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If you start a job as an oil rigger, then there’s a 50% chance you’ll have a report­able accident within the next six months. After that period, the risk drops to 5% or less, as you get to know the ropes.

That’s quite fright­ening for poten­tial oil-​​riggers and for people in the oil and gas industry who hire such folk.

I was lucky enough to be at a present­a­tion from Kevin McNulty from Coole Immersive yes­terday, part of the Visual Web Convention. They’ve made a sim­u­la­tion game that allows new oil-​​riggers to get that first six months’ exper­i­ence for free. That’s to say, the like­li­hood they’ll have a report­able accident drops to <5% if they’ve used the game. That’s a fairly cast-​​iron case for games in the work­place, if you ask me.

Earlier in the day, Lord Puttnam gave a chal­len­ging keynote sug­gesting that this field — serious games — was a poten­tial answer to the work he was doing with the climate change com­mis­sion in the House of Lords. Briefly, his argument was that younger people are more likely to engage with games than any other media — I’d agree with this but suggest that older people are also gamers. Games are also blessed with the ability to offer exper­i­en­tial learning unlike any other ped­agogic tech­nique cur­rently avail­able — I think the oil rigger case study shows that’s true. Communicating the things that all of us need to do to avoid the looming disaster that climate change will bring is a tough problem for all pro­fes­sional com­mu­nic­ators. We held a private event this week for advert­ising pro­fes­sionals called Can Advertising Save the Planet? The answer is probably ‘no’, but as com­mu­nic­ators, we have the ability and respons­ib­ility to make things a little easier and better — the disaster is imminent, after all, but even the lowest of the low can do some­thing to help.

If we are to steer society away from cata­strophe and into edu­ca­tion, games will have a key part to play.

Unfortunately, as Puttnam admitted, as soon as some­thing is called a ‘game’ then bur­eau­cracy and gov­ern­ment recoils. The idea of our gov­ern­ment lending public support, and ulti­mately money, to games, is stymied by its vocab­u­lary. Games are trivial and a social harm in the minds of most bur­eau­crats and, sadly, most news­paper editors (see the press about the recent Byron Review which, while admit­ting a need for some gov­ernance over which titles were avail­able to younger gamers, was over­whelm­ingly in favour of video games as a learning resource, if you bother to read the whole thing).

Flipping back to climate change and the emer­gency we face com­mu­nic­ating the facts about it and what needs to be done, then games provide an excel­lent oppor­tunity. But the flip-​​side of the problem with bur­eau­crats then sets in — enter­tain­ment pro­viders are ter­ri­fied of being asso­ci­ated with anything remotely ‘worthy’. Being ethical is, appar­ently, uncool.  There have already been a few brave attempts — World without Oil, the BBC’s Climate Challenge and others. But the likes of Sony, EA and Microsoft aren’t devel­oping or pro­moting these sorts of titles. What needs to happen to make the big games pub­lishers alert to their power to change the future?

[Update — Robin Blandford has some videos of what this looks like and a chal­lenge for the rescue industry]