Gamified Landscapes

Video game made in Unity
2020

This project disentangles the relationship between gamification and landscape transformation seen in recent afforestation efforts in Northern China. After decades of state-sponsored tree planting projects designed to combat desertification in the country, Alipay (a financial services subsidiary company of Alibaba) introduced a gamified add-on to their popular mobile payment app that fundamentally transformed the method of tree planting in the region. Known as Alipay Ant Forest, the add-on allows users to plant real trees in exchange for green transactions performed on the app. “Low carbon” activities are rewarded with green energy points, which roughly correspond to the carbon offset by the activity in question. These points are used to cultivate virtual trees, which can be transformed into a real tree planted in the desert when enough points have been gathered.

Despite the rosy marketing, this research reveals a more complicated situation on the ground. Legitimate activities on the app are restricted to a narrow set of consumerist activities that primarily serve to increase the company’s bottom line, while only being marginally sustainable (no straw at Starbucks, please!). Furthermore, research has shown such tree planting projects to actually increase desertification, due to a depletion of the watertable. Rejecting gamification, this project looks to competitive Esports networks, as well as a speculative monetary policy known as carbon quantitative easing, to propose an alternative decentralized gaming network that couples play with decarbonization, in line with the ecological affordances of the region.