Here’s how video games can save the world

Stop in front of a tree, e hear his story. Save an entire ecosystem, with the right combination of commands. In video games, this is possible. More and more, they are not just means of entertainment, to escape from reality, but they are also establishing themselves as an educational toolwhich can be used to talk about sustainability. It’s there gamificationthe game that emerges from an exclusively playful perspective to convey other messages.

The dialogue with trees, for example, is part of a detailed project just launched by the Municipality of Dossena and Roncobello, Na.tur.arteto enhance the mountain area of ​​Val Brembana and encourage sustainable tourism that is aware of the surrounding natural environment. Among the initiatives, an interactive journey where it will be possible talk to plants, animated by artificial intelligence. Various immersive projections are also planned inside the town hall, where visitors will be able to become part of the narrative of the territory.

«Video games are one of the most used expressions, especially in the under 40 age groupboth at an Italian and international level”, he explains Fabio Violacurator of Video Game Zone of the Turin Cinema Museum, inaugurated in the summer of 2024, and of the video games area of ​​Lucca Comics&Games. His cultural association, TuoMuseo, is among the partners of the Dossena project, together with GAMeC, the Polytechnic of the Arts of Bergamo, the Bergamo Orobie Park, the Menna Ortighera Forestry Consortium and VisitDossena. «Inside the video game, in part, identities, awareness, ways of relating to oneself and others are formed. And the topic of sustainability is often addressed in some way in this sector.”

Teamwork

There are games where the environmental issue is somehow part of the plotperhaps because they take place in a post-apocalyptic era or after some natural disaster that has destroyed almost all forms of life. The Last of Usfrom which the successful HBO series was also based, imagines the proliferation of a fungus that takes control of the nervous system, and which was able to contaminate human beings thanks to the increase in temperatures. Other video games, however, have the final objective of restoring an ecosystem, as in Land Nildeveloped by Free Lives and published by Devolver Digital, released in 2023, where players they purify the soil, clean the oceans and plant trees.

«Compared to other languages, such as books or films, video games are largely collaborative-competitive experiencesthat is, multiple people collaborate or compete with each other in real time”, observes Viola. Not only, therefore, the experience of working as a team for a common goal (and the most common goal is to save the planet), but they also become an ideal “ground” for activism: “A good part of the protest movements of today, against wars, for feminisms… they don’t happen in physical squares, but often they take place within online multiplayer video games». On the possibility that what happens in a virtual context moves into reality, Viola is optimistic: «The first moment of protest already happens in the digital worlds, as well as social media. Today’s methods are different compared to the squares of the twentieth century». And the videogame community is an extremely large community, which brings together more and more enthusiasts. Just look at the enthusiasts who gather there every year Lucca Comics&Game: tickets sold for the last edition were almost 300 thousand, and the total attendance according to the organization was much more. Just with the video game The Last of Us we have seen how much elements presented in the virtual world can become subject of real debate: in the second installation of the game, the sexuality of the protagonist Ellie, who in a scene kisses another girl, has great importance, and has divided the players, who represent in any case a very transversal segment of the population: from those closest to the alt right to people who needed to see themselves in the heroes of a game.

What video games put us in front of, without discounts, are above all thereand consequences of our actions: where it is possible to accelerate time, it becomes evident how everything we do has an impact on the environment. «If I throw a piece of paper on the ground, I immediately understand the damage it can cause», explains Viola. «I see a dead animal because the waste paper reached the aquifer, polluted it, the animal drank the polluted water and died. In real life, a process like this takes years».

Even at school

Viola has followed several gamification projects, such as GreenNAppan app dedicated to the gardens of Naples, with interactive cards that allow you to learn about urban greenery, and has collaborated with schools: it created the app Play for Planet&Artswhich offers children various thematic missions related, for example, to biodiversity or sustainability, also expanding to art and culture. Launched in October, it will be tested in the elementary schools of Basiglio, a municipality between Milan and Pavia.

An example of Play for Planet&Arts activities

Immersing yourself in the context, as happens in games and with augmented reality, is an effective way for students to understand what talking about the environment really means. «Deforestation in the Amazon, which is very far from us, can become closeor even just experience what it might be like to live in space if one day the Earth became uninhabitable.”

Abroad, some video games have even become textbooks: this is the case with This War of Uswhich has entered the high school curriculum in Poland. The game is set during the siege of Sarajevo, and its aim is not to win a battle, but survival in wartime. In Italy, many video games aimed at protecting the environment are created within research institutes, also thanks to European tenders that have encouraged this type of project, as Viola explains: with an additional entertainment component, they can also spread among the general public public, with the encouragement to be more aware even when it’s not just a game. From the immersive reality to the reality in which we are actually immersed.