You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on
Reading Passage 1 below. Climate Change Challenge for Computer
Gamers Fate of the World: The video game in
which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to
raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more
pressing issue: climate change. Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and
Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm
of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of
saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring
temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential
breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners
as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have
focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World
features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer
Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK.
It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose
previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a
million times since it was launched in 2006. Gobion Rowlands,
chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation
Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject
more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics
at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate
science panel. ’My wife was working on Allen’s
Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process
climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, 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.’ Allen has provided the
prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been
developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through
talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows
people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions
we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should
we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for
example’ Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun
Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could
be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on
whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation
franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of
sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message
often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be
interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games
that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’ But, he
added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as
the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan
played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity.
Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and
ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102
12-to 17-year-olds. Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that
games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate
change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and
geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet
and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see
the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a
better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by
doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up
to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an
age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend
and help us to smarten up.’ Green campaigners have welcomed
gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to
the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike
Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books,
films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight
against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling
with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will
be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international
climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’ —Guardian The aim of Fate of the World is to create an opportunity for people to learn climate change in an ideal environment.