Plant Real-World Trees Playing Terraforming Sim TerraGenesis

With the gaming industry being way bigger than music and movies combined, there is a lot of potential when it comes to harnessing the audience. A potential that the United Nations Environment Program intends to unleash with the creation of its Playing for the Planet Alliance. The initiative has seen multiple studios of all sizes banding together to fight climate change with the help of their combined 1 billion players. And the cool planet terraforming sim, TerraGenesis, is the latest to throw their hat into the green ring.

The Green Game Jam is an effort by Playing for the Planet Alliance members to leverage the power of gaming to achieve the following objectives:

Rally the industry to reduce their carbon footprint
Inspire players to climate action through in-game activations and messaging
Share the knowledge gleaned from their initiatives with others in the industry
Explore strategies for new games and approaches to storytelling

And since 2019, their efforts have yielded some awesome results, including the planting of over 266,000 trees thanks to activations. Which is exactly the kind of activation that TerraGenesis developer Tilting Point is introducing in its own title.

TerraGenesis is an app game that typically sees players terraforming other planets in order to make them habitable for humans. You know, the last-resort solution for if/when humans destroy their own planet. But to help hammer home the message that we’re not entirely beyond hope just yet, TerraGenesis is re-focusing on the third rock from the Sun in its latest event.

From now, players can start earning ‘carbon impact points’ through gameplay. These points can then be used to plant trees in each player’s very own in-game forest. This will not only net in-game rewards, but will also translate to IRL tree planting thanks to the partnership between the terraforming simulator and Ecologi.

A weekly leaderboard will also help to encourage healthy competition between players, hopefully working to drive competitive spirits into racking up as many carbon impact points as possible to secure that number one spot.

Plus, a limited-time event in-game will see TerraGenesis aiming to educate its players on climate change with a focus on food and forests, tasking players with regenerating a desolated Earth.