Proceedings of DiGRAA 2014: What is Game Studies in Australia? © 2014 Authors & Digital Games Research Association DiGRA. Personal and educational classroom use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author. Videogame Visions of Post-Climate Change Futures Ben Abraham University of Western Sydney Locked Bag 1797 Penrith NSW 2751 +61 2 9852 5222 benjamin.j.abraham@gmail.com ABSTRACT In this paper I describe my current research into videogame depictions of the future, and those that engage substantially with anthropogenic climate change, building upon an understanding of the role played by visions of the apocalypse as an outlet for expressions of popular fears and anxieties. The paper looks at games that have been released in the recent period, which has seen a rise in corporately funded campaigns undermining popular and scientific consensus on climate change, discussing three games in detail and the climate future they present; Anno 2070 (2011) which depicts a flooded earth; Fate of the World (2011) which presents a player with the supreme difficulty of balancing development goals with a finite carbon budget; and ARMA 3 (2013), which deploys visual depictions of renewable energy power generation (windmills, tidal power, solar arrays) to evoke a sense of futurity and in the process projects an unexpectedly optimistic vision of our climate future. Keywords videogames, climate change, futurity, premediation, apocalypse, renewable aesthetics, Anno 2070, Fate of the World, ARMA 3 INTRODUCTION It is fast becoming obvious that we are living in a slow apocalypse. This apocalypse takes the form of anthropogenic global warming and the world that it is predicted to precipitate. Estimated to have – at very best – only somewhat devastating impacts on the way that individuals and societies live and engage with their environment, at the extreme end of predictions it presents a vision of a future planet earth devoid of the capacity to sustain human life entirely. Videogames have frequently engaged with apocalyptic visions, though usually of a distinctly different character. The prominent place accorded visions of the nuclear post-apocalypse (and its aesthetic equivalents) is well documented in games, from the Fallout series (1997-2010), and the related visions of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series (2007-09). Similarly, visions of apocalypses ranging from alien invasion to zombie apocalypses abound in commercially successful game franchises, from Gears of War (2006-13), to Resistance (2006-12), Left 4 Dead (2008, 2009) and Dead Rising (2006- 13), along with countless others. A less commonly acknowledged and as yet unexamined trend is videogames’ depiction of future visions of climate change, apocalyptic or otherwise. This paper presents a brief attempt to examine the few recent instances of videogame visions of climate change that