A well-maintained coal plant in the new SimCity.
A polluted, dirty city caused by poor management of emissions.
UPDATE & APOLOGY 11/16: I erred in describing EA folks as the designers of SimCity Societies. It’s the crew at Tilted Mill Entertainment, outside Boston. The lead designer and company president, Chris Beatrice, helped clarify this for me (I admit freely that my sons are the gaming experts in my house, not me), and pointed out the importance of distinguishing between the creators of a game and the company that publishes it (which is Electronic Arts).
In an email, Mr. Beatrice explained that he approached BP with the idea of developing “a sort of ‘game within the game’ that would be both accurate and fun – not an easy challenge. We spent countless hours refining an approach that would meet these goals, and that was before our team of artists, programmers and sound designers got to work to do their parts as well.”
“My team and I eagerly took on the challenge of educating the public about this worthwhile cause within the context of a fun and accessible game, because we believe in the cause, and are always eager to use our unique medium to serve the public good,” he said. “We also of course saw this as an opportunity to counter the typically negative impression associated with (violent) video games in most of the mainstream news — because we don’t make those kinds of games (we make family friendly games). This is what Tilted Mill Entertainment is all about, and it’s very important to us that your readers know that. While I don’t expect my team to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, that certainly was the spirit in which we undertook this challenge, and strove to advance this cause.”
Somehow I doubt that the game designers at Electronic Arts are going to be in the running for a Nobel Peace Prize any time soon. But given how popular the SimCity series has been, there’s a decent chance that the new SimCity Societies game I just wrote about will engage more people with the realities of climate risks and responses than all the yelling about Bjorn Lomborg or Newt Gingrich. It could even have more impact on the American public (those not reading the Huffington Post or National Review) than “An Inconvenient Truth.”
One reason is that the game, while very much entertainment, forces players (at least the demo I saw) to make choices, to understand that forswearing coal means installing an amazing number of much more expensive wind turbines and solar panels.
That means that to avoid going broke fighting the climate fight, one has to invest a lot more to make energy storage and solar panels far, far cheaper — and such research still isn’t happening on anything close to the scale scientists say is needed.
An example of the dashboard that helps you monitor the health of your city and the environment.But the game also shows the long-term consequences of sticking with the cheap and easy fuel of the last two centuries — black combustible rocks. (I wonder what that coal-sales ticker that I blogged about recently is reading right now over on the www.peabodyenergy.com Web site?)
For gamers who build a city around fossil energy choices, droughts and heat waves supposedly intensify (I haven’t bought it yet). As the producer, Rachel Bernstein, explained, climate-related disasters abroad also have a ripple effect that hurts your imagined city’s economy. And on and on.
By the way, for those not willing or able to fork over $49.95, there is a simple Web-based city-building game out of New Zealand at electrocity.co.nz that has some of the same “what if” qualities. Thanks, Peggy Minnis of Pace University, for alerting me to this.
So maybe a game is a way to reveal two futures, kind of the way the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come enlightens Scrooge before it’s too late. As I said yesterday, we have only one planet to conduct the real game with, and that experiment is well under way.
Then the only question is whether people can internalize and act on that kind of information in their real, not simulated, world.
(BTW, are there other games like these out there with a climate component? Climate researchers at Princeton have put together a game of sorts to explain their “wedges” strategy for identifying opportunities to cut greenhouse gases. Any others?)
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From 1 to 25 of 32 Comments
Electrocity is fun, but very easy to game…just mine gas and sell it when the price spikes. Nevertheless, a fun way to pass the lunch hour at work.
— tommy suriwongWell, if SimCity can help people better understand ecological choices, then it may be good news that I just read that EA is porting SimCity to run on the One Laptop Per Child XO machines.
— Some GuyThere used to be a game called SimEarth. Among other things, the player had to control the envoronment of the planet.
— GeneThey might not make accurate estimates of economies of scale of solar and wind collection devices in the SimCity computer model, or fully account for incidental costs of burning coal.
Why don’t you spend as much researching multi-megawatt-hour lithium batteries for centralized storage of energy from distributed collectors as you do on oxymoronic “clean coal” combustion?
— Steve BolgerChevron has a game focused primarily on energy at http://www.willyoujoinus.com/energyville – although climate does come into play somewhat. I don’t necessarily agree with the way they assign environmental, economic, and security risks and benefits to the various energy options, but it is a good conversation starter.
— EmilyInteresting game. Here’s a shock: I read National Review, agree with a lot of the articles, enjoy the magazine, AND I’m concerned about the environment, oil dependency, alternate fuels, and the war. Oh, I’m also a bible believing Christian. I think one of our country’s biggest problems is that the person on one side of an issue believes all the stereo typing he or she has heard about the person on the other side.
— KenThere have been a number of environmental simulation games in the past.
When I was a kid, there was a very simple computer game (we played on teletypes) that simulated the relationship between farm fertilizer use, algae and bacterial growth, and fish population.
I also remember playing a board game that simulated air, water, and solid waste disposal policies for cities. (Very likely long out of print.)
Besides SimCity, Maxis also made SimEarth, which simulated cloud albedo, CO2 content, etc. etc. Unfortunately, the Sim games seem to be gravitating toward bad animations of lots of people wandering around the scenery rather than making more intriguing simulations per se.
— ClaytonHurray for Electronic Arts adding yet another new dimension to their wonderful SimCity series. I’ve been a big fan of the SimCity games since ‘95, and each new version has been a more complex, more entertaining game and all have proved to be a formidable learning tool in [imaginary] urban planning.
— BlueArtichokeThe greatest game in the history of the computer, Sid Meier’s Civilization, has long had a global warming component. The seas will literally rise and swamp your cities unless you adopt eco-friendly technologies. Also happens if you nuke too many of your enemies.
— Chris K.A game called “Call to Power” stressed the environmental consequences of unbridled growth. It left out most of the detail. Also, I don’t know if it is still available in stores.
— EugeneI don’t know how to avoid presuming that a “bible-believing Christian” maintains a mental model of two parallel universes on either side of the sky with two different sets of rules they can choose between at any point in a discussion of facts.
Please don’t try to tell me that your opinion represents what God thinks.
— Steve BolgerI’d like to see this integrated into computer class! People should learn at an early age that a cheaper, dirty present certainly won’t lead to a healthy, prosperous future. Ebay has a lot for sale at a good price if you want to give it a try.
— LaVidaVerdeThe “Civilization” games have had global warming built into them for over ten years. The tradeoffs for avoiding it in earlier games were not that sophisticated, but they had the option of building solar and hydro plants in lieu of coal, and building public transportation to avoid consumer generated emissions.
This hardly amounts to a revolution worth writing about. Must be a slow week.
— bkpIf memory serves, the classic game Civilization II had a bit of this built in: once your society modernized, you had to either invest in clean energy technology or pollution would appear. If enough pollution was present for long enough, the sea levels could rise, wiping out coastal cities. Pretty impressive for a game released over ten years ago!
— ByronThis blog posting continues the thesis that we just can’t solve the greenhouse gas problem without a lot of new research. Now, this thesis is not entirely wrong; more research in various directions certainly is important. But it is far from the whole truth about American energy policy. The US is a wealthy country that could substantially mitigate greenhouse gas production with existing technologies. Maybe it would be hard for India and China, but changing the subject to what they can afford is dodging our own responsibility.
For one thing, a lot of electricity in the US is just plain wasted out of sheer habit, without even saving anyone any money. For another, although wind and nuclear are both more expensive than coal, they aren’t all that expensive. The real issue is that coal is as cheap as dirt, not that the alternatives are unaffordable. You could price coal entirely out of the market with a greenhouse tax that the nation could easily afford. Such a tax would be a monster to the coal industry, but not to the economy as a whole.
It would be one thing if America were overtaxed. It isn’t: both the federal government and the economy run a deficit and a shift towards savings would make a lot of economic sense. There is no strong economic argument against imposing a greenhouse tax immediately. Maybe SimCity makes that point and maybe it doesn’t, but you have to remember that it’s just a game.
What particularly bothers me about the recurrent plugs for research in your articles is that some of them resonate with Republican calls for inaction. The Republicans have maintained that greenhouse taxes are a bigger monster than global warming; and hey, maybe some frocked genius will discover a way to slay both at once. That is the motivation for the bogus “hydrogen economy” research program. (From the sound of it, it’s also the thinking at the self-parodying “Breakthrough Institute”.)
— Greg KuperbergHa, I’m going to trump you all with the first environmental game I ever saw. It was in the 60’s at the University of North Carolina and it was called Foxes and Hares. It ran on a teletype connected to the university’s mainframe (that was very impressive in those days!) You entered the population of foxes and the population of hares and watched as the computer slowly calculated the interaction between the two as the food supply and predator population cycled around each other.
On another point, today everyone thinks of computers as being digital, but there were two types of computers in the late 60’s – digital and analog – and they were about the same in capability. For determining complex interactions like environmental effects the analog computers were better. However, digital won and all research on developing analog computers stopped.
— C. Reaves“Why don’t you spend as much researching multi-megawatt-hour lithium batteries for centralized storage of energy from distributed collectors”
It’s a better bet, IMHO, to smarten up the grid so the energy could be used directly to charge batteries in people’s homes. That avoids the power loss from converting electrical energy to chemical, then back. That way solar or wind providers could find their niche in the energy market.
— A3kThis looks like a great game, and should be very interesting for everyone. Common sense adds the environmental aspect to the game and I hope it’ll wake up some in my generation who might otherwise not be paying attention.
- Benjamin Jones
— Benjamin JonesI am very disappointed with Sim Societies, as a longtime fan of the SimCity franchise. While I welcome the climate related features, other areas of the game have been significantly dumbed down, such as transportation and waste collection. The game is much more like a “Civilization” clone than a new installment to the already fantastic SimCity franchise. It’s a shame MAXIS didn’t develop this one.
— RichardI’d agree that games have the power to educate in profound ways and it’s nice to see that the SimCity franchise is continuing it’s emphasis on environmental impact. However, this is far from news; energy, emissions and pollution was a significant gameplay factor in SimCity2000 back in 1993. The next 2 games in the series built upon that and added sanitation and wildlife among other environmental features. People can learn a lot by playing any of the previous SimCity games.
Along the same lines, it is my hope that if and when Maxis releases Spore, it well help educate young Americans about biology, sociology, technology and evolution in the same way the studios previous games have been educational (to varying degrees) on a variety of subjects.
— RussellToo bad it’s Windows/XP only.
— SteveMy son started playing SimCity back in the mid 90’s and I do recall the droughts and other things the author atributes to coal plants and pollution. Could it be that the game programmers bought into global warming 10 years ago or so? Or was their day job in the sciences?
— SierraTime for a “Triple Play”: Reduce Oil Prices and Dependence on Fossil Fuels, while Meeting the Growing Demand for Electric Power
The Cost of Oil
Oil prices are climbing toward $100/barrel. In two years there will be one billion automotive vehicles worldwide. If current trends continue, by 2030 world oil supply, projected to be 70 Million barrels per day, will fall far short of the estimated daily demand. The projected shortfall of 40 Million barrels of oil per day will drive fuel costs far beyond tenable levels. The world will see more wars, such as the conflict in Iraq, unless a path is opened that can dramatically reduce demand for oil.
Fossil Fuels and Global Warming
James Hansen speaks for many scientists, stating we must dramatically reduce the use of fossil fuels in less than a decade to avoid life threatening catastrophes. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, concluded that drastic shifts are happening more rapidly than predicted. Heat waves, flooding, drought, tropical storms and sea level surges are expected to become more frequent, more widespread and intense. Each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature deprives between 400 million and 1.7 billion people of water.
Greenland loses more ice each year than all the ice in the Alps said Konrad Steffen, a Greenland expert and advisor on abrupt climate change. “It is scary,” said Steffen. Not only in Greenland, but in Antarctica and elsewhere there is massive melting of ice. In 8 years nearly all Peru’s glaciers will be gone due to global warming and its 27 million people will nearly all lack fresh water, with the likely result being: ‘chaos, conflict and mass migration’. A total of 46 nations and 2.7 billion people are now at high risk of being overwhelmed by armed conflict and war because of climate change. A further 56 countries face political destabilization, affecting another 1.2 billion individuals. (Observer UK 11-4-07). More than 180 nations have coastal areas in peril. Two-thirds have over 5 million people under threat of serious flooding. Included are cities such as New York, London, Miami, Shanghai and Tokyo.
The World’s Huge Appetite for Energy
Energy consumption is at the core of human existence. It virtually controls what we eat, how we live, where we go, how we are entertained, our health, knowledge, defense and exploration. The world’s demand for energy is surging.
The International Energy Outlook 2006, by the U.S. Department of Energy, forecasts electricity use will grow by an average of 2 percent per year worldwide and almost twice as rapidly in the developing world. Robust economic growth in many developing nations is expected to boost demand for electricity for air conditioning, cooking, space and water heating, and refrigeration. Global energy consumption is projected to increase by 71% from 2003 to 2030. We need to sharply accelerate development of radically new, cost-effective, sustainable alternatives.
The Triple Play
A revolutionary new technology, GENIE™ (Generating Electricity by Nondestructive Interference of Energy) is being developed at Magnetic Power, Inc. (MPI).
MPI has dedicated more than 20 years of research and development into exploring breakthrough technologies. To reverse the trends discussed above, MPI envisions a technological revolution, developed commercially, that has limited impact on available planetary resources. GENIE is projected to be easy to manufacture and use, as well as inexpensive, thus capable of rapidly achieving global impact.
Based upon proprietary breakthrough discoveries in MPI’s labs, GENIE generators are being designed to operate continuously, without fuel, extracting electricity by converting an energy source that exists everywhere in the universe. This process creates no pollution. The cost of electricity is estimated to be significantly less than any competing form of power generation, today or in the foreseeable future.
GENIE generators with no rotating parts can be made in many of the world’s electronics factories. Household units will produce power 24/7. Larger units will replace automobile engines. GENIE will eliminate any need for fuel to run a vehicle. It can also allow future cars to become income producing power plants when parked.
GENIE is a magnetic device. Nobel physicist Werner Heisenberg once stated: “We could utilize magnetism as an energy source”. Hans Coler demonstrated a 6 Kilowatt, solid-state, magnetic “space-energy receiver” in Germany during 1937. It was destroyed by an Allied bomb during WWII. The invention was confirmed by British Intelligence after the War. However, at the time, there was no comprehension as to the source of the energy. Coler wrote: “These fundamental researches…have made the first real and large breach in the citadel of present scientific belief.”
Advanced GENIE prototypes are currently being constructed by MPI. Lee Felsenstein, EE, evaluated an early proof-of-concept prototype. He felt it to be analogous to the first examples of the transistor, which eventually led to a Nobel Prize and the creation of Silicon Valley (and similar high-tech complexes throughout the world).
A near-term MPI goal is a compact, solid-state, 1 kW self-sustaining generator. In 2008, a plug-in hybrid car, with a pair of these 1,000 watt GENIE prototypes, is expected to demonstrate that a connection to the grid is not necessary in order to recharge the battery. That will herald the beginning of an end to the need for fuel.
The urgent need is for an emergency changeover, in less than a decade, from burning fuel, to widespread use of new sources of energy that eliminate the need for fossil fuels. The Triple Play made possible by GENIE makes that a practical goal. We applaud all efforts to replace oil and reduce greenhouse gases. However, nothing short of revolutionary new technology can act fast enough to save millions of lives.
Scientists may express skepticism, since the energy source is not yet widely understood. Acceptance will come when one sits on a desk in front of them and produces electricity. MPI is developing room heaters, Demonstration Devices and toys. Young people with open minds might teach their elders how they function. This Triple Play can and will accelerate, as rapidly as the required funding will allow.
http://www.magneticpowerinc.com
— Mark GoldesThe SimCity model correctly notes that to migrate from our current energy situation costs a lot of moeny and will take time. Even if you want to go nuclear and drive on hydrogen, that is not going to happen any time soon. While overly simplisitc, SimCity recognizes that society needs a balnce of r&d expenditure and supportive governemtnal spending if we are ver going to stop burning gasoline in our cars. That is a lot more than can be said for a lot of the zealots purporting to define policy today.
— Maui SanWith distributed intermittent generation, the grid makes its living charging more for energy it delivers than it pays for energy it receives. The differential pays for spinning generation reserve now. If the are economies of scale to centralizing electricity storage instead, this margin will fund it.
Many generators may be net drawers from the system who may prefer not to own batteries.
— Steve Bolger