Im a huge fan of the game SimCity, I’ve played nearly all games in the serie. But it is with disappointment I look at the newest version of the game in the series: SimCity Societies.

The disappointment is because of a few things. One is that it doesn’t look or behave like a SimCity game should. Another thing is that they in this new game accept corporate sponsorship inside the game.

Okay, before we get any deeper I think I need to explain what kind of game SimCity is. This is what they say about the game on the official site:

Featuring an all-new, revolutionary feature set, SimCity Societies allows you to create your own kinds of cities and shape their cultures and environments. Make your cities green or polluted, contemporary or futuristic, rural or urban. Create an artistic society or a police state, an industrial city or a spiritual community—or any society you want!

Let’s get back to the corporate sponsorship shall we?

If the player chooses to build a green city with renewable energy sources the wind and solar power plants will have the British Petroleum (BP) logo on them. BP have, of course, paid EA (the makers of the game) a sum to have their logo on the game. The amount of money is still unknown.

According to an article in New York Times BP wants to “teach” the players that the energy usage with electricity has a much bigger impact on climate change than for example transports does.

But they apparently don’t want to “teach” the players that BP is suspected to have leaked out a million litre oil in Alaska and that they have and are receiving critics that they ignore human rights. And that’s just to name a few bad examples.

SimCity Socities has received some postitive feedback from other green blog such as the well-known EcoGeek and TreeHugger. But apparently no one cares about greenwashing anymore.