One of my favorite genre of games is the 'city builder' where you have to obtain and manage you resources from the land in order to build structures and units of increasingly higher technological tiers. One such game is 'Banished'. 'Banished' is particularly unique compared to the other games i have played so far because the players are set in a situation where they are suppose to build a city in a fairly hostile location in the forest with a limited access to technology. I felt that this game is useful in helping us discuss the issue of management of our limited resource as well as environmental determinism.
On resource management
I think that one of the most interesting things i have learnt so far was the idea that we can view resources from perspectives other than through the extraction of raw materials. The idea of 'ecosystem services' come to mind. For those who do no know, ecosystem services refers to the direct and indirect ways in which the ecosystem can be beneficial to us humans. There are 4 main ways in which the ecosystem can provide us resources (Geury et. al, 2015):
- provisioning
- support
- regulating
- cultural
For resource management games, they mainly focus on the provisioning service; what the environment can provide us. For example, in the game of 'Banished', the forest provides the wood for resources as well fish to sustain your villages. However this comes at a price as the population of deer in the forest that you could hunt for food would also decrease as more and more trees are chopped down. Another thing the forest may provide is finding the cure to an ailment affecting your village but only old ancient forest provide it and not secondary forests that the player could build.
I think no game better captures the feel of having to 'trade off' one resource for another, as we see in the real world. When we have to trade of vast ancient forests in order to build farms, as seen in place like Indonesia and Brazil, are we losing something in process? Are there more far reaching implications such as the impact of burning on climate change and drought? (Lindsey, 2004) Our primary rain forests houses some of the most important natural resources to man. How we use it is a responsibility that we share as a species.
On wastage of our resources
In my studies as an undergraduate, one of the most interesting ideas that i was informed on was the issue of pollution. Its highlighted to me by my professor that pollution is a 'wasteful approach towards management of our resources'. I found this idea particularly interesting. Why? because you don't really think of pollution issues through the lens of wastage of our natural resources. However, upon deeper introspection, it makes sense. I mean after all if we kill off all our marine life through things like oil spills (Graham, 2003), or introduce toxic chemical like mercury into soil which results in our food becoming potentially toxic to human (Zhao, 2014) , or as i have explored in my previous post the pollution that comes from mining activities, then we are simply wasting everything that mother Gaia provides for us. This is clearly a problem we need to fix.
I am fairly disappointed that more games do not explore the issue of pollution as wastage of natural resources issue. The only game that i have played so far that came close was the game 'Civilization V' wherein tiles that have nuclear radiation as a result of nuclear war could not be use. While radiation is an important an important issue to look at and a fairly big pollution issue, i wish more focus was given to everyday pollution such as that of plastics in our ocean, heavy metal pollution of our soil or even air pollution (something i am facing as i write this post)
The bigger picture
Indeed, humans society has always been managing what limited resources that they have since the inception of civilization. Modern humans have such a global reach onto resources that they can access from the environment. It is our duty to ensure that the the way we use of resources is sustainable for the sake of our future generations.
Geurry et. al. "Natural Capital and ecosystem service informing decision: From promise to practice". PNAS. 16 June 2015.
Graham Sarah. " Environmental effects of Exon Valdez is still being felt". Scientific American. 19 December 2003.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/AmazonFire/
Lindsey, Rebecca. " From forest to field: how fire is transforming the amazon". Earth Observatory. 8 June 2004.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/AmazonFire/
Shining Rock Software. Banished. http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/game/
Zhao et.al. "localization and speciation of mercury in Brown rice with implication for Pan-Asian Public Health". Environment Science and Technology. 13 June 2014.
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