Survival games are lonely affairs: players hunt for food, build shelter and avoid predators. The price of failure? Grisly death. But introduce more players and suddenly you're competing for nature's resources. And as any anthropologist will tell you, from there things get... complicated. "It's the tragedy of the commons," says John Krajewski, founder of Seattle-based developer Strange Loop Games. "You have the individual incentives versus the group. All of government, all of economics, that's what society is: the relationship between the two."
That's the premise of Strange Loop's Eco. "The core idea is a society simulator," says Krajewski, 37. Like Minecraft, Eco is a first-person survival game. Players harvest from the environment to craft their own creations. The twist: you're sharing the world with dozens of other players. And, like the real world, the environment is fragile. Chop down forests and wildlife faces extinction; pollute the air and temperatures will rise. "Each individual is incentivised to be greedy and destroy this ecosystem," says Krajewski. "But together you can create institutions and make progress as a group."
As Eco players are limited to one skill tree, you'll have to trade with other players to survive. You can run for government and propose and vote in new laws. To help, the game's simulation is rich with data. "You can see population and heat maps of the climate," says Krajewski. "Scientific argument is your weapon. It's really interesting to see how players are arguing over what needs to be done."
Krajewski founded Strange Loop in 2009 to help develop games with an educational twist. Its previous releases, Sim Cell and Vessel, won plaudits for their inventive gameplay based on realistic science. Krajewski took inspiration for Eco from self-regulating online communities such as Eve:Online's, as well as sandbox survival games such as Minecraft and Rust. The idea won a grant from the US Department of Education. The finished game will include educational tools, which Krajewski hopes will encourage kids to debate laws and find solutions. "I have this idea of a digital field trip: that every classroom can have this digital world alongside it, where students can apply what they learn."
Eco is in beta, with a release planned for summer 2017. "Something we're starting to see already is that you get biases," Krajewski explains. He cites players with a tree-cutting specialism resisting attempts to pass anti-logging laws. "The key is letting people see that in themselves, and see it in others, and have it all happen in a time frame that is visible. In the real world you're not going to see the effect for a decade or a lifetime."
The bad news: in early play tests in schools, students despoiled nature to build their own houses. But, upon realising their environmental impact, that began to change. Therein lies Eco's magic. "There is a sense of permanence," Krajewski says. "The fact that the world can be destroyed means your actions actually have meaning." In short: your ability to destroy the world also means that you have the power to save it.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
