You may have read a couple of days ago that Rez-creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi (did I tell you about the time I went to an Australian restaurant in Tokyo with him?) might be working on an interactive environmental project with Al Gore. There has been a reaction of mild surprise at the thought of a videogame developer becoming involved in such a venture - but when you think about it, games are filled with environmentally-friendly concepts.
Energy and item conservation are vital components of all combat games. In survival horror, no bullet is wasted, no herb squandered, while in RPGs the obsessive collection and management of weapons, potions and foodstuffs makes up a significant element of the in-game action. Plus, in most RPGs, we instinctively know never to wander into a discoloured cloud - it's bound to be poison gas. And with a predominantly elemental basis, magic in role-playing games is a symbol of natural order gone savagely awry. If you look at it in a certain way.
First-person shooters are filled with ecologically sound features. Re-spawning is the ultimate in recycling after-all, while vehicles are continually re-purposed - dumped by one player, they'll usually be picked up by another to provide more useful service in the war effort. Battlefield 1942 even introduced the engineer character class able to repair knackered tanks and jeeps (we'll pass over the fact that engineers can also lay landmines...).
And then, of course, there are strategy games. Sim City, with its great chunks of blackened empty land showed what happens when civil planning goes wrong. Civilization forces the player, throughout the game, to appreciate the development of a sustainable agricultural model. It also encourages players not to bomb enemy cities into submission, but rather to sneak in and spark a revolution - so much less waste. Resource management is a fundamental element of the RTS, requiring players to understand the delicate balances between nature and industrial ambition. And then we have Harvest Moon, perhaps the most explicitly environmental game of them all.
Pollution has proved a useful videogame device in dozens of games. The SNES RPG Lagoon is based around a small town whose water supply is poisoned by an evil sorcerer. C&C 3 takes place on a near-future earth polluted by the energy-rich substance, Tiberium. In Ratchet & Clank, Emperor Drek is a galactic post-industrial imperialist, seeking to steal chunkc of other planets to save his own devastated homeworld. S.T.A.L.K.E.R, finally released last month, creates a futuristic distopia around the abandoned Chernobyl plant.
Energy bars, limited ammo, limited lives... games are built around the eco-friendly concepts of recycling, repairing and re-using. When saddled with limited inventories, players often agonise over dropping valued weapons and supplies - nothing is wasted in games. Everything is there for a reason. We learn it quickly in the virtual world - quicker, let's face it, then we've ever realised it for real.
