How Video Games connect people to our planet

GAUTAM SHAH HAD spent 20 years working in IT—and his whole life caring about nature. He saw advances in conservation that got mentioned only in science journals, “but the story lines within that data are amazing; they’re fascinating,” Shah says. “They’re absolutely things that can engage an audience.”
Eager to use his techie skills for wildlife conservation, Shah—a National Geographic explorer—founded a game company called Internet of Elephants in 2016. The Kenya-based start-up designs digital experiences to tell real conservation stories based on real data.
One example: Wildeverse, an augmented reality mobile app like Pokemon Go, launched in April 2020. In the game, players can “track” apes by collecting environmental samples such as fruit and scat. Rather than putting lots of high-tech tricks in a game, Shah says, the company prioritizes telling a compelling, true story through whatever technology is best suited to it.

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Shah believes that gaming has a unique ability to connect audiences with wildlife in a deep, personal way that will generate concern and advocacy. His goal is for Internet of Elephants to reach more than 50 million people by 2027.

Ideally, he says, “we can create an entire industry where creating games and these type of digital experiences about wildlife conservation becomes as commonplace as creating a wildlife documentary.”

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Video Games, a new workplace ?

The ask-nice approach had not worked. Lewis Smithingham, an advertising executive in Brooklyn, was trying to land a virtual meeting with an analyst at an investment management firm, who he hoped would be both a source of potential clients and information. Dates were agreed to and then postponed, rescheduled and rescheduled again. So Mr. Smithingham had an idea. He would end the brush-offs by emailing a cheeky invitation: “Let’s go rob a bank in Grand Theft Auto.”

"With Zoom call fatigue setting in and boozy lunches out of the question during the coronavirus pandemic, housebound executives are finding new ways to meet and bond in video games."

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Soon, Mr. Smithingham and the analyst were tearing around a fictional version of Los Angeles, submachine guns in hand, in one of the world’s most popular and raucous multiplayer video games. The analyst lacked the skills for a bank heist, but the two did some carjacking, ran over some unlucky pedestrians, eluded some cops, drove off a cliff and died a few times.

“He isn’t a great gamer, so I had to sort of be the point person for all of the shooting,” said Mr. Smithingham, a director at MediaMonks, which is based in the Netherlands. “But now we text each other regularly, and when I get on a call with this guy, I’ll be like, ‘You remember that time we ran from the cops and crashed into a highway divider?’” With Zoom call fatigue setting in and boozy lunches out of the question during the coronavirus pandemic, housebound executives are finding new ways to meet and bond in video games. The goal is to break up a day that is crammed with get-togethers that generally look, sound and feel identical.



"And for people like Mr. Smithingham, an outing in virtual space is a chance to form memories with people he has never met, which is a crucial part of developing relationships, business and otherwise."

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But Games Don't Do Enough to Combat Toxicity

In early May, when Valorant was in closed beta, publisher Riot Games said it would make an effort to curb toxicity after several of the company’s female developers spoke out about harassment they’d received in-game. On Twitter, a UX designer for another Riot game, Teamfight Tactics, posted a video of a teammate calling her a “thot” after she turned down his advances over voice chat. Wrote one senior game designer in the replies to the tweet, “It's fucked up, but this is why i added the #RIOT tag to my handle. I've noticed a significant decline in voice comms harassment since adding it.” Said Donlon, “Gross, this is creepy as hell. This is why I can't solo. I'm so sorry.”

Valorant launched earlier this week, but its anti-toxicity features lag. Like Overwatch, which didn’t get a function to report abuse on console until over a year post-launch, and Apex Legends, which launched without a report feature entirely, Valorant is not on track to keep up with gamers’ tendency to harass women and minorities. It launched before developers implemented a robust system to combat toxicity: strict, in-game messaging about what is not OK; incentives for prosocial behavior; and stern punishments for repeat offenders. (Last week, Amazon’s first big videogame, Crucible, launched without both voice and text chat, developers say, because they were not equipped to mitigate toxicity). Apex Legends publisher EA did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. In 2017, Overwatch developer Blizzard described the implementation of a console reporting system as “extremely challenging.”

“I don’t think we were prepared nearly enough for games plagued by disruptive behavior—what a lot of people would refer to as harassment or toxicity in games,”

Donlan, a veteran of Call of Duty studio Treyarch

“Toxicity, harassment, and disruptive behavior in voice chat have always been the hardest of the problems,” says Donlon, “and it’s definitely the problem I think we’re going most aggressively at to find solutions for.”

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