Essay by Eric Worrall
“… After each round, you are sent back to a roundtable of NPCs (non-playing characters) who scrutinise your decisions before revealing a sustainability score …”
I tried out a new version of Minecraft to see why environmental storylines help children learn
Published: October 22, 2025 4.07am AEDT
Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda
Senior Research Associate, Environmental Sciences, University of East AngliaA new version of Minecraft aims to teach students about coastal erosion, flood resilience and climate adaptation, and shows how children can use computer games to learn about complex situations.
CoastCraft is a new custom world from the educational arm of the Minecraft team that can be downloaded and added to the game. It is set in the seaside town of Bude, Cornwall, and players attempt to protect the coastal landscape from the various effects associated with sea-level rises and climate change. The game takes about an hour or two to complete.
…
In the game, students use animations to help them understand coastal erosion and rising sea levels before being able to explore and engage with a range of coastal management strategies (including relocating key infrastructure, using nature-based solutions such as plants, or potentially doing nothing at all).
…If you do a bad job, the sea encroaches on the terrain and certain infrastructure is lost (for instance, a car park or toilets). These dynamics add to the immersive experience of the game. They also really nail the realities of future climate change in a way that is potentially far more relevant and digestible than scientific models and projections.
…
After each round, you are sent back to a roundtable of NPCs (non-playing characters) who scrutinise your decisions before revealing a sustainability score on how well you managed to reconcile the competing economic, societal and environmental demands. Once you have finished the game, you can return to the main base and also chat to NPCs about different careers in coastal management.
Read more: https://theconversation.com/i-tried-out-a-new-version-of-minecraft-to-see-why-environmental-storylines-help-children-learn-267161
…
Minecraft is the best selling kids game of all time, 350 million copies sold as of 2025. Very popular with primary school age kids. It is simple enough for four year olds to get into it, and keeps them engaged up to the age of 12.
Imagine taking one of the world’s most popular games and twisting it into yet another green propaganda tool. Isn’t there already enough youth climate anxiety in the world?
Minecraft isn’t unique in experimenting with climate themes, other popular games like Sid Meier’s Civilisation games were experimenting with global warming themes in the 1990s.
But what really upsets me about this new Minecraft game is the age of kids who are attracted to Minecraft. Young kids, pre-school in some cases, who don’t have the experience and perspective to realise they are just playing a game, when the fake AI non player characters criticise the kids for making climate change decisions the game creators disagree with.
I’m sure this game will be popular with UK education boards. How many primary school kids will be introduced to this game by teachers, as part of their climate education?
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Indoctrination…it’s never too soon to begin. “Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man.” This saying is often linked to St. Francis Xavier and Aristotle, though the exact origin is debated. It means that the formative years up to about age seven are crucial in shaping the person’s character and future.
A related and somewhat similar quote by B.F. Skinner is: “Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything,” emphasizing the power of early upbringing and conditioning.
There is also a notable Lenin quote in the same spirit: “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world,” reflecting the importance of youth in societal transformation.
LOL, there are castles in the UK that used to have sea ports, and are now well and truly high and dry. !
Heretic, next you’ll be suggesting sea levels might have been higher during the Medieval Warm Period than today 🙂
That was a few topics ago 😉
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/10/20/steve-milloy-the-hurricane-season-that-still-isnt/#comment-4122725
Is one of the admonishments shutting off your computer and getting offline? I doubt it.
We laugh but I think miss the point. Digital information can be raising our children. Who knows where that comes from?
But we suspect where it leads. 🙁
Points to issue exposed during COVID: If schools go digital/online, then
1) Recordings will exist to show parents what their kids are being taught
2) Student-to-teacher ratio becomes meaningless… why not just one, single, “the best” teacher per grade eg 1 teacher per 32 million USA 1st graders? Sounds like a smaller teachers’ union.
3) To decision-making parents, how much of elementary school’s value is derived from what the kid is taught, how much is derived from a socialization with other in-person kids and how much is derived from socially distributed cost of babysitting the kid for long enough for a pair of suburban parents to split the “driving them there” and the “driving them home” so two incomes can pay a mortgage?
The pie chart answer to question 3 gets to the truth of the matter. If two working parents or one working single parent is to be standard, then school is needed for daycare. During COVID, when school was closed as a daycare option, parents of young kids must have thought about that a lot. What does a middle school aged kid do if left unwatched round the house all day? Minecraft is a weak guess.
(Still drinking 1st coffee on West coast. Sorry if incoherent.)
Would this be child abuse..?
A new version of
MinecraftMindcraft aims toteachindoctrinatestudentsyoung children about coastal erosion, flood resilience and climate adaptation, and shows howchildrenadults can use computer gamesto learn about complex situationsfor nefarious reasons.In any other walk of life it would be called grooming
Not good.
The climate zealots have learned from history !!
All religions mould the kids from birth.
The ‘green movement’ has its roots in Nazi teachings, a central tenet of Nazi ideology linked environmentalism with racial purity, like the tribalisum we see in today’s politics.
The Hitler Youth (formed in 1925) served as a key recruitment source for the SS and other Nazi paramilitary groups. Even after defeat, many continued the Nazi beliefs they were taught until old age & have influenced several generations; 100 years on, we have an increase of violent neo-nazi groups around the world.
So history shows this climate nonsense could go on for a long time; beliefs trump facts.
From Elliot’s own profile:
Pure word salad, with bonus ultra-processed made-up words; the hallmark of someone struggling to sound educated.
We can though, be grateful he’s brought this abomination to our attention.
As I recall, Sid Meier’s Civilization had general environmental concerns as a limiting factor on economic growth.
It was nuclear war that caused the biggest problems.
And, in contrast to current Green beliefs, the game’s solution to environmental problems wasn’t to avoid further civilising but rather to invest in research and technology.
I’m not understanding the thesis, but +1 for referencing young adulthood favorite game. I played with VGA graphics on a clone PC with 10MHz 8088.
Climate propaganda in the form of a game – profitable and fun, too. What’s not to like?
Buy stock. Use the profits to pay your outrageous electric bills.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated
— Climate Borg
Is it sold to kids up to the age of 12? Or to those who think it’s sufficiently dumbed down for kids up to the age of 12?
Oh, and ickypedia link.
Civilisation was set to prop Smithsonian / Wikipedia universe to begin with from 1.1.0, as such it never was not made of propaganda. So what did this change? Introduced the only one peculiar piece of pop BS smell of which you don’t like? LOL.
Speaking of which… I wonder if anyone have tried to estimate amount of players of vanilla Civ vs. non-cosmetically modded vs. FreeCiv + UnCiv, through the years. Not that it really matters, as other 4X left it behind.
I have been playing Civ for decades. I really only remember one version that had the CC crap as part of the vanilla game, Civ 3 I think it was. It had ridiculous events like “Global Warming has struck near Paris”, as if global warming is a localized event. It almost seemed like they put it in as a mockery of the whole concept. But in Civ 5 and 6, they haven’t had that, to my recollection, definitely not 6, which I play regularly (I have it up on my other screen right now). I only play vanilla.
Civ allows an interesting contrast for “how the real world has changed”. I was also a player of the first couple generations, as would most from my generation and the fattest part of the socioeconomic class bell curve.
My generation had:
Cartoons like GI Joe where men with guns and tanks saved the day.
TV like A-Team where men with guns and the tank BA made the van into saved the day.
Computer games like Civ where men with guns and tanks saved the day.
Board games like Risk where plastic men with guns and tanks saved the day.
A president like Reagan who ended the Cold war by spending on men with guns and tanks.
World view USA 2000-2020 did not support any of that, and Civ stands out by emphasizing the algorithmic nature of the winning recipe:
Use all resources available. If you run out there’s more off-screen.
Invest in tech for as long as possible then conquer everyone who didn’t,
Ruin the environment with today’s tech then fix it with tomorrow’s tech (ideally post-conquest).
Yeah. It’s like a meteor impact, it just strikes wherever it wants. Bang, a Global Warming crater.
It’s almost like when a Pointy Haired Boss barges in and says “oh, and by the way, we need to put this trendy BS in there, too”, the developers are much less enthusiastic than they pretend to be. ;]
“(non-playing characters)”
Should be “non-player characters”.
“Microsoft’s acquisition of Minecraft, Mojang, was a strategic move to expand its gaming portfolio and reach a broader audience. The deal was announced on September 15, 2014”
Not “climate education”, climate brainwashing.
Speaking of games, back when Obama was running the first time there was a popular racing game (I forget what it was called.).
As the players raced they’d pass billboards. Some of those billboards were Obama campaign posters.