Atelier Students Create Interactive Games Inspired by Climate Change Investigations

Students work on computers with projections of game images on the walls

Rising Waters: Climate Change Games. Photo by Minh-Thi Nguyen

Rising Waters: Climate Change Games. Photo by Minh-Thi Nguyen

Students surround a faculty member sitting at a computer

Rising Waters: Climate Change Games. Photo by Minh-Thi Nguyen

The Princeton Atelier presented Rising Waters: Climate Change Games, an end-of-semester exhibition of early-stage interactive video games inspired by investigations into climate change created by students in a spring Atelier course taught by award-winning new media artist and game designer Matt Parker.

The course focused on the development of a commercial game about climate change, giving students the opportunity to contribute to a piece with broad social impact. The 21 students, who worked together in groups, presented five different games they developed.

Fireline allowed players to command fire crews and deploy Silicon Valley’s weirdest inventions as directors of Cal Fire. The game created by Robert Liu, Alexandra Palocz, Jose M. Rico, and Ioana Teodorescu focused on how wildfires burn year-round and the need to find creative solutions.

NOAH, created by Adam Berman, Caleb Gum, David Luo, and Yunzi Shi, addressed the issue of Earth in the midst of its next mass extinction event. Players ventured from the safety of their underground colony to collect animal and plant specimens for preservation, if there was even anything left.

From their vantage point in the sky, players spoke with the people left below as they coped with a world broken by climate change in From the Sky, created by Helen Park, Ivy Xue, Brendan Weng, Kevin Bradicich, and Kraig McFadden.

Solastalgia, created by Sophia Marusic, Yash Patel, Wendy Ho, and Priscilla Bushko cast the player as a gondolier in a future New York City, experiencing people’s lives vicariously as players drive them through the city.

The Retreat was created by Luke Petruzzi, Austin Mejia, Josh Murray, and Jessica Ji. This game addressed how droughts and rising sea levels make large portions of the United States increasingly uninhabitable while massive population displacement has forced millions of people into migrant camps across the country known as RETREATs. The game’s main character, Lorena Zamora, was the first-ever journalist to be granted access to the notoriously secretive northwestern Colorado RETREAT. The player’s job was to guide her in her quest to discover the camp’s secrets in only a week.