UPDATE 29TH JUNE: The full list of winners for the Green Game Jam are as follows:
UNEP Choice: Boom Beach (Supercell) Best Newcomer: Tray Racers! (Bitloom Games)Media’s Choice: Boom Beach (Supercell)Player’s Choice: June’s Journey (Wooga)Best in Wildlife: June’s Journey (Wooga)Jam Spirit Award: Bandai Namco (Pac-Man) and MAG Interactive (QuizDuel, WordBrain, Ruzzle, Word Domination)Google’s Choice: Love & Pies (Trailmix) Industry’s Choice: My Talking Angela 2 (Outfit7)Most Adoptable: My Talking Angela 2 (Outfit7)
ORIGINAL STORY 28TH JUNE: This year’s Green Game Jam has just wrapped, and as with last year, I was asked to judge the Media’s Choice part of it. If you don’t know what it is, the Green Game Jam is an annual event organised by the Playing for the Planet Alliance – itself organised by the United Nations Environment Programme – that challenges game developers to make ‘activations’ for their games. These are packages of content both in and around the games based on a theme.
The theme this year was conserving wildlife and biodiversity, with a particular eye on the snow leopard and the Himalayas, the manta ray and the Western Indian Ocean and the harlequin toad and the Amazon. And as always, the sentiment fuelling the jam was how much can a game teach us about a problem while having some kind of impact on the real world too?
There were dozens of entries – 41 in total – and the best ones showed efforts inside the games and outside them, in their communities, and raised or donated money towards a cause. Remember, some of these games have enormous audiences so leveraging even a small portion of them – for fundraising or otherwise – can have a massive effect. And the winner we chose did exactly that.
Our winner was Boom Beach, a game made by Clash of Clans behemoth Supercell. And its activation revolved around conservation of the sea turtle, which wasn’t one of the animals specifically listed above but still fit within the brief.
Supercell built a storyline in the game about it, revolving around a mad scientist whose giant robo-turtle malfunctioned and started stealing turtles, and dressed it up with bespoke cutscenes and artwork and gameplay content. Supercell also commissioned a mini-documentary about sea turtle conservation, and flew its two hunky Boom Beach community people, the CosmicDuo – I kid you not – to Panama to record it. The resulting video is actually pretty good.