Call of Duty Screenshot. Image: Activision
The ‘Biggest ''Cli-Fi'' Entertainment Launch of the Year’ Is All About Climate Change
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/behold-the-rise-of-cli-fi
So why aren't we seeing global warming in cli-fi feature movies or on cli-fi TV dramas?
Climate change is routinely called the biggest threat humanity’s ever faced, but pop culture missed the memo. While there’s a burgeoning genre devoted to cli-fi literature, led by Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake), Nathaniel Rich (The Odds Against Tomorrow), Paolo Bacigalupi (the Water Knife) and others, there still hasn’t been a whole hell a lot of ''cli-fi'' stuff in our most-watched media — film, TV, or video games.
This week, though, we saw a bit of progress, courtesy of Call of Duty.
Yes, that Call of Duty. As my colleague Emanuel Maiberg points out, the most persistent enemy in the latest installment of the franchise is actually man-made global warming, aka AGW, aka climate change. The game takes place in a globally-warmed 2065, and players face environmental extremes wherever they go — dust storms in Egypt, floods and hurricane winds in Singapore, and so on. There have to date been a handful of games where the impact of climate change is made explicit—Anno 2070 is basically a post-global warming Sim City — but few that dramatize the experience in such a visceral way.
And Call of Duty is huge. This is the series that routinely beats out summer blockbusters at the box office, the series that has nearly as much reach as any fiction franchise going, period. This latest installment is already the “biggest entertainment launch of 2015,” according to IGN and Fortune. It pulled in millions in 3 days. That’s crazy money. Especially for a ''cli-fi'' game about climate change. Think of it this way: the biggest entertainment launch of 2015 forces players to interact with, and endure, a climatically-transformed world, in a ~reasonably~ realistic fashion.
Granted, there’s a lot going on in the new Call of Duty—supersoldiers, cybernetic implants, technophobia, people shooting people dead, all the time—but climate change is omnipresent, an obstructive force. AGW is something you have to deal with, constantly. You are forced to experience the environment that will likely come to pass if warming continues unmitigated. You will wade through floodwaters, wait out that dust storm. It will aggravate and annoy you. You are forced to feel climate change.
It’s a very interesting frontier for cli-fi, and one that’s probably unprecedented, on a couple fronts.
I wrote about ''cli-fi'' earlier here and here.
For starters, firstly, a decent climate-themed fiction project of any medium has never dominated a box office of any sort, as far as I’m aware. (Okay, Day After Tomorrow did all right, but it mangled the climate science so badly it really shouldn’t even count.)
2ndly, it marks an innovation in how audiences might experience distant AGW impacts. Today’s big budget games are clearly organic enough in the manner in which they drive players to interact with their environments that it might not be too much to posit that this COD could prod some new neurons to fire on the climate issue.
****I’d love to see some social scientists try to study whether gamers’ attitudes towards global warming changes over the course of playing through this installment.****
Could be nothing.....could be minute.... but then again.......it could plant some seeds, too.
And the more audiences engage with the climate issue — which is notoriously tough to get folks to do so, given global warming’s pervasiveness and seemingly long-unfolding timeframe—the more they might internalize and respond to it.
The climate activist movement and liberal “thought leaders” alike have long aspired to generate more effective “storytelling” and deploy more memorable narratives around global warming—I’ve heard calls for VR, augmented reality, and immersive media to inspire the public to learn about climate change. How about we just get them to play Call of Duty, 1st.
Still, we’re going to need a lot more than a single video game, however popular it may be, before we can consider pop culture a useful tool in reflecting back to the public the severity of the currently unfolding AGW crisis. The true populist mass media—television and film—are conspicuously absent of compelling ''cli-fi.''
(Nonfiction, it should be noted, fares better: An Inconvenient Truth created a sensation, as was the Arctic melt-documenting Chasing Ice,and the Year of Living Dangerously, and the climate episodes for VICE’s own HBO show, if I do say so myself, have been well received on TV.)
About a year ago, I recall having a brief chat with Vox’s energy and politics guru Dave Roberts, about this very problem; even then, there just weren’t any great examples of a climate change-based pop culture product, or even of climate change simply existing as a fixture of a future ambient reality in which a CF [cli-fi] show took place.
Dave noted that there hadn’t been a “Will & Grace” moment to spur the cultural normalization of climate change yet, in the way that that sitcom had for gay rights.
I argued that Interstellar, which featured a thinly veiled stand-in for climate change called “the blight” could have been the start of that very trend. Clearly, that didn’t pan out.
If we discount ''TAKLUB'', a cli-fi film from the Philippines that won best picture award at the 2015 Cli-Fi Movie Awards (dubbed ''THE CLIFFIES".....there hasn’t been a USA film this year that prominently features climate change — and this is a year in which we will witness the world’s biggest effort to actually try to save itself from climate change, when leaders gather in Paris for COP21 (aka FLOP21?).
Climate change has been in the news, a lot, for reasons both scientific and political, all of them worrisome. But films? [korgw101.blogspot.com]. If we discount ''TAKLUB'', a cli-fi film from the Philippines that won best picture award at the 2015 Cli-Fi Movie Awards (dubbed ''THE CLIFFIES" ...no executive thought to synergize the surefire climate-heavy news cycle with apocalyptic cli-fi to maximize interest and/or profit — no, our dystopian fiction is stuck on zombies and hunger games.
“My business is a disaster in this area,” he said, referring to Hollywood. “There’s no interest at all. I tried to sell a pilot that dealt with climate change this year. Not one network would go near it.”
[Which is weird; Hershkovitz is the creator of numerous respected prestige TV shows; thirtysomethings, My So-Called Life, Relativity, and Once and Again. He’s produced Hollywood hits like Traffic, The Last Samurai, and Blood Diamonds. He recently signed a first-look pact with Lionsgate TV. ]
So how did Lionsgate, and all of the industry, for that matter, feel about a TV show focused on climate change? “Wouldn’t go near it,” he told City Atlas. The pilot sounded pretty interesting, too!
Here’s the premise, per Hershkovitz:
“It takes place in 2085. It exists in a world that had been utterly transformed by climate change; climate change was everywhere. It was called ‘Storm World’... Basically, they just live in storms all the time. In the show, by 2085 .......25 million American climate refugees had to be removed from where they lived because where they lived had been inundated, and so they set up what they called ‘The Territories’ in the West.
Most of the Dakotas and Utah had been turned into, essentially, refugee camps for 25 million people to live because there was no other place for them. And these were Americans. This displacement had completely messed up the economy and the politics of America.”
Hershkovitz thinks he knows why, that, in the age of mass pop dystopia, the studios wouldn’t even consider his concept.
“Because they are not in the business of making people mad. In other words, they are trying to maximize their audience, and this is still very polarizing in the country. I think they feel that for a lot of people, it’s a turn off.”
And there it is. Because climate change is still a fraught political issue, with significant minorities of the country still in denial about the scientific reality of climate change, execs figure that they’re denying themselves a market segment—and perhaps courting controversy—right off the bat.
It’s the same reason Hollywood produces an unending deluge of superhero flicks, "reboots," and sequels—it’s a deeply conservative, risk-averse industry. Of course, it could be that this treatment was underdeveloped, poorly written, or whatever. But it could also be that Hollywood is full of profit-driven accountants.
Which, again, is why it’s so interesting that Call of Duty has unambiguously drawn climate change into a central role in such a marquee product. Sure, the franchise doesn’t even need to comment on the nature of climate change, just introduce the players to an environment in which it has occurred. But it’s still a mass-market product—and already an extremely profitable one—powered by global warming.
Unmitigated successes like COD: Black Ops 3 (and, I’d argue, Interstellar before it) may help to break down the perception that climate stories aren’t fit for the big tent. And, ideally, they’ll further encourage developers, producers, and executives to invest in stories about that biggest threat to humanity.
In turn, and somewhat ironically, it might help those doubters currently holding back cli-fi production to finally start feeling the gravity of the situation. Everyone wins. Except us I guess, when we look up from the screens and the Earth is still scorching.
Climate change is routinely called the biggest threat humanity’s ever faced, but pop culture missed the memo. While there’s a burgeoning genre devoted to cli-fi literature, led by Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake), Nathaniel Rich (The Odds Against Tomorrow), Paolo Bacigalupi (the Water Knife) and others, there still hasn’t been a whole hell a lot of ''cli-fi'' stuff in our most-watched media — film, TV, or video games.
This week, though, we saw a bit of progress, courtesy of Call of Duty.
Yes, that Call of Duty. As my colleague Emanuel Maiberg points out, the most persistent enemy in the latest installment of the franchise is actually man-made global warming, aka AGW, aka climate change. The game takes place in a globally-warmed 2065, and players face environmental extremes wherever they go — dust storms in Egypt, floods and hurricane winds in Singapore, and so on. There have to date been a handful of games where the impact of climate change is made explicit—Anno 2070 is basically a post-global warming Sim City — but few that dramatize the experience in such a visceral way.
And Call of Duty is huge. This is the series that routinely beats out summer blockbusters at the box office, the series that has nearly as much reach as any fiction franchise going, period. This latest installment is already the “biggest entertainment launch of 2015,” according to IGN and Fortune. It pulled in millions in 3 days. That’s crazy money. Especially for a ''cli-fi'' game about climate change. Think of it this way: the biggest entertainment launch of 2015 forces players to interact with, and endure, a climatically-transformed world, in a ~reasonably~ realistic fashion.
Granted, there’s a lot going on in the new Call of Duty—supersoldiers, cybernetic implants, technophobia, people shooting people dead, all the time—but climate change is omnipresent, an obstructive force. AGW is something you have to deal with, constantly. You are forced to experience the environment that will likely come to pass if warming continues unmitigated. You will wade through floodwaters, wait out that dust storm. It will aggravate and annoy you. You are forced to feel climate change.
It’s a very interesting frontier for cli-fi, and one that’s probably unprecedented, on a couple fronts.
I wrote about ''cli-fi'' earlier here and here.
For starters, firstly, a decent climate-themed fiction project of any medium has never dominated a box office of any sort, as far as I’m aware. (Okay, Day After Tomorrow did all right, but it mangled the climate science so badly it really shouldn’t even count.)
2ndly, it marks an innovation in how audiences might experience distant AGW impacts. Today’s big budget games are clearly organic enough in the manner in which they drive players to interact with their environments that it might not be too much to posit that this COD could prod some new neurons to fire on the climate issue.
****I’d love to see some social scientists try to study whether gamers’ attitudes towards global warming changes over the course of playing through this installment.****
Could be nothing.....could be minute.... but then again.......it could plant some seeds, too.
And the more audiences engage with the climate issue — which is notoriously tough to get folks to do so, given global warming’s pervasiveness and seemingly long-unfolding timeframe—the more they might internalize and respond to it.
The climate activist movement and liberal “thought leaders” alike have long aspired to generate more effective “storytelling” and deploy more memorable narratives around global warming—I’ve heard calls for VR, augmented reality, and immersive media to inspire the public to learn about climate change. How about we just get them to play Call of Duty, 1st.
(Nonfiction, it should be noted, fares better: An Inconvenient Truth created a sensation, as was the Arctic melt-documenting Chasing Ice,and the Year of Living Dangerously, and the climate episodes for VICE’s own HBO show, if I do say so myself, have been well received on TV.)
About a year ago, I recall having a brief chat with Vox’s energy and politics guru Dave Roberts, about this very problem; even then, there just weren’t any great examples of a climate change-based pop culture product, or even of climate change simply existing as a fixture of a future ambient reality in which a CF [cli-fi] show took place.
Dave noted that there hadn’t been a “Will & Grace” moment to spur the cultural normalization of climate change yet, in the way that that sitcom had for gay rights.
I argued that Interstellar, which featured a thinly veiled stand-in for climate change called “the blight” could have been the start of that very trend. Clearly, that didn’t pan out.
If we discount ''TAKLUB'', a cli-fi film from the Philippines that won best picture award at the 2015 Cli-Fi Movie Awards (dubbed ''THE CLIFFIES".....there hasn’t been a USA film this year that prominently features climate change — and this is a year in which we will witness the world’s biggest effort to actually try to save itself from climate change, when leaders gather in Paris for COP21 (aka FLOP21?).
Climate change has been in the news, a lot, for reasons both scientific and political, all of them worrisome. But films? [korgw101.blogspot.com]. If we discount ''TAKLUB'', a cli-fi film from the Philippines that won best picture award at the 2015 Cli-Fi Movie Awards (dubbed ''THE CLIFFIES" ...no executive thought to synergize the surefire climate-heavy news cycle with apocalyptic cli-fi to maximize interest and/or profit — no, our dystopian fiction is stuck on zombies and hunger games.
So what’s going on? This week, we got an interesting clue. In an interview with City Atlas, the successful TV and film producer Michael Hershkovitz revealed that he’d spent all last year shopping around a pilot for a dramatic show that took place in a climate-changed world.“My business is a disaster in this area,” he said, referring to Hollywood. “There’s no interest at all."
“My business is a disaster in this area,” he said, referring to Hollywood. “There’s no interest at all. I tried to sell a pilot that dealt with climate change this year. Not one network would go near it.”
[Which is weird; Hershkovitz is the creator of numerous respected prestige TV shows; thirtysomethings, My So-Called Life, Relativity, and Once and Again. He’s produced Hollywood hits like Traffic, The Last Samurai, and Blood Diamonds. He recently signed a first-look pact with Lionsgate TV. ]
So how did Lionsgate, and all of the industry, for that matter, feel about a TV show focused on climate change? “Wouldn’t go near it,” he told City Atlas. The pilot sounded pretty interesting, too!
Here’s the premise, per Hershkovitz:
“It takes place in 2085. It exists in a world that had been utterly transformed by climate change; climate change was everywhere. It was called ‘Storm World’... Basically, they just live in storms all the time. In the show, by 2085 .......25 million American climate refugees had to be removed from where they lived because where they lived had been inundated, and so they set up what they called ‘The Territories’ in the West.
Most of the Dakotas and Utah had been turned into, essentially, refugee camps for 25 million people to live because there was no other place for them. And these were Americans. This displacement had completely messed up the economy and the politics of America.”
Hershkovitz thinks he knows why, that, in the age of mass pop dystopia, the studios wouldn’t even consider his concept.
“Because they are not in the business of making people mad. In other words, they are trying to maximize their audience, and this is still very polarizing in the country. I think they feel that for a lot of people, it’s a turn off.”
And there it is. Because climate change is still a fraught political issue, with significant minorities of the country still in denial about the scientific reality of climate change, execs figure that they’re denying themselves a market segment—and perhaps courting controversy—right off the bat.
It’s the same reason Hollywood produces an unending deluge of superhero flicks, "reboots," and sequels—it’s a deeply conservative, risk-averse industry. Of course, it could be that this treatment was underdeveloped, poorly written, or whatever. But it could also be that Hollywood is full of profit-driven accountants.
Which, again, is why it’s so interesting that Call of Duty has unambiguously drawn climate change into a central role in such a marquee product. Sure, the franchise doesn’t even need to comment on the nature of climate change, just introduce the players to an environment in which it has occurred. But it’s still a mass-market product—and already an extremely profitable one—powered by global warming.
Unmitigated successes like COD: Black Ops 3 (and, I’d argue, Interstellar before it) may help to break down the perception that climate stories aren’t fit for the big tent. And, ideally, they’ll further encourage developers, producers, and executives to invest in stories about that biggest threat to humanity.
In turn, and somewhat ironically, it might help those doubters currently holding back cli-fi production to finally start feeling the gravity of the situation. Everyone wins. Except us I guess, when we look up from the screens and the Earth is still scorching.
Scott Thill, Dan Bloom
SEE BRIAN MERCHANT IN AN EARLIER INCARNATION:
SEE BRIAN MERCHANT IN AN EARLIER INCARNATION:
Behold the Rise of Dystopian 'Cli-Fi'
Though the age of the literary fiction is supposedly waning, the age of the literary genre is at its apex. In addition to staples like thrillers and sci-fi, bookstores are littered with sections for teen paranormal romances, apocalyptic fiction, werewolf horror, and beyond. Amazon.com has turned genre-naming into an SEO bloodsport, with my personal favorite example being “Affair of the Wolf (Book One of the Jim Tankson Saga: An Erotic, Keyword, Environmentalism, Werewolf, Schoolgirl, Horror, Passion Tale)."
And now, evidently, we've got cli-fi. Short for "climate fiction," the term was first coined by Dan Bloom, a Taiwan-based blogger in 2007 as part of an ill-fated effort to market an e-book called Polar City Red, a dystopian story about Alaskan climate refugees. The slowly growing genre is documented in an NPR piece that focuses on Nathaniel Rich's Odds Against Tomorrow, which, despite featuring a submerged Manhattan on the cover, and taking place in a world where the climatic system is certainly skewed, doesn't actually mention the words "climate change" in its pages.
The NPR story muses, as NPR stories are wont to do, about what constitutes cli-fi:
The dystopian present otherwise known as the actual present, where a carbon-loaded atmosphere is already beginning to wreak some havoc on human civ. Over at the Guardian, Rodge Glass runs down some recent exemplars:
Bloom, meanwhile, who coincidentally has been snubbed by the press despite coining the term—NPR didn't even mention him in its story—is glad the genre is taking off.
"What I like about the cli-fi term is that it can serve as a convenient way to find novels about climate change in both brick-and-mortar bookstores and from e-retailers," he writes. "Already, Amazon lists cli-fi as a genre in its book search data, and you only need to type in the words for a book search at Amazon and you will be taken to cli-fi books."
Anyhow, debating genre tags is a bit of a goofy thing to do, and authors end up hating them anyway—Atwood herself repeatedly denies any allegiance with sci-fi, so I doubt she'd be quick to embrace 'cli-fi'. But in this case, it's good to see more authors tackling a topic that is at once the most important phenomenon of our time, and the most difficult to write about interestingly. Despite the above-mentioned examples, there's a real dearth of good fiction about climate change and its impacts. So if high-profile writers like Rich and Atwood and best-selling books like The Dog Stars can demonstrate that there's a market for the genre, perhaps it will draw more interest from publishers and, subsequently, film studios. And that's where people are actually paying attention. That and YA cli-fi, of course.
And now, evidently, we've got cli-fi. Short for "climate fiction," the term was first coined by Dan Bloom, a Taiwan-based blogger in 2007 as part of an ill-fated effort to market an e-book called Polar City Red, a dystopian story about Alaskan climate refugees. The slowly growing genre is documented in an NPR piece that focuses on Nathaniel Rich's Odds Against Tomorrow, which, despite featuring a submerged Manhattan on the cover, and taking place in a world where the climatic system is certainly skewed, doesn't actually mention the words "climate change" in its pages.
The NPR story muses, as NPR stories are wont to do, about what constitutes cli-fi:Odds is the latest in what seems to be an emerging literary genre. Over the past decade, more and more writers have begun to set their novels and short stories in worlds, not unlike our own, where the Earth's systems are noticeably off-kilter. The genre has come to be called climate fiction — "cli-fi," for short.And then the august public news org really separates the wheat from the chaff: "Of course, science fiction with an environmental bent has been around since the 1960s (think J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World),"—and about ten thousand others—"But while sci-fi usually takes place in a dystopian future, cli-fi happens in a dystopian present."
Of course, science fiction with an environmental bent has been around since the 1960s (think J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World). But while sci-fi usually takes place in a dystopian future, cli-fi happens in a dystopian present."I think we need a new type of novel to address a new type of reality," says Rich, "which is that we're headed toward something terrifying and large and transformative. And it's the novelist's job to try to understand, what is that doing to us?"
The dystopian present otherwise known as the actual present, where a carbon-loaded atmosphere is already beginning to wreak some havoc on human civ. Over at the Guardian, Rodge Glass runs down some recent exemplars:
Whereas 10 or 20 years ago it would have been difficult to identify even a handful of books that fell under this banner, there is now a growing corpus of novels setting out to warn readers of possible environmental nightmares to come. Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour, the story of a forest valley filled with an apparent lake of fire, is shortlisted for the2013 Women's prize for fiction. Meanwhile, there's Nathaniel Rich's Odds Against Tomorrow, set in a future New York, about a mathematician who deals in worst-case scenarios. In Liz Jensen's 2009 eco-thriller The Rapture, summer temperatures are asphyxiating and Armageddon is near; her most recent book, The Uninvited, features uncanny warnings from a desperate future. Perhaps the most high-profile cli-fi author is Margaret Atwood, whose 2009 The Year of the Flood features survivors of a biological catastrophe also central to her2003 novel Oryx and Crake, a book Atwood sometimes preferred to call "speculative fiction".I'd add the current bestseller The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller, which is mostly about a flu pandemic, but also has a healthy dose of climate dysfunction. There are also subtle hints lurking in the background of the Hunger Games that the dystopian present was precipitated by climate changed—does that make it 'Young Cli-fi'? And I guess films like The Day After Tomorrow would have to count too, even if it did get the science all wrong.
Bloom, meanwhile, who coincidentally has been snubbed by the press despite coining the term—NPR didn't even mention him in its story—is glad the genre is taking off.
"What I like about the cli-fi term is that it can serve as a convenient way to find novels about climate change in both brick-and-mortar bookstores and from e-retailers," he writes. "Already, Amazon lists cli-fi as a genre in its book search data, and you only need to type in the words for a book search at Amazon and you will be taken to cli-fi books."
Anyhow, debating genre tags is a bit of a goofy thing to do, and authors end up hating them anyway—Atwood herself repeatedly denies any allegiance with sci-fi, so I doubt she'd be quick to embrace 'cli-fi'. But in this case, it's good to see more authors tackling a topic that is at once the most important phenomenon of our time, and the most difficult to write about interestingly. Despite the above-mentioned examples, there's a real dearth of good fiction about climate change and its impacts. So if high-profile writers like Rich and Atwood and best-selling books like The Dog Stars can demonstrate that there's a market for the genre, perhaps it will draw more interest from publishers and, subsequently, film studios. And that's where people are actually paying attention. That and YA cli-fi, of course.
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