Fun with depopulation: Fate of the World

There’s a new computer game released this week, but ‘Fate of the World’ is a green game, designed with the cooperation of climate academics like Dr Myles Allen of the Oxford University. So far, so good, but this gets weird in a uniquely green way.

The aim of the game is to save the planet, of course, but some of the methods available to players attempting to achieve the lofty goal are all too familiar to skeptics and more than a little disturbing. It begins to go awry when the scientists involved felt the need to make the game ‘scary’:

Dr Myles Allen, who provided the climate model, pushed us to make sure we included methane as well as CO2, but he did so for game play reasons as well as scientific ones. He pointed out that if we included methane we could include a lot of exciting/scary geo-engineering technologies. That opened up a new set of features for players: who wouldn’t want to be able to risk plunging the Earth into an Ice Age, or cause floods of biblical proportions?!

Perhaps the disasters are just a way to sell the product. Or maybe it’s just the first hint that the game is another incarnation of the green blood lust recently exposed in the 10:10 splattergate movie. Familiar dark green fantasies appear in the game:

Global governance:

…the year is 2020 and the world has done nothing significant to tackle the multitude of problems facing 21st century society, and then the first impacts strike and the nations create a new global organisation – the World Environment Organisation – and they put you in charge.

Depopulation:

the simple expedient of removing a large proportion of the planet’s population from circulation. Let’s say with an engineered super-virus. The first thing to say about this is the obvious, that killing every last person in Africa would have less impact on climate change than getting Westerners to use 10% less energy. But let’s say you spread the virus around evenly, so everyone loses say half their family (the half who always get them crap stuff for Christmas). The trouble is, people don’t just conveniently fall over and die. Their friends and loved ones have to go and try and keep them alive, or always want to bury them decently instead of just tossing them in a skip; and then they spend time moaning and weeping and what have you. And that guy in IT who was fixing your laptop? He’s gone, and so, by the way, is the engineer who was keeping the power station running. So the rest of your society stops working so well, and that potentially puts your civilisation into a downward spiral as critical infrastructure falls apart.

Killing large swathes of the populace can be such an inconvenience when your iPod won’t charge.

The game is unlikely to be successful except as a reminder that greens see mankind as a problem to be eradicated. Whether they are blowing up skeptics or encouraging moppets to design super-bugs to commit mass murder, it’s all the same to the green mindset. As long as it’s good for Gaia, anything goes. But you go first.

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