Animal Crossing are already changing in the real world.

For example, players and real-life humans in the northern hemisphere recently got to enjoy the romantic flowering of the cherry blossom trees. Hopefully, you were able to get senpai to notice you this year, but if not there is always 2022! Did we get senpai to notice us? That’s hardly relevant now is it. Anyway, soon Animal Crossing will need to officially change the week of the cherry blossoms in-game if they want to emulate real ecosystems. All around the world from Japan to the US, the iconic trees are blooming earlier and earlier.

In Kyoto, they found records to prove that this year’s bloom was the earliest on record in over 1,000 years! And like a party guest who turns up six hours early, with a barrel (?) full of old casserole (???) this is far from good news. You see, the trees are very sensitive to temperature and as spring months are getting warmer, the trees are blooming sooner and sooner. Some scientists worry that with continued rise in temperatures earlier and earlier in the year, the trees may not bloom at all. Then none of us will be able to complete our long neglected DIY recipes. Looking at you, Cherry Blossom Wand 🙁

So you may be thinking, “bah! I don’t need any of the special things in Animal Crossing. I love the consistent things. Like a good ol’ sea bass.” Ah yes, much like an emotionally-stunted ex who realized they “made a mistake,” the irritating-but-predictable sea bass is always there when you are looking for something better. As annoying as they may be, they are a staple in Animal Crossing, but in the real world they are trying to swim away from increasing water temperatures.

Black sea bass off the Northeast coast of the US have already started to show up farther and farther north than any historical records show. They aren’t alone – some studies estimate that some fish will shift their normal ranges as far as 1000 km away. Wow. So it turns out boring-but-reliable sea bass can be just as cold and distant as our ex after all. Pfft who cares? Who’s gonna go long distance with a fish anyway? Help, we’re drowning in this metaphor and don’t know how to get out.

But the problem is that people DO travel that far for fish. The people fishing for them! And it’s getting harder and harder to travel that far. You may think, “hey, just let the people who live closer catch those fish” but unfortunately it isn’t that simple. Just like we have created arbitrary hierarchies for which Animal Crossing villagers suck and which ones don’t, we’ve also created arbitrary systems to try and manage our fisheries. Usually those systems are based on physical or political boundaries rather than where the fish are. These are the things I think about every day for a living…I’m definitely not distracted by Animal Crossing OR trying to take the ghost of partners past joke too far.

Managing moving fisheries based on unmoving physical or political boundaries, of course, results in conflict. Look up the great mackerel war of the late 2000’s between Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Britain over access to this fish in the North Sea. As temperatures were increasing, the fish were migrating farther and farther north (sound familiar?) causing conflict between who was allowed to catch what between the disputing parties. In this case, there was no solution. The fish were fished beyond a sustainable amount and the population collapsed.

We don’t have to stand by and simply watch this problem advance. We can fight to ensure that we may frolic annually in cherry blossom blooms (we MUST make that cherry blossom wand) and continue to fuel our rage at predictable exes… I mean sea bass. The best way to do this is to learn more about the problem, support those who are trying to change it, and advocate for those changes however you can. To learn more about changing communities and species under climate change, follow blogs like ours and scientists like Malin Pinsky. You can also support organizations like the Clean Air Task Force:

Here at Climate Replay, the only air we’re not interested in clearing is with our aforementioned ex, so we think the Clean Air Task Force is brilliant. Go check them out and see how you can advocate for climate solutions in your communities!

Thanks to Mariah Pfleger for providing an excellent screenshot of Pietro, the not-at-all-excellent clown.