Planet Zoo

Saving the Planet One Game at a Time

Video games are examined here as a potential vehicle for ecological awareness, with the central claim that they can make abstract environmental threats concrete through several design strategies.

• Effective eco-games share four design features: accurate ecosystem replication, meaningful player agency, changes of scale, and emotional engagement.
• The analysis warns of common pitfalls in eco-games, including over-reliance on technological fixes, idealization of nature-based labor, reproduction of orientalism and speciesism, and rewarding the resource exploitation they aim to critique. In the Solutions board game, only 8 of its 76 solution cards propose sociocultural rather than technological change.
• The main empirical evidence, a reception study of Abzû based on 2,421 player comments across 14 platforms, found that only a minority of players discussed the game's environmental message and none identified perpetual growth under petrocapitalism as a driver of ecosystem devastation.