Remember when the BBC came up with a climate change game? Well, now Chevron has done so, as well. Apparently, all the data in the game came from the Economist Intelligence Unit. The BBC game suffered a fair bit of well-deserved criticism. I have yet to give the Chevron simulation a comprehensive try, but I am waiting with a fair bit of curiousity for a chance.
You can read a bit more about the Chevron game on R-Squared: a popular energy blog.
[9 September 2007] This game doesn’t really have much to it. By constraining you to the management of a single city over the span of a couple of decades, it excludes both the chronological and geographic scale at which real change needs to take place. Still, it is interesting from a corporate public relations standpoint. Unsurprisingly, the game simply forbids you from using a power balance that excludes petroleum.
Skinner:”We can buy real periodic tables instead of these promotional ones from Oscar Meyer.”
Krabappel:”Who can tell me the atomic weight of bolognium?”
Martin: “Ooh … delicious?”
Krabappel: “Correct. I would also accept snacktacular.”
Have you seen this controversial Greenpeace video.
Oiligarchy – Strategy Game
Below the fold is a copy of the free game Oiligarchy, for some Mother’s Day afternoon fun. It is a strategy game, simulating what oil companies do and the obstacles they face. It can also be found at this link.
Mr Lille does not exist. Neither does the country, Petronia. They appear instead in a new online game created by the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), a think-tank based in New York and London that seeks to improve the management of oil, gas and mineral wealth in developing countries. As a player, you take on the role of that pesky foreign adviser eavesdropping on Mr Lille. As well as the drinks reception, your adventures will take you to the presidential palace, the capital city’s cafés and markets, and the coastal district of Neftala, where the oil was discovered.
In its training courses NRGI has long experimented with role-playing. It hopes that the game, which took £130,000 ($170,000) and three years to produce, will reach a wider audience, including activists in countries that see a lot of themselves in Petronia. A former employee, Jed Miller, has described it as “grand theft petro”.
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NRGI is not alone in venturing into this kind of “serious gaming”. Petronia’s launch event featured Elizabeth Newbury of the Wilson Centre, who has helped create games out of American government policy. In “The Fiscal Ship”, for example, players try to cut America’s public debt while meeting national goals they can choose (or copy from President Donald Trump). Ms Kuai thinks that films like “Avatar” and “Black Panther” show that the politics of natural resources has broad cultural resonance. “We wanted to catch this wave,” she says.