But worse than the game, are the intentions behind. Gobion Rowlands, Chairman and co-founder of Red Redemption, the creators of the game, in an interview to Edge, gives us some interesting previews of what might be going on in the game:
| If you go to the US and the first thing you do is to implement a one-child policy and try banning meat, then they might just tell you to get out. Your agents can be killed, lost, blackmailed and kidnapped - so your agency gets taken away. I've just tried to ban meat here and the carnivores have rebelled. They're not happy. |
But when you've thought it couldn't get worse, it does:
| Under what circumstances, we wonder, would the US populace agree to processing dead people into ration wafers? |
Everything is there. Regarding the New World Order, you just get it out of Rowlands words, in another interview:
| So the year is 2020 and the world has done nothing significant to tackle the multitude of problems facing 21st century society, and then the first impacts strike and the nations create a new global organisation – the World Environment Organisation – and they put you in charge. |
And what can you do with all this power? Producer Klaude Thomas gives you an idea:
| Another example would be the simple expedient of removing a large proportion of the planet’s population from circulation. Let’s say with an engineered super-virus. The first thing to say about this is the obvious, that killing every last person in Africa would have less impact on climate change than getting Westerners to use 10% less energy. But let’s say you spread the virus around evenly, so everyone loses say half their family (the half who always get them crap stuff for Christmas). The trouble is, people don’t just conveniently fall over and die. Their friends and loved ones have to go and try and keep them alive, or always want to bury them decently instead of just tossing them in a skip; and then they spend time moaning and weeping and what have you. And that guy in IT who was fixing your laptop? He’s gone, and so, by the way, is the engineer who was keeping the power station running. So the rest of your society stops working so well, and that potentially puts your civilisation into a downward spiral as critical infrastructure falls apart. |
Get it? I wondered who had sponsored this stuff? Didn't have to dig much. The biggest investor in the project is the managing director of Deutsche Bank's asset management arm - he's in charge of all their clean tech and renewable investments globally. It has even made it into Nature, where you get a good idea that there simply is no solution for the game:
| It is the year 2110, and the level of methane in the atmosphere has reached a critical threshold. You have a decision to make: accept the risk of global catastrophe and continue extracting the gas to meet the energy needs of an increasing population; implement a one-child-per-household rule to reduce future energy demand; or fund a decade-long research programme to deliver technological solutions. |
