Wish that, like fantasy baseball players or civilization builders, you could have your own planet to kill with greenhouse gases? Good news! "Fate of the World" lets you run a UN environmental group tasked with saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or - and you know most people will do this - seeing what soaring temperatures do.
The people really excited about this "issue-led gaming" concept are the same people who think a game about cleaning up pollution would lead to less pollution and comic books about religion make kids want to go to church. Basically they think people are pretty dumb and will only understand climate change if it's a game. But let's face it, BP executives are not buying this game and getting rehabilitated, the already convinced are.
Like many games, and apparently Facebook, this game issued forth from a drunken challenge. Gobion Rowlands, chairman at developer Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organization Games for Change, made a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, he told Adam Vaughan at the Guardian:
"We got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change."
The big issue with climate change advocacy is earnestness that has bordered on smarmy and making a game of it may be more fun than listening to Al Gore. If so, it could be a win.
Ed Yong at Discover called this "World of WarmCraft", which would have been a much better title than "Fate of the World" - presumably "Sanctimonious Environmentalists" didn't do that well in testing.
It's not released yet but is available for pre-order. If you pre-order a game based on a cultural hot topic without at least trying a demo version first, you deserve whatever you get.
