Blog Action Day: Global climate change summits in Climate Challenge 2010

So today is Blog Action Day on Climate Change. Obviously this subject is close to my heart (this is Gobion btw) so I am taking part :)

With the Copenhagen COP-15 climate change negotiations soon upon us, I wanted to write about my first experience with the summits process in Climate Challenge 2010. It is also the first time I will start talking about particular game play elements, as the team are currently putting together the first rough cut of the game and the designers and developers let me loose on this bit of the game (so far). I got a chance to play with some of these rough elements of game play.

Before I go any further, a proviso: I'm not a designer or a developer for Climate Challenge 2010 – my main role is as spokesman for the company, and what I am writing here reflects my personal experience with the game. The game still has many months left of development and no doubt over time very many elements of the experience will change. It is a natural part of the design and testing process. So with that proviso in place, take this as a snap shot of work in progress from my perspective.

Summits are an interesting part of the game for me for several reasons:

• They are where I get the 12 regional groups to sign up to global level agreements
  
• They provided me a fun change of pace from regional fire-fighting, shifting my focus to the big picture
  
• They give me the chance to play out what goes on "under the hood" at these international negotiations.
  

The real world process of negotiation is one of convincing the various partners that they want to reach a common agreement, and that can be much trickier than it sounds. National negotiators generally want to add exceptions for elements they do not want, amendments to add in elements they do want, follow the orders they have been given by their governments and to come out of the negotiations looking like they stronger/better/more willing party.

When multiple nations come together with these requirements tend to butt heads. Sometimes that can be worked out, but sometimes a party will just storm off in protest (or mock protest), or threaten to storm off in order to put more weight behind their requirements. International agreements are partly voluntary: unless you're prepared to go to war you can't make a sovereign nation sign something they don't like into law in their country.

The development team let me play with a first “rough cut” of the summits system. I was hoping that this part of the game would reflect the real world negotiation, back room dealing, posturing, and deal making; but of course I also hoped to be the driving force behind successful negotiations!

How did it work for me as a player?
In the game I was given an initial agenda that I could accept or throw out (at the risk of the sponsoring parties leaving the table), and then add in my own issues. I found that some of the nations were especially willing to storm out – and that made me adjust my strategy a bit to try and keep them in, or if I couldn't to ensure that the regions I most wanted involved stayed in. If I couldn't get everyone to agree, maybe I could just satisfy the biggest players?

My draft agenda was haggled over and some of the regions added in riders, which surprised and intrigued me. Hopefully as this system continues to evolve as it made some agenda items I did not like become married to agenda items I did like. This felt a lot like the “real world” to me (though of course I could be wrong – but that was my impression!).

Once that stage was completed I had the chance to adjust the final agenda and put it to the vote. At this stage of production it was really tough: most regions refused to ratify my proposed agreement! (It was pointed out to me several times that this was pre-balancing.)

Overall I like this part of the game, and I plan to follow this post up with some thoughts from the design team themselves soon. In December myself and Hannah, our science advisor, from our team are going to the Copenhagen COP-15 negotiations. There I will get to see how my experiences in the game marry up with the real world which should be exciting. So expect more about summits soon!

Interview with our games designer

April 16 2009

Ian Roberts,
Creative Director and Lead Games Designer on Climate Challenge 2010

Ian Roberts is the lead games designer on Climate Challenge 2010. He designs the game experience and mechanics that the developers then programme and the artists bring to life visually. In many ways he is the heart of the game. Ian came to us with experience across a wide range of new media forms, ranging from award-winning video production and editing to 3D Graphics and website programming. These skills are combined with a background in media, film, literature and cultural research in the forms of academic study, writing, lectures and teaching which gives him a unique outlook on games design.

While working for Red Redemption he has been lead games designer on all of our games (including Climate Challenge and Operation: Climate Control), has produced extensive web portals including the ClimateX.org for Oxford University, directed and edited academic multi-media presentation films for University College London, and was an games industry consultant for the UK Department of Trade and Industry.

I wanted to interview him about his influences...

GR: What was the first game you ever played?
IR: Almost certainly something very simple like Pong as we had one of those old Atari boxes where you had this clunky selector with one of those joysticks with one of those big satisfying button. The first game I became obsessed with as a computer game was "Elite" I played religiously on the Spectrum 128k which was all swish and fancy with a tape deck.

GR: What is your favourite game and why?
IR: That's a really tricky question as there are lots of different kinds of games and they are difficult to compare - like apples and oranges. So I think a game which really captured me first time I played it was Ron Gibert's original "The Secret of Monkey Island" it was probably the first of its kind [adventure game] that I had played and it was so incredibly well put together, witty and all the things that make it a classic so that is definitely something I have very fond memories of. Modern games that hearken back to that such as Psychonauts work very well for me.

GR: What games influence your design of socially conscious games?
IR: Well I can think of a couple of examples in games where I've really felt that the game as a medium and an art form surprised me in terms of how it conveyed my awareness of something I already knew but never really understood, so for example a very early point of realisations for me was in the early 1990s. It was the game Cannon Fodder weirdly. You wouldn't think of Cannon Fodder as a socially-aware game it is a war game, it had a poppy on the front cover and was asked to remove the poppy by the Haig(?) foundation because they felt it was offensive to have a game which trivialises war, but in fact I found that to be the first computer game which didn't trivialise war, but whilst it had bright sprites and look and feel it was completely ruthless. Your little soldiers that die will die normally by being hit by a single bullet or single piece of debris, and while you play the game you see a memorial hill and you see a list of the fallen and it gets longer and longer and longer and longer. And it is very shocking as it happens where you would normally have a victorius transition. There is this really stark reminder that all of these people have died, and they have died because you are controlling them. And that made me understand casualties of war to a much great extent than reading about historical battles ever could. You had a direct relationship with what was going on, and whilst it was a fun shooter game it had this serious war message which I thought was excellent.

Deus Ex is another very good example in the level of immersion in the world and the freedom it gave you. and it was unique at the time for granting you this freedom allowed you to not only uncover the intricacies of this conspiracy in this dystopian future, but also to allow you to take control over which way it goes and allow yon to be part of its resolution in a much more active way than other games. You could make a decision to change sides or to choose how society would end up at the end of the game. It gives this feeling of great scope and made you think a great deal about the issues that the game posed.

Why? The reason why is that these were games of traditional entertainment value targeted at teen and young men that rather than just relying on sensationalism of the genre decided to do something with the genre to allow the player to discover something about the human condition within the structure that they have been given and that is the ultimate goal of a socially conscious game. which is to be both considerate of a games relationship to the world we live in and to take that next step and actually do something interesting with it, to make and experience that the player can take home with them which makes them more aware and helps them understand the world we live in a bit better.

GR: You have a strong eye for design - you were central to the design of the original Climate Challenge, Operation: Climate Control and Trouble Shooter - what drives that part of you?
IR: I'm a very cross-media person, and I'll describe what that means. A lot of people would describe themselves as being very textually focussed or visually focussed or respond well to music or so on. For me it is the combination of two or more types of media and the new experience that is made from the combination that interests me the most. So I find for example film more interesting than just music because you have the combination of lots of different elements, and with game and games design you have the combination of the aesthetics, the gameplay, the music and the emergent experience and it is in being able to create that emergent experience both in a way that you want to convey but also in a discoverable way that people could feel a variety of different responses depending on the person and all of which would be valid game experiences. That is what really drives me about game design.

GR: You were a teacher before becoming a games designer. What impact has that had on your games design?
IR: So people have short attention spans so you need to engross students or the audience or players in your world as quickly as possible for them to understand where you are and where things are going so they are never lost or feel it is an effort to follow you on this journey. The other part is that the best knowledge in terms of retention and comprehension is knowledge which is gained through personal experience and experimentation that there is only so much you can learn from reading the same page in a book again and again, or reading off the board or copying what a teacher is saying that without trying something out or creating something and seeing the results of your creation your understanding of the theory can never be fully solid. That means in games design you have to propose the theory, not necessarily in its entirety, then allow the player to discover it and discover how that theory works through their own experimentation.

Note: This interview is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License so do feel free to reprint. If you would like to reprint without attribution, please drop me an email to gobion at red hyphen redemption dot com.

Back from Easter

Ah what a fine break we had for Easter.

The last few months have been intense to say the least. One of the truisms about being an Indie games developer is that you spend a lot of the time dealing with two competing pressures: Can we make the game awesome, and can we carry on paying ourselves!

Luckily we have a fantastic group of supporters in our investors. They share our vision to produce a really fab game about climate change that picks up where the original Climate Challenge left off and builds on the concept massively. The new game is on a global scale and should offer a very satisfying game playing experience. Like the original it won't be preachy. We all feel climate change is an incredibly important issue, but like you we don't like being preached to. Our agenda, if we have one, is to let you the player play with the options and make up your own mind on the best ways to tackle climate change.

And what about the science? Well this time we will have even more science in the game, but lots will be behind the scenes. That said however, there will be areas of data that for whatever reason we cannot get hold of - maybe it is not available to us gamer types, or perhaps it doesn't even exist. In those cases we will "guesstimate" from the probable data and will note in our science notes that the data is "iffy".

Climate Challenge 2010 is a game first and a science simulation a distant second. I hope that when you play our game it will get you thinking so you can go off and learn more, but what I really hope is that you have a damn good time and a lot of enjoyment from it :)

P.s. If you haven't yet - do join our Facebook group :)
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=92217565125

Climate Challenge 2010 Announced

2009-04-07T12:00:00Z

Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Gobion Rowlands, Chairman, Red Redemption Ltd
Tel: +44 (0) 1865 596 160 | Email: innovate@red-redemption.com

International investors fund Indie Games Company developing “Climate Challenge 2010”

Global strategy game puts our planet’s future in your hands

Oxford, England, April 7th 2009 - Award-winning indie games developers Red Redemption will launch PC title “Climate Challenge 2010” early next year. The new game mirrors the challenges that face the planet as we struggle to combat and reverse the potentially cataclysmic effects of climate change. Climate Challenge 2010 is the ambitious sequel to the massively successful flash game Climate Challenge, developed by Red Redemption and sponsored by the BBC, which has been played on-line by nearly 1 million people since launch in 2007.

Based in Oxford and partnered with Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute, Red Redemption (http://www.red-redemption.com) has captured a unique market niche making science based climate games that both provoke and challenge and are exciting to play. With credit lines limited and games publishers slow to invest in new games titles, Red Redemption have still managed to raise development funds from private investors on both sides of the Atlantic to expand their creative workforce and put Climate Challenge 2010 into production.

“With climate change an ever more pressing issue we wanted to make a game that put the power, and the science, firmly in the hands of the public.” explains company chairman Gobion Rowlands, “making a game that is both fun and yet true to the science is a tough challenge, but it's a powerful combination that really engages players with the issues.”

Speaking about their investors Gobion Rowlands says “We are delighted that our shareholders on both sides of the Atlantic have shown the confidence and vision to support us in bringing a game on an important and timely subject to a wide audience.”

# # #

Notes for Editors

Mini Biographies:

• MD/CEO: Klaude Thomas was formerly MD of Eidos Hungary and produced Battlestations: Midway for Eidos PLC before leaving to join Red Redemption in 2008.
  
• Creative Director: Ian Roberts was a former teacher before joining Red Redemption and has been lead designer on all of Red Redemption's games including the original Climate Challenge.
  
• Science Advisor: Hannah Rowlands worked on the ClimatePrediction.net project and completed her MSc in Environmental Change and Management at Oxford University before joining the company.
  
• Red Redemption was founded in 2000 to create exciting games and made a conscious decision in 2005 to concentrate purely on games that were ethical, brought real science, were family friendly and were fully featured games.
  

Interviews:

The following team members are available for interviews:

• Klaude Thomas MD & Producer
  
• Gobion Rowlands Chairman & Communications Director
  
• Ian Roberts Creative Director & Game Designer
  
• Hannah Rowlands In-house Games Climate Scientific Advisor.
  Team photos and Climate Challenge 2010 concept art are available on request.
  

  Contact:

  Gobion Rowlands FRSA
  

  Chairman, Red Redemption Ltd
  Oxford, UK
  +44 (0) 1865 596 160
  Email: innovate@red-redemption.com
  Website: www.red-redemption.com
  

  2009-04-07T12:00:00Z