Daniel Englander
“Warning! Danieltown Needs Petroleum!” February 1, 2008 at 3:19 PM
Chevron’s Energyville online game is a sham. After reading today’s writeup of Chevron’s brain-rotting propaganda play, I decided to try my luck at urban planning and energy management in Chevron’s world. So, how did the online game endorsed by The Economist fare on the “ulterior motives” scale?
Well… I was already a little turned off by the “oil drop” loading page and the trippy music, but then… My solar panels were too expensive and inefficient, my hydroelectric dam was nullified because of community-level water rights claims, my wind turbines broke, my hydrogen plant suffered from “viability problems”, and my biomass facility caused a famine. While busily working to fix my crippled renewable energy infrastructure, a new oil tar sand deposit was discovered and exploited, dropping oil prices and allowing the good citizens of Danieltown to hit the open road once more. The tar sands also spread freedom.
At one point, I was served with the ominous admonition “WARNING! DANIELTOWN NEEDS PETROLEUM!”
Other people I’ve talked with who have played the game report such “unexpected events” in the game as cloudy days driving up the cost of solar installations, ethanol tariffs, and hydrogen price pressure. No mention of other “unexpected events” like… Nigerian freedom fighters, polar bear extinction, extreme natural disasters, or $200 hedges on oil. This is almost as lame of an effort at environmental relevance as FutureGen. And we all know what happened to that.
We at Greentech Media have decided to play a little experiment. Since Energyville is so clearly biased and damaging to our cause, we are asking all of your help to game the system. You should all go out and play the game, and we will give a free, totally awesome prize the person with the highest portion of renewables in your energy mix. Send your screen shots of the final results page to me at englander at greentechmedia dot com . You can’t win if you have fossil fuels in your city. We will, however, offer a special bonus prize to the entrant with the dirtiest city. Good luck - we’ll broadcast the results next week.
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Hey Daniel,
I got a decent (maybe) score 654764082. This time. The last time I was afflicted with many many unfortunate events that rendered all my well-intentioned renewable fuels use worthless. This time, thankfully (?) a terrorist attack increased the price of oil which seems to help in this game.
Why play? What did I learn? I think the obvious answer is that oil shale will save us from the unreliability of renewables. A fine lesson for us all.
Scott
Hey Scott - One thing I noticed after another few rounds this morning is that the game allows you to install unlimited coal and oil capacity, but takes away your ability to install renewable capacity after your city has “too many”. On my last round my Energyville was powered with 50 percent coal, 33.3 percent petroleum, and the rest from oil shale and natural gas.
Does anyone else have a funny Energyville observation or story to share? We’d love to hear from you.
-Daniel
In my fictional town of Blacklung, USA - coal plants and nuclear power plants placed in disadvantaged neighborhoods keep the town running until 2030 - when we miraculously discover new natural gas sources in Africa. I tried to float a nuke plant in a body of water (Russia is trying this as we speak) but even this game wouldn’t accept that ridiculous premise. A lot of corporate lying going on with this game. Actually it’s not a game, it’s the business plan of the oil companies in graphical form.
My score for Disco Town was 651,178,688 and was 58% wind powered. The first time i played it wouldn’t let me put in any solar… and like Scott, I was attacked by terrorists and told that I needed more oil even though my town was already 90% powered at that point.
I will have to agree with Eric that it’s a business plan in graphical form.
I do enjoy the silly background music though!
Wonderfully vacuous shill this is. I noticed that my town, Deathzoo, was incapable of reaching capacity without the petroleum plant. All of the other options actually grayed out after I added ‘too many’ wind turbines, with only the little cartoon oil rig glowing there. It made me think of a feeder bar and a rat, cognition is not part of the experiment, just conditioned response. I guess you need base load power, and the hydro plant that dwarfs the city’s blocks isn’t sufficient. Well, they say, ‘Game is not to scale.’ They also say, ‘Data and events are conjectured.’
as someone environmentally informed but not up in the business of it, it didn’t feel that rigged. which is kind of scary.
i want to know why i can’t invest in trained hamsters in wheels hooked up to generators.