Saving the world from your armchair brings home the enormity of climate change, says Jack Arnott
Being asked to save the world while sitting in your living room is the kind of request gamers take in their stride. And while Fate of the World arms you with environmental data and renewable energy policies rather than grenades and rocket launchers, the result is still compelling.
The action takes the form of a turn-based data-management simulator ? think Football Manager, but with biofuels. You're given a budget with which to implement various schemes across different geopolitical areas, each of which have different long- and short-term costs. Put an emissions cap on a growing economy, stifling growth, and they'll get fed up and throw your agency out of the area. Encourage investment and prosperity and there'll soon be environmental consequences. Each turn sends you forward five years ? and you're informed as the game progresses of the many changes that take place in the world as temperatures increase. As if the sheer difficulty of Fate of the World wasn't sobering enough, watching the planet crumble ? wars and natural disasters are often triggered inadvertently by your decisions, and you're informed each time a major species becomes extinct ? really brings home the enormity of the impact of climate change.
Multiple scenarios are available offering differing challenges and targets ? from managing the oil crisis to protecting the Amazon rainforest ? meaning there's a great deal of replayability for those wishing to learn as much as they can about the issues handled in the game.
There's even an anarchic "Dr Apocalypse" mode in which your goal is to raise temperatures around the world as much as you can without losing the political support of different regions.
This dark humour crops up throughout the game and helps alleviate moments where things may get a little too dry. If a regime is refusing to bow to demands, why not sponsor an insurgency force to take them out? Better yet, if a country has an unforgivably high population to emissions ratio (I'm looking at you, North America), why not covertly sterilise the population?
Though the variables on offer can be a little bewildering,, by using real data models the game provides a fascinating simulation of what the next 200 years have in store for Earth. President Arnott not only failed to prevent catastrophic climate change but ended up being barred from most continents ? I can only hope my real-life counterparts fare better.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/31/fate-of-the-world-review
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