What Now?: Ecogames after Missed Climate Targets

This conference paper by Conor McKeown argues that ecogames scholarship must shift from a focus on preservation and damage limitation toward engagement with the lived realities of an already-changing climate, now that overshooting the Paris 1.5°C target is effectively acknowledged as inevitable. McKeown contends that existing ecogames work, though substantial, remains oriented toward hopeful, forward-looking reforms of game design and industry practice, and is insufficiently anchored in present climate catastrophe. The paper proposes that games addressing livability, citizenship, and practical adaptation should be counted as ecogames, with climate migration identified as the most pressing area of concern.

The author surveys representative scholarship and initiatives in the field, including work by Chang, Abraham, Fizek, and Prax, as well as practical projects such as Green Game Jams, Playing for the Planet, Bart Simon's solar-powered Minecraft server, and the EcoKnowGames project on Lotka-Volterra modeling. While McKeown credits these efforts with meaningful influence on industry sustainability, he judges them to lack direct engagement with immediate climate impacts. Recent work on climate refugees in games, such as Carolin Becklas's study of Battlefield 2042, is cited as a promising direction that still falls short of practical intervention.

To illustrate the expanded scope he advocates, McKeown points to existing titles such as Immigration Nation and Chants of Sennaar, which he argues should be read as climate-relevant despite not being typically categorized that way. He also describes classroom experiments in which students create Twine games on climate migration, including a Singapore-based student project exploring heat, food attitudes, and multicultural tensions. The paper is a short, polemical position piece rather than an empirical study, and its argument rests on theoretical framing and illustrative examples rather than survey data or systematic analysis.