Games created during NASG (Un-)jams

2022 NordEcoJam games

Hoomans

In this choice-based adventure game, a team of survivors of the environmental apocalypse on Earth seek refugee status on another planet. The survivors must stand trial in front of a board of alien jurors and take accountability for humanity’s actions on their home planet. Arguably, the “good ending” is the one that involves the survivors accepting blame for what humankind has done to their home planet and abandoning their hopes for asylum. Play the game here.

Eco Bio Inc.

Eco Bio Inc. is a card game about greenwashing. Players take on the role of a brainstorming team in a marketing agency, where they take turns coming up with ideas for how to greenwash environmentally unsustainable products. While humorous in tone and emphasizing social gameplay over factual accuracy, the game helps highlight a pervasive but problematic practice rarely addressed in environmentally-themed games. Download the game materials here.

City Planning Quackery

City Planning Quackery models how cities are often designed badly for humans but even worse for the animals that live in them. In this game, the player starts by building a city of their dreams. Once the city is ready, a twist is revealed: the player finds themselves in the city, but playing as a duck instead of as a human. The duck now has to survive in the unfriendly urban environment. This experience reflects on the ethical ramifications of destroying the planet for human purposes.

Hire Hamster

In Hire Hamster, you play as Lily: a young woman entering the job market and trying to find a position for herself while facing hostile interviewers, predatory employers, and gender bias. The player needs to carefully consider Lily’s CV and skills, as well as salary ambitions, but even so, finding a work environment that is actually comfortable to be in and respects its employees remains a challenge. Hire Hamster is particularly insightful as it uses real cases of job interview situations. Play the game here.

Town Will Be Mine!

A spreadsheet-based corporate simulation (choice-based resource management) about greenwashing and PR. The player takes the role of an evil CEO who wants to buy out all the land from a town in order to gain access to a rich mineral deposit underneath it. The CEO balances between PR choices and corporate gains, trying to avoid angering the townsfolk too much.

CEOmulator

CEOmulator is a choice-based management simulation game, in which the player takes the role of the CEO of a company. In this capacity, they must make decisions that maximize profit while maintaining a good public image and being mindful of the environment. The game highlights the challenge of accommodating environmental considerations in a neoliberal capitalist economy.

2023 NASG Un-Jam games

Got Water?

Got Water? is a game inspired by the entirely plausible prospect of water wars breaking out in the future. The game transports the player into a world where clean water has gone from being abundant and taken for granted to a scarce resource that people must fight each other over. The game shows the stark contrast between the world today, where our relationship with water is casual and fun, and the future, where, to obtain water, one might need to be prepared to kill others.

No More Fish

No More Fish is a local multiplayer resource management game for four players that explores the challenges of overfishing and the negative effects of corporate-led fishing. The game scrutinizes the impact of corporate greed the marine ecosystem, society and culture in the context of Iceland, where large companies hog the fishing quota and destroy the local marine environment. This not only renders local fishermen unable to make a living and leads to overpricing in the local market, but jeopardizes the traditional culture of Iceland an island nation living off the ocean.

Ecoloids

Ecoloids is a physical board game created that explores the dynamics of a fantasy island ecosystem, which players must work together in order to keep in balance.

Eat the Rich

Eat the Rich is an anti-capitalist card game in which the players are given the roles of PR managers to billionaires and the ‘hungry crowd’ who is after those billionaires. Your task as a player is to make decisions that either reveal the secrets of the rich or protect the interests of your employer.

If Everyone Had Wings

If Everyone Had Wings presents a world where everyone else in the world has wings except you, the player. As such, the game depicts the experience of living as a person with a disability, where the world grows increasingly more inaccessible as other people move their daily lives to the sky.