Sea change
How games such as Floodland and Terra Nil are engaging with the climate crisis
A
rt reflects the anxieties of the era.
Cold War nuclear tension inspired the creation of everything from the alien invasion flicks of the 1950s to Atari’s hit 1980 coin-op
Missile
Command.
Now, with anxieties increasingly focused on the climate crisis, it’s only natural that game developers would respond. Bleak forecasts of catastrophic sea-level rises have inspired both
Highwater,
a forthcoming turn-based PC strategy adventure made by Demagog Studio in Serbia, and Vile Monarch’s
Floodland,
a PC city-builder launched in November that puts you in charge of scattered survivors attempting to rebuild society from whatever scraps they can find in half-submerged cities.
This has gained the latter game an unlikely champion in the form of Sir Tony Robinson. Robinson is of course well known for his TV roles in Blackadder and Time Team – and, relevantly, Man On Earth, a 2009 Channel 4 documentary series that looked at the effects of climate change across 200,000 years of history. “For some time, I’ve been wrestling with the fact that it’s very difficult to talk about global warming in a way which isn’t so depressing that it makes everybody want to switch off and go and party, or sit in the corner and cry,” Robinson tells us. “Neither of those options are really much good to anybody, and I became intrigued by the fact that a lot of people are trying to find new ways of talking about global warming.” As for the actual benefit of such pop-cultural representations? “It’s hard to empathise. By nature, we don’t dwell on other people’s agony too much, otherwise we’d all go mad. So I think there has been this kind of distancing from global catastrophe, which is actually totally inappropriate.”