How Video Games Can Boost Climate Awareness

Most evenings after a long day of work, I boot up Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and take to the virtual skies. On July 16, I chose to take off from LaGuardia Airport in my native New York City, knowing wildfire smoke from Ontario, Canada, blanketed much of the area. The air quality index peaked at 289, the second-worst smoke event in modern NYC history. The worst event came just a few years before, in 2023.

I knew that the simulator projects real-world weather data, but I was still shocked by the accuracy. The sky was a smoggy red-purple mess, with visibility so poor I couldn't make out the motel on the other side of the airport fence, never mind the Manhattan skyline in the distance. As I rolled down the runway and made my dutiful climb to 36,000 feet, the game was faithfully rendering the planet’s new climate reality.

First launched in 1982, Microsoft Flight Simulator is part of a long lineage of so-called serious games, interactive media anchored around education, advocacy, or public policy.

Live action games such as these highlight the promise and potential of putting people in situations where they are creating or, at the very least, replicating reality. Underlining this fact, real pilots use Microsoft Flight Simulator to train.

In fact, more than 3 billion people play video games globally, making them the largest and most lucrative form of entertainment on Earth. They are also platforms where enormous communities can be built and values can spread. And like in my Microsoft Flight Simulator game, increasingly, they are even becoming a place where climate change themes are rendered, explored, and contested. 

“For some folks, serious games are war gaming. But in my field, it’s really about games that are designed … for education, impact, or advocacy,” said Elizabeth Newbury, a longtime game studies researcher and former director of the Serious Games Initiative at Wilson Center, a DC-based think tank.

Before the Department of Government Efficiency cut funding for the Wilson Center last year, the Serious Games Initiative functioned as a coordinating, research, and promotional body rather than a traditional game development studio. In 2024, it released The Plastic Pipeline, a game that encourages players to reduce single-use plastic pollution through policy innovations. Newbury tested the game with almost 230 participants in college classrooms in the United States and Vietnam, surveying them before and after they played. 

Described as Animal Crossing meets Carmen Sandiego, the game teaches players about policies, such as enhanced producer responsibility, which holds corporations more accountable for packaging throughout its lifecycle, from production to waste management. A minigame focuses on nurdles, tiny plastic pellets no more than five millimeters wide that can accumulate in oceans. Players see the consequences as fish and other marine life ingest them, only to realize (hopefully), that the best course of action is preventing them from entering the environment in the first place. Ultimately, the study found that players came away feeling more empowered to change laws and curb pollution, Newbury said. 

That sense of agency and control is the secret sauce of serious games and video games overall, she added. A player can pass one policy and see what happens, but if that goes awry, they can go back, try again, and maybe achieve a different outcome. “That is a really crucial part of a true game experience,” Newbury said. “It's not just prescriptive.”

And there is some evidence that these effects can extend beyond the screen. A May 2026 study from researchers at Oxford found that people who played an environmentally themed game subsequently chose grocery baskets with about 20 percent lower environmental impact than a control group. The effect was still partially evident several weeks later, suggesting that games can lead to lasting decisions that take place outside the game.

Daniel Fernandez Galeote, a postdoctoral research fellow at Tampere University in Finland, said that even within the mainstream gaming space, many developers are incorporating climate themes into their work. Galeote is the coauthor of a 2021 paper on game-based climate change engagement in which he analyzed 150 games, a mix of serious and traditional entertainment. He said that he is seeing an environmental commitment from people who do mainstream game development and game design.

“There's a lot of people nowadays who have been doing games professionally, who are still very much in what I would have called years ago the games for entertainment space, but who at the same time are [trying] to tackle these environmental topics in some way,” Galeote said. 

One avenue for doing that is to build climate change directly into a game’s mechanics. Another can simply be depicting a world where environmental change has become impossible to ignore. 

“I think video games, much like any other form of art, are just reflections of what the artist is thinking about the most,” said Jacob Geller, a popular writer and video essayist. “And because of that, I think we have already seen a multitude of games that are grappling with climate change or even just having it as a default fact of the setting.”

Geller has built an audience of millions on YouTube with provocative videos like “How Well Can You Really Know a Game?” He pointed to Frostpunk and Horizon Zero Dawn, both of which place players in worlds radically altered by environmental catastrophe as good examples of climate-themed games. At one point in Frostpunk—think Sim City meets Day After Tomorrow—players might have to implement authoritarian law to keep the majority alive.

“I think that when a lot of us think about climate change, we very quickly go to a sort of post-apocalyptic scenario where the cities … no longer exist,” Geller said. “And everyone is just scavenging the best they can for the few resources available.”

But what about games that make you live through climate change while it is still happening—and while you still might be able to do something about it?

One of Geller’s favorite examples of this is Umurangi Generation, created by a Maori developer inspired, in part, by the 2019–20 Australian wildfires. Players move through a world where people are trying to carry on with ordinary life while the disaster becomes increasingly impossible to ignore. That can be a harder story to tell because the world is not yet fire and brimstone. But it also pushes back against a kind of fatalism that these particular kinds of games might engender.

On the other hand, there is also a power in games that barely announce themselves as climate games. City-building games such as SimCity and Cities: Skylines were not necessarily designed to make the case for sustainable transportation, yet anyone who has tried to build a respectable city quickly discovers the challenges of maintaining one dominated by endless roads and cars. 

“You're like, ‘My God, what better world we could live in if only I could put farmers' markets here instead of parking lots or whatever,’” Geller said with a laugh. 

These sorts of accidental discoveries, like when I took to the skies in my Cessna in Microsoft Flight Simulator, seem like one of the best ways to carry a more persuasive climate message going forward. Geller agrees and thinks games can subtly ring the alarm bells, while also helping us envision a more hopeful future.

In Denshattack!, people live inside climate-controlled domes convinced that the outside world is too dangerous. But as the game progresses, players discover that while the world outside is changing, not everything is as it seems. What players discover is that the world is still one worth exploring.

“I don't think the game is saying that there is no risk to climate change, but it is saying like, ‘Do not just believe the world is doomed and become a hermit. You should still try and interact with the world. You should spend time with it,’” Geller said. “And you should recognize that even as it changes, there is hope for us to kind of become a part of it again.”