A University team is researching the potential of raising awareness by incorporating biodiversity into video games.

Back in November, Charlie Brooker wrote in The Guardian with characteristic subtlety: “The trouble with video games isn’t the violence. It’s that most of the characters are dicks.”

Bill Adams, Moran Professor of Conservation and Development and fellow of Downing College, is hoping to address this trait of the gaming world.

As part of the project, entitled Games for Nature, Adams has run a workshop and seminar exploring the possibilities of incorporating elements of conservation. The research raises questions about the extent to which video games should be injected with didactic content. However, Adams claims that the aim of the research is not to preach to potentially young gamers who are susceptible to such influences.

“You don’t make computer games just to change attitudes. People only play them if they are enormous fun,” he explains. “You can’t write a game to make people eat more vegetables or save the world because it is not a lot of fun. You write stories in games, and can create particular dilemmas, inviting people to think about problems.”

The problems and dilemmas discussed by the project address whether “virtual nature” will “start to outshine living nature in the eyes of a game-obsessed world” and whether games can “engage a generation who have already lost contact with nature.”

The project follows the surprising success of recent games that illustrate ecological concerns, such as Flower, which earned the coveted and fittingly ethical award of Playboy Best Indie Game of 2009.

2011 saw the release of Fate of the World, described by The Guardian as “Football Manager, but with biofuels,” in which the player aims to alleviate poverty and prevent climate change.

Adams argues that in fact “there is a lot of potential” for ‘green gaming.’

If such potential is realised, and the prevalent violence in video games gives way to ‘cleaner’ alternatives, then perhaps gamers will stop seeing red, and instead start thinking green.