Floodland: Where society has to start again.
“It’s hard to say when we passed the point of no return. But we did.”
Climate dystopia is all the rage. If you’re a gamer, you might have played Frostpunk, set in a world devastated by a cold-pocalypse. Fate of the World plays global warming off against neoliberal economic policies, although if that doesn’t sound like it has enough boom! kapow! for you, there’s always Battlefield 2042. That’s the one where you can throw your characters out of helicopters into tornadoes. In Factorio, pollution is punished with alien attacks.
In the new and strikingly beautiful game Floodland, from which the quote above comes, rising sea levels have reduced the world to islands with small, nomadic populations. In the real world, this is not even particularly futuristic: right now in Pakistan, summer floods have killed more than 1000 people and made half a million homeless.
Floodland is a city-building sim. Your task is to rebuild a functioning society that won’t repeat the mistakes that created the catastrophe. Keep burning that coal, because it’s easy, and more floods will come.
You need to conserve drinking water and get enough to eat, deal with viral epidemics, defend against maurauders, explore the other islands, guard against an abundance of poisonous fish. Your society also needs a broad range of civil laws: labour relations, same-sex marriage, rules for sports contests - and how about a law that insists everyone takes swimming lessons?
There is no electricity and you need to learn how to make things: rafts for fishing, welding torches, proper houses. Research and debate are valuable activities.
Players get to be in charge of a clan. One of them is the Good Neighbours: people with “traditional” values who want to create a sustainable world. Another is the Fire Brigade, whose members are more interested in the “freedom” to act as they wish. Berkut-3 is full of warriors. The clans can join forces, for the strengths that come from greater good, but also at the risk of greater tension.
The core skill you have to learn is good management. Do you do it with tolerance, with martial law, or some mix of both? How do you unlock creativity and manage risk-taking? How do you deal with crime? Can you get your clan to evolve its values and view of the world? Everything you do is challenged, every decision has consequences and things break down quickly when you get it wrong.
Fundamentally, Floodland is about how the world works and how it could and should work. Whether it provides a framework for hope or despair might be up to you. But, apart from the fun, maybe there’s no harm in getting in some practice? We don’t need to wait for the apocalypse, after all, before we try to do things better.
Design for Living is a series devoted to bright ideas that make cities better and appears weekly in Canvas magazine.