GreenQuest: A game raising climate awareness
Green Quest is an interactive gaming app focusing on sustainability. Its creator believes gamifying climate change issues will inspire young people to think about the environment.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 The aim is to clear up waste and separate it before the green monster gets you.
00:09 Siblings Delight and Dominion are testing a new game.
00:12 I clean the house before I leave for school.
00:17 So the game is just when you play it, you appear suddenly in the place you are going
00:23 to clean.
00:24 So as you are cleaning it, as you are going you are cleaning it.
00:27 And you have to avoid the monsters that are coming your way.
00:31 At some point the monsters, it gets difficult as you gradually increase the points.
00:37 So you just try to avoid the monsters to get more points.
00:41 It's all about learning to protect the environment in a fun way.
00:45 The game's developer Grace James lives in Lagos, a city where waste disposal is a major
00:51 problem.
00:52 When you look at my background here, you can see that people are continuously polluting
00:57 the environment.
00:58 There's literally plastic trash everywhere.
01:01 Just like my game Green Quest, the player is tasked with a particular quest to clean
01:05 up the environment.
01:07 The Green Quest app was actually birthed out of my passion to actually see how communities,
01:14 both male and female, boys and girls, old people actually and young people, can contribute
01:19 towards sustainability in a way that is interactive and logical for them.
01:27 She and her team have spent two years developing the game, pitched at young people aged 7 to
01:32 15.
01:33 The main task in the early levels is to dispose of waste correctly.
01:38 Then the focus shifts to recycling and using renewable energies to stop climate change.
01:44 The game's central character is a young woman.
01:48 In the game itself, there's a main character, her name is Nicole, and that is actually a
01:54 tribal name from Kogi State.
01:57 It's actually Ojo Nicole.
01:59 I tried to make it very relatable because I feel like this is one of the best ways as
02:05 well to tell indigenous stories and preserve our culture, right?
02:10 The game is still in the test phase.
02:12 Grace James visits schools to present it.
02:14 There's also a board game version for those who don't have a computer.
02:19 The main thing is that it's learning through play.
02:23 What inspired me to educate the children, the younger generation through gaming is I
02:29 wish I had this opportunity in my own primary school.
02:32 I wish people could actually do this for me and I discovered that I could learn more from
02:38 games and I just decided to give that to my community because it would have been really
02:42 nice to have this in my own time.
02:47 Environmental protection and climate awareness are not part of the school curriculum in Nigeria.
02:53 Climate activist Olumide Odowo and his organization are campaigning to change that.
03:01 When you look at the kind of government that we have now, it's always a problem to integrate,
03:07 let me say, a problem with continuity.
03:11 When you have a government that is very, you know, responds to climate change issue, it
03:15 will be more faster to inculcate that.
03:18 And you know, when you want to develop a curriculum or you want to add something to curriculum,
03:22 it takes different stages.
03:24 That makes projects and games like Green Quest all the more important.
03:29 They make children aware of environmental issues and show them what they can do to help
03:33 solve them.
03:36 I am very excited.
03:38 I played Green Quest today.
03:42 I realized that if I see trash on the floor, I will dispose it as Nico did inside the game.
03:51 Using gaming as a way of tackling climate change is a new approach.
03:55 It's a strategy, says Grace James, with a lot of potential.
03:59 If we don't actually start to take conscious effort, a lot of things are going to impact
04:05 us.
04:06 Our human beings, even our ecosystem, the animals, our trees, the balance of the environment
04:12 as a whole.
04:13 So, and that's one of the reasons why we actually do our advocacy programs, because it's not
04:17 just about playing games, right?
04:19 But we found a way to make it so simple and put it in the form of a game.
04:24 So it's a movement, generally, and we see that it has very huge potential to actually
04:29 change the mindset of how future generations see sustainability.
04:35 And so Grace James is campaigning for environmental protection to be included in the curriculum
04:41 and hoping her game will be part of it.
04:43 - I like the sweet.
04:45 [BLANK_AUDIO]