Hosted by Esme Stallard, a BBC climate and science reporter at the COP27 Global Climate Action Hub, Inspiring the Next Generation: BBC's Frozen Planet II and Minecraft showcased how the BBC and one of the most popular computer games in the world joined forces to engage young people with climate change.
One way to do this is through traditional documentaries, something the BBC have a long track record of. Its award-winning nature shows, such as The Living Planet, Planet Earth and Life in Cold Blood have enchanted and informed for more than five decades. The common thread through all these programmes is of course Sir David Attenborough, a biologist, natural historian and author, whose authoritative charm has explained the natural world – and the importance of its biodiversity – to millions.
As the climate crisis has gotten more intense, the BBC has used its natural history programmes to showcase the effects the crisis is having on the natural world. Its Blue Planet II documentary series helped to focus minds on the production of single-use plastic, and Frozen Planet II – a six-part series narrated by Sir David Attenborough, explores the wildlife found in the world’s coldest regions: the Arctic and Antarctic, high mountains, frozen deserts, snowbound forests, and ice-cold oceans.
Climate Storytelling
The aim of the series, according to its producer, Dr. Elizabeth White, is to inform people about these regions, and make them fall in love with them. “It is a series with heart,” she told the audience in Sharm El-Sheikh. “It also puts the climate changes we are seeing in these regions at the heart of the storytelling.”
Frozen Planet II tells the stories of the animals living in these landscapes and shows the hardship they suffer as a result of the climate crisis. “It is not a particularly happy message,” White said. “It’s a hard message to digest, but we know that audiences have an appetite for this, as this drew the biggest audience of the year in the UK for a factual television programme.”
This type of show has a global reach, and are particularly of interest to young people, White said, pointing out that in the UK’s 4 to 15-year-old age group, the viewing figures were three times higher than for a normal nature documentary.
The BBC then looked at how it could engage with young people further and contacted the makers of the best-selling video game of all time: Minecraft. Its statistics are incredible: played by 100 million people a month in more than 160 countries and has more than one trillion views on YouTube. Often described as online Lego, Minecraft is a 3-D computer game that allows players to use ‘blocks’ to build structures in a variety of different landscapes.
Critical Messages
“With that type of reach and scale, we feel we have a responsibility of telling critical messages,” says Minecraft’s Director of Learning Experiences, Justin Edwards. “We want young people to use the game to build empathy for animals and the challenges that animals face, and how we can take corrective action, so they can convey that message intergenerationally and to their peers so we can build better knowledge and understanding.”
Minecraft created natural landscapes that mimicked the worlds shown on Frozen Planet II, while Sir David Attenborough provided the voiceover. “We start introducing the science and the study of the animals but in a Minecraft way,” Edwards says.
Within this Antarctic Minecraft landscape, players control a penguin, which needs to collect pebbles to build a nest to keep their chicks dry. “It’s not about collecting points, but about protecting your young in a challenging world,” Edwards says. “Children really connect with the penguins and feel the tension of protecting [their] young.”
Playing for the Planet
Minecraft is not the only computer game that explores the topics around the climate crisis. Launched during the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit, the Playing for the Planet Alliance has seen the likes of Microsoft, Sony and Ubisoft join up. Playing for the Planet also hosts a yearly Green Game Jam, which sees game studios integrate green activations within their popular games. Studios with a combined reach of 1 billion players participated in the 2021 Jam, and they were able to engage 130 million players around the world with some 60,000 pledges signed for the UN campaigns, Glowing, Glowing Gone and Play4Forests, and $800,000 in donations to different charities working with environmental causes.
The beauty of these games is that they translate often complex climate topics to students in a way that they can understand and act upon. “Children are not just interested in learning about these topics,” says White, “but they want to know what they can do to help. So, [Minecraft] is a great way to reach out to children directly.”
“Children want to understand what’s happening in the world around them,” Edward adds. “And they feel comfortable learning about this in the platforms they love.” One of Minecraft’s aims was to connect children and adults in a conversation about climate change, with children armed with the education they have gotten throughout the game.”