A Sandbox for the Anthropocene

Chaim Gingold/Earth Primer

Too often, we specialize. But we don’t have to. One of the fields with the space to embrace generalists and polymaths is video game design. As I’ve written before, there are certain types of video games that are particularly well-suited to interdisciplinary thinking: games like SimCity or Spore or Civilization that require broad knowledge in area after area, from complex systems and astrophysics to history and evolutionary biology. Essentially, these sandbox games are exercises in building a self-contained microcosm and seeing how it works and hangs together.

Into this genre of world-building toys steps something new. Chaim Gingold, a computer game designer who worked on Spore, has released something truly special: Earth: A Primer. It is billed an interactive textbook that teaches geology and other planetary processes. But really, it’s a playground for the Earth.

Earth: A Primer explores the various aspects of our planet’s systems, from water flow to sand dunes. But rather than simply allowing you to read some text or see illustrations (even animated illustrations), you get to play with these systems.

I had a chance to receive a review copy and I can tell you that I was enchanted from the beginning. I started by playing with plumes of magma and graduated to leveling and raising the Earth. The user is stepped through various aspects of our planet and how they operate, getting a chance to employ rain, temperature, even changing the sea level, all to alter our globe and see how it works.

Chaim Gingold/Earth Primer

Once you learn how the individual pieces operate, you can then see how they all fit together. The user is given a postage stamp piece of the Earth, and then given the powers of Baal, the Lord of the Heavens. You can make mountains skip like rams, or strip the forests bare. These powers all interact in complex ways, yielding a wide variety of biomes, depending on the choices you make to your little sandbox of planet Earth.

Chaim Gingold/Earth Primer

This is much more than a toy. It is a catalyst for thinking about our world. As one of Gingold’s interlocutors on Twitter noted, Earth: A Primer shows “how models give us insight into the anthropocene.” In this era of the Anthropocene, where humanity is having an unprecedented effect on our planet, knowing how all the various planetary systems and processes hang together is more important than ever. And being able to do this with a sense of play is truly a joy.