Global Warming for Gamers

[phantom power]

I'm pretty sure I played this on our Apple IIe back in 1982, but back then it was all text and it was called "Hammurabi"

In the real world, even leaders of nations are having trouble figuring that out. But in the new strategy video game “Fate of the World,” players singlehandedly confront that daunting challenge, while tackling peak oil, overpopulation and saving the rain forest to boot.

“You are in charge,” Gobion Rowlands, founder and chairman of Red Redemption, the British-based design company that created the game, said in an interview. “It’s your world to save or destroy.”

Players serve as the president of the “Global Environmental Organization,” a fictional group with the ability to dictate economic, environmental and social policies around the world — “a U.N. with teeth,” Matt Miles Griffiths, one of the games’ designers, told me.

Over the course of 200 years, players must surmount a variety of challenges, from saving the Amazon rain forest to creating a post-oil economy in the United States — a scenario dubbed “Oil Crash America.” As the years progress, resources dwindle, temperatures climb and ecosystems around the world crumble, raising the stakes.

The game relies on climate prediction models supplied by Myles Allen, head of the climate dynamics group at the University of Oxford’s atmospheric, oceanic and planetary physics department.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/global-warming-for-gamers/

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. This might be good -

a gaming methadone treatment for my Civ IV heroin addiction. Instead of uncounted hours conquering the world, I could spend uncounted hours saving the world (to the same real-world effect).

[Terry in Austin]

2. Hammurabi

Enjoyed many hours of Hammurabi on my Apple II. The game actually goes back to one called "Kingdom," which I first saw running on a MITS Altair.

[Odin2005]

3. I WANT!!!

[bananas]

4. simcity = Hammurabi 10.0

[bananas]

5. survivor tv show = Hammurabi 100.0