Jean Baudrillard could hardly have imagined the extent to which simulations have come to pervade everyday life. Whereas Baudrillard postulated a future in which reality dissolves into a system of signs and simulations—obliterating meaningful distinctions—today’s simulations exert a more subtle influence.1 They establish new epistemic regimes that increasingly replace traditional forms of knowledge.
Martin Warnke and Anne Dippel have noted that this shift has altered our relationship to the world: we now orient ourselves less through theories and more through speculations.2 Simulations perfectly embody speculation, enabling us to explore complex systems without necessarily conceptualizing them theoretically. Climate simulations are a paradigmatic example of this. Their complexity makes them nearly impossible to comprehend in full, while their output—apparently certain and data-driven—contrasts sharply with the uncertainties inherent to classical theory as such. As a result, simulations appear unquestionable, even authoritative. Mario Carpo has warned about this new epistemic regime:
In all aspects of contemporary culture, and most remarkably in economics and politics, theories today are universally reviled. With theories, all the makers and markers of theory, and many ingredients of theory-making, are being equally and drastically demoted: facts, observation, verification, demonstration, proof, experts, expertise, experience, competence, science, scholarship, mediation, argument, political representation, and so on—in no particular order. Why waste time to argue? Ask the crowds. Why waste time on a theory? Just try it and see if it works. But computational simulations are made of bits and bytes, and can be rerun at will: the next atomic blast in physical reality may not allow for a retrial.3
Simulations operate on the basis of models that transform aspects of the real world into data. By doing so, they acquire their own autonomy—an epistemic distance from the realities they represent.4 Their origins lie partly in US military research on weather forecasting and nuclear war scenarios, but have since expanded widely, particularly in fields such as climate science, economics, biology, and physics.5
A particularly influential simulation model in environmental discourse was developed by Jay Forrester at MIT. Forrester’s system dynamics approach formed the basis of the Club of Rome’s landmark report The Limits to Growth (1972). Although Forrester’s models were criticized for being overly deterministic and insufficiently precise, they mark a turning point in the rise of simulations as dominant tools of knowledge—and consequently—of general opinion.
While it seems futile to oppose simulations with new theories, games offer an alternative: they incorporate simulations, yet in a way that allows players to interact with them, probe their assumptions, and understand their underlying logic. Environmental games therefore might serve as counter-models to the regime of simulation that surrounds us.
Games as Simulations
Games can be understood as a form of simulation: they reference reality—its contexts, environments, behaviors—but in simplified and rule-bound ways. What differentiates game simulations from “scientific” simulations is twofold: designers can define the underlying models when creating game mechanics; and players can intervene, altering the course of the simulation in real time.
The overlap between games and simulations has long fascinated popular culture. Films such as WarGames (1983) or The Last Starfighter (1984) dramatize this convergence, imagining games as training grounds or triggers for real-world geopolitical action. Environmental games (“eco-games”) represent the most explicit form of this overlap. These games integrate environmental data—CO2 emissions, waste flows, climate parameters—into their mechanics. Many of them qualify as “serious games,” designed not only for entertainment but also for education.
Scarcity—limited resources—is inherent to most games, which naturally aligns them with ecological issues. Unsurprisingly, research on environmental games emphasizes their pedagogical potential, especially in teaching systems thinking.6 Yet beyond education, environmental games play a second, less discussed role: they can function as counteragents to the dominant regime of computational simulation. They invite intervention, interpretation, and critique—not through theoretical reflection, but through the embodied act of playing.
A foundational example is the series of board games developed by Richard Rosen at Urban Systems, Inc., including Ecology: The Game of Man and Nature (1970), Smog: The Air Pollution Game (1970), Population (1971), and Clean Water (1972).7 These games are notable both for their visual design and their attempt to teach players about complex environmental systems. The evolution of the design of Rosen’s games shows a development from classical rules to a more elaborate set of rules, to match the system thinking behind environmental issues.
Ecology: The Game of Man and Nature follows a traditional board game structure, guiding players through stages of civilization. The goal of the game reads as follows: “ECOLOGY puts you in charge! It’s your job to lead a population through three challenging ages of civilization – Hunting, Agricultural, and Industrial. Your goal? To survive the conflict between technology and nature and reach an ideal Environmental Age.” The player thus must find some kind of equilibrium that leads to an “ideal environmental age,” while failure manifests as various ecological crises.
Smog: The Air Pollution Game is more sophisticated. It introduces interlocking systems—labor, settlement, pollution, abatement, waste, public relations—and uses physical tokens to visualize pollution, giving spatial form to an otherwise abstract phenomenon. Despite simple mechanics, the underlying system is complex and highly instructive. These games influenced later games by other authors, such as Pollution Solution (1989), Oil Spill (1990), and Envir-o-mania (1990). While otherwise being a rather a traditional game, in the latter the player must wear a pair of gloves when moving through toxic waste land, thus plastically rendering the environmental problem and blurring the classic boundaries of games.
A later game that is particularly relevant in this context—a counter-model fostering system thinking—is Ökolopoly: Ein kybernetisches Umweltspiel (Ecolopoly: A Cybernetic Environmental Game), a board game developed in Germany by the biochemist Frederic Vester between 1980 and 1984. As its title suggests, the game addresses not only ecological issues but also principles of cybernetics. Even though it takes the form of a traditional board game, Ökolopoly anticipates the transition from analog board games to computer-based formats capable of incorporating dynamic simulations.
To introduce non-linear relationships between variables, the game employs a rotating disc and a set of graphs. Players enter values that produce outputs, which in turn feed back into the game’s system. This design reflects Vester’s commitment to system- and network-oriented thinking, enabling players to grasp the complex interdependencies between society, the economy, and the environment. Whatever choice one makes, it always has an impact on all other aspects. Ecology is not only a matter of pollution, but also of energy or society. The player then understands how everything is interrelated and that there is an underlying logic that can be learned by playing.
The game achieved considerable commercial success and was published by Ravensburger. A digital version was later developed, which became the basis for a student competition known as the “Ecopolicyade.”
Digital City-Building Games
Although ecological games are typically designed for explicitly educational purposes, mainstream city-building games—developed primarily for entertainment and mass-market appeal—nonetheless integrate themes related to climate and environmental management. One of the most successful titles of all time, SimCity (1989), included pollution as a core “problem” indicator from its very first version, alongside metrics such as housing costs, taxes, and crime. While its early representations and simulations of urban processes were highly abstract, they have evolved significantly over subsequent releases.
At the outset, the game’s creator, Will Wright—who had received partial training in architecture—struggled to find a publisher. SimCity did not fit the mold of contemporary arcade-style games and lacked the action-oriented elements that dominated the market. It introduced a fundamentally new genre: a non-linear game in which action was not sequential but emergent. Publishers initially feared this structure would fail to sustain player interest. The success of SimCity, its numerous sequels, and the many city-building games it inspired, ultimately proved these concerns unfounded.
Wright himself traces the origin of this new format to his work on the development of Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984), a helicopter action game for the Commodore 64. While designing it, he realized that constructing the game’s islands was more enjoyable than piloting the helicopter through the action sequences. This insight became foundational to SimCity.
SimCity is not only about the construction of cities, but also about disasters that can destroy them. Environmental thinking is always projected to some possible disasters that could happen and must be avoided. Even if the disasters are not always directly related to climate, SimCity shows how these are part of the urban imaginary and how they can be integrated into the narration of environmental games. One has only to think about how often Los Angeles has been destroyed in movies and literature.8
The evolution of SimCity was also an evolution of visual perspective, progressing from top-down plan views to isometric projections and eventually to full perspective rendering, thereby increasing the sense of realism. Yet despite these advances, SimCity has retained certain limitations in the scale and detail of its representation. In contrast, successful successors such as Cities: Skylines—first released in 2015—have built their popularity on significantly larger maps, the possibility of expansive urban sprawl, and a far more detailed and realistic simulation model. This heightened realism, however, also makes the planning process considerably more challenging.
One striking example of this sophistication is the simulation of noise pollution, which Cities: Skylines models and visualizes with impressive nuance. This has become a recurrent topic of discussion within player communities, where users exchange observations, debate mechanics, and share strategies about whether elements such as trees can mitigate noise. On Reddit, for example, one user who managed to have his city “decently looking,” but has a problem with noise, asked “how [can] I reduce or eliminate commercial noise pollution?” Another user replied as follows: “Use trees and parks as buffers. I need to double-check, but I suspect tall trees like redwoods do better at blocking noise from high-rises.”9
These discussions demonstrate the extent to which even commercially oriented entertainment games can foster educational engagement and stimulate interest in urban environmental issues, and the extent to which players delve into the matter, such as looking up different types of trees for their noise reduction qualities.
Learning to Question Simulations
Environmental games have clear educational value: they teach systems thinking, highlight ecological interdependencies, and show how human actions produce measurable consequences. Yet we should not overestimate their capacity. Games necessarily simplify reality and cannot cope with its complexity. Alenda Chang reminds us that “ecology is not solely about the bright optimism of interconnection and interdependence, a warm, furry, mammalian comfort in our cohabitation, but also a universe of waste, dirt, shit, and trash that does not disappear.”10 She also warns against the escapism inherent in virtual environmental engagement, which risks abstracting real-world ecological crises into manageable, digital forms:
Environmental justice activists warn us of the danger of deflecting our hopes for environmental quality onto the places other than where we live—whether those are national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, or compelling virtual realities. With Lisa Nakamura’s description of online identity tourism in mind, we might advise ourselves of the risks of virtual environmental tourism: pleasant abstraction.11
Nevertheless, these games possess a unique strength: they render simulations malleable. Even if players cannot change the underlying mechanics (mods aside), interaction fosters intuition about how systems behave and what decisions and strategies have which effects. As such, playing games allow players to understand the rules of the simulation behind it. In a simulation, an output follows an input, but in games, this process is constantly repeated by every decision of the player. Every input generates an output that is brought back into the game. As such, one can influence the action in games by constantly recalibrating the simulation behind it.
This quality positions environmental games as counterpoints to dominant scientific simulations. They do not produce theories—if not some sort of performative theory based on the very act of playing. Instead, they invite players to test assumptions, explore alternative pathways, and question the validity of simulated outcomes. The boundary between game and simulation is therefore porous and based on a constant feedback loop. Researchers have even explored using Cities: Skylines for real-world urban studies, just as SimCity itself was explicitly influenced by Forrester’s urban and world dynamics models.12 Recognizing this interplay opens new perspectives—not only for understanding environmental games, but for designing future ones. Environmental games are more than serious games: they are serious challenges to the dominance of simulation as the only form of knowledge. They teach players to understand how complex systems are built and work and as such help them build knowledge about systems, which can be transferred to other domains.
“The principle of simulation governs us now, rather than the outdated reality principle. We feed on those forms whose finalities have disappeared. No more ideology, only simulacra.” Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage Publications, 1993), 2.
Martin Warnke and Anne Dippel, Tiefen der Täuschung. Computersimulationen und Wirklichkeitserzeugung (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2022).
Mario Carpo, The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), 164.
Daniel Martin Feige, Kritik der Digitalisierung: Technik, Rationalität und Kunst (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2025), 8.
Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press, 2010).
See Daniel Fernández Galeote et al., “Play, Games, and Gamification to Support Sustainability Transitions: a Scoping Review and Research Agenda,” Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 57 (2025): 1–24; Janot Mendler de Suarez et al., Games for a New Climate: Experiencing the Complexity of Future Risks (The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, Boston University, 2012); and Sebastian Gölz et al., Serious Gaming – Potenziale für Wissensvermittlung und Bewusstseinwandel für mehr Nachhaltigkeit (Dessau: Umweltbundesamt, 2025).
For the sake of simplicity, I am not including in this discussion important precursors of analog city simulation games such as Metropolis (1964) by Richard D. Duke or early computer simulation games such as the Sumerian Game developed between 1962 and 1967 by Bruse Moncreiff or the Ecogame developed by George Mallen in 1969.
Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998).
“Can I Somehow Reduce or Eliminate Commercial Noise Pollution?” Reddit, July 20, 2021, ➝.
Alenda Y. Chang, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 173.
Chang, Playing Nature, 40.
Jan Pinos et al., “Automatic Geodata Processing Methods for Real-World City Visualizations in Cities: Skylines,” ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 9, no. 7 (2020).
