The Green Game Jam calls on millions of gamers to take action on the climate crisis

The UN-facilitated initiative, Playing for the Planet Alliance, has launched the second-annual Green Game Jam, which brings the games industry together to educate their players on how to take action on the climate crisis.

The Jam involves more than 25 studios from around the world, including the likes of Ubisoft, Mojang Studios, Niantic, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Ustwo Games. The studios will collaborate and commit to implementing green activations in and outside of their games, such as new modes, maps, themed events, storylines and messaging. The efforts are themed around conserving and restoring forests and oceans.

As part of this year’s Jam, Pac-Man’s for Mobile’s Adventure Mode will focus on the theme of reforestation, Ustwo Games’ Monument Valley 2 will feature new level content to “connect players to the life of trees” and will be partially unlocked through their support of forest conservation initiatives, and Media Molecule hosted an environmentally themed jam within Dreams. Additionally, Ubisoft studios working across mobile, PC and consoles will each create new content for one of their games – the participating studios are Ubisoft Annecy, Ubisoft Barcelona Mobile, Ubisoft Mainz, Ubisoft Future Games of London, and Ubisoft Paris.

Two pledge campaigns have been set up to encourage players to take action. Play4Forests is focused on conserving and restoring forests in areas such as the Amazon, the Congo Basin and South East Asia, while Glowing, Glowing Gone is a campaign concentrating on the protection of coral reefs. Participants will call on their communities to support these campaigns and the petitions will be presented to world leaders at future UN Summits including COP26, the UN’s Climate Summit, later this year.

The Green Game Jam launched today ahead of World Environment Day on the 5th of June, with the winners announced on the 25th June 2021. Participants will be judged across five categories including a “Player’s Choice” award for the first time this year – gaming communities will be able to vote on their favourite activation from 16th June 2021.

Since the Playing for the Planet Alliance was established in 2019, we’ve witnessed the power of the gaming industry when rolling up its sleeves and collaborating as a creative force, regardless of which competitors are sitting around the table,” said Sam Barratt, Chief of Youth, Education and Advocacy at the UN Environment Programme, which facilitates the Playing for the Planet Alliance. “The Green Game Jam 2021 has over double the number of studio participants than its pilot first year and with PC and console now involved, the scale of this annual activation has stepped up multiple notches. In addition to vast global reach, this year’s participants are also creating an example for how other areas of the private sector can coalesce around a shared issue and engage with the greatest environmental challenges of our time.”