Monday, June 25, 2012

The Resource Wars [Common Threads]

Video games tend to borrow from those that came before, and build upon things that have become old hat from previous generations. Settings, the worlds and universes of each game, are usually as varied as the characters that inhabit them. However, common threads can often be seen among them. In this post, I'll talk about how video games tackle the issue of limited resources, and see if there's anything we can glean from the way they handle it.

One common setting for a variety of video games is a post-apocalyptic landscape brought on by war, often over limited resources. In the Fallout universe, the reason relations between China and the United States soured was due to depletion of petroleum reserves. The result? 2 hours of nuclear exchange that ended civilization as we know it. In the Gears of War universe, the various factions of Sera fight over control of Imulsion, a highly valuable energy source that is basically monopolized by a single nation. The war over this resource, as well as the resource itself, is responsible for how things end up where they do when the character takes control.

Some games settings don't rely on all out war over resources, but their settings are nevertheless depended on the never ending quest for minerals. In Borderlands, for example, the planet of Pandora is initially colonized by a mega corporation in order to mine it of all valuable minerals. However, once they strip the planet dry and find it no longer profitable to run their operations, they abandon the planet, leaving it a barren wasteland covered with nothing but landfills and derelict mining equipment. Plus, as an added insult, the convict labor force used for mining is simply released, which is why the player has to deal with the roaming gangs of bandits across his adventures. In the game Dead Space, the player is also sent to a planet mining operation, but in this universe, mining a planet means actually cracking it into pieces and processing the bits that fall out. It just happens that one of the bits is a face eating zombie plague religion, but I digress.

So how can we use these examples and the common thread among them for energy education? We can talk about the limited nature of many resources, and how if we continue using things like fossil fuels that there will be a point where it will no longer become economical to do so. We can talk about some of the more fantastical worst case scenarios, including resource wars and having to travel to distant planets for minerals. But the best way we can use this is to simply generate interest and dialogue among the students. When kids are engaged in a discussion, they're more likely to internalize what they've learned and come up with interesting solutions to some of the world's most pressing problems.


No comments:

Post a Comment