New World’s new “Feast for the Future” event asks players to tap into the old world’s bounty and get cooking. As part of a sustainability-focused “Green Game Jam,” players can make a “sustainable” recipe for a chance for it to be featured in the game itself.
More specifically, this event asks players to create an in-game recipe using a list of canon “sustainable ingredients” onto an official Discord channel, and the winner will have their recipe adopted into the game itself.
The official rules state that players can submit up to five recipes; once player voting is over, the final judgment will be made based on the creativity and originality of the name, recipe name, ingredient list and lore note.
“This year’s [Green Game Jam] event is about making small changes to the way we eat to drive demand for more sustainable food sources,” the New World event page reads. “With sustainability in mind, we are excited to give our players the opportunity to design a new in-game cooking dish. While resources in Aeternum may respawn infinitely, we must consider the environmental impact of our choices in the real world.”
Green Game Jam went live earlier this month and is run by Playing For The Planet, a UN Environment Programme that was launched in 2019 and claims organizations such as Razr, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Unity, Bandai Namco and more as official members. Plus, there are other initiatives out there trying to get people to touch grass, including the SeedSaga campaign with Guild Wars 2, where players in the UK got to acquire real native seeds with GW2 equivalents to plant in real life.
On the other hand, while we’re sure it’s more New World than Amazon itself leading this initiative, Amazon itself is probably not the pinnacle of sustainability, between being responsible for uncountable tons of packaging waste and fuels in transport and owning the server mega-service AWS (which is at least moving towards renewable energy… over the next 25 years). Still, kudos to New World/the Amazon Games team for taking the step.
