What can fantasy mechanics tell us about depleting real-world natural resources?

In KreatureKind, the Mana Well is running dry, because people have been using magic for the most frivolous of tasks. Should it be depleted, magic will disappear forever, leaving the world gray and in disarray. Through short, tongue-in-cheek dialogues, giving players a toolbox they can use when meeting science-denying people in our own world.

Using Abstraction to Reveal Costs of Extraction is a great way to make dry systemic issues more approachable, and the metaphor is apt – after all, electricity has a lot in common with the mana of our fantasy stories, you can pretty much just substitute one for the other. In fact, energy and magic are SO well aligned that it can be argued the abstraction isn’t very, well, abstract, on its own. It easily becomes transparent and educational, so coating the story in an additional layer of abstraction might in this case actually help the player take away more profound insight.

For example, Final Fantasy VII takes the concept a step further by adding a spiritual twist: the “mako” that the city of Midgar uses for generating both electricity and magic, also doubles as the life force of the planet and the souls of the dead.

It should be noted that energy is not the only thing that can be substituted for magic. A story such as KreatureKind’s can just as easily reveal the cost of other types of extraction where ordinary people can make a difference, such as groundwater depletion.