Games grimy and green
Every day, I spend an hour or three playing a game called Factorio, in which you mine and process natural resources with which to build and automate ever-larger factories that manufacture materials for research, transport, power, and weapons. Once your factories get big enough (say, when they consume 10 MW), Factorio is less like a game and more like a simulator, and wherein your task is to automate your setup to the extent possible while emitting as little pollution as you can. I currently operate a 120-MW mini-empire of factories, and parts of it are already more complicated than I can describe. The game's fun lies in being able to optimise your setup across several interacting factors in order to maximise sustainability and efficiency and minimise conflict (which arises due to expansion and pollution). If you like building things that just work, Factorio will ping your reward pathways enough to leave you ecstatic.
This morning, while browsing the web in search of a solution for a problem with one of my factories, I came across a game called Terra Nil. Here, you reclaim a degraded ecosystem by rewatering and re-greening it using machines, leading up – among other things – to completely restoring the land and removing all machines. There are multiple landscape types to begin with, three difficulty levels, and each combination (unless it's extremely difficult) has no one solution. The best thing for me about Terra Nil, unlike Factorio, is that the visuals accompanying the re-greening process – water flowing anew in once dry channels, wetlands coming to life around a hydroponium, a thunderstorm over young forests – are very soothing on the mind. Also unlike Factorio, pollution is not inevitable in Terra Nil, and Terra Nil also has a design that accentuates the lushness of its scenarios instead of the grimy look that Factorio uses.
This said, both games are similar to the extent that they incorporate a sci-fi narrative that means, among other things, the technologies in use aren't realistic, nor do they embody stories about why pollution is bad or ecosystem restoration is good. Put another way, how you narrativise the stories available to tell in each game is up to you. If you're playing with your children, you can use Factorio to show, say, how quickly pollution builds or Terra Nil to say how expensive cleaning up pollution can be. If you're playing with India's Union environment ministry, Factorio can help you see how pollution in one area needn't affect another and— you get the drift.
I discovered two more similar games, where the player consumes limited resources in order to build things and achieve some goal, that I hope to try next week: Dyson Sphere Program and Oxygen Not Included.
