Gaming is funny sometimes, right? While we've been playing games for quite some time, it's interesting to see much bigger players make moves on this giant chess board of life and that's exactly what's happening between big corporations and activist groups like Greenpeace.
The latest campaign from Greenpeace features a large-scale LEGO display sinking under oil, all in an effort to protest the LEGO company's partnership with the Shell Oil Company.
Taken separately, LEGO and Shell serve very different purposes as does Greenpeace and other groups fighting against big oil, but ultimately the best message I get out of this video is that we could all use a little moderation in our lives.
Here are the lessons I've learned from this rather abstract and metaphoric video from my former employers at Greenpeace:
- Awesome animals like the polar bears and arctic wolves are under threat. The entire video features an arctic display, so it follows that Greenpeace is trying to express that industrial developments in the arctic and around the world are contributing to a greater problem surrounding global warming and climate change.
- Those of us who don't do our part to decrease our dependency on industry and oil might suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs and become trapped in the black liquid that fills the scene in the video above. We could, potentially, become the very dinosaur fossils that we depend on for oil production around the world.
- Everything is awesome, until it isn't. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Ask any kid the day after Halloween if his or her parents are free-thinking enough to let the child go to town on all the candy they brought back with them.
- Shell and LEGO are targets, but that doesn't necessarily make them the problem. We, collectively, are the problem. The LEGO Movie heroes, Emmet and Wyldstyle, act as representatives for the audience here. While there are plenty of animals, hockey players, oil rig workers, and even Master Chief and a cruel looking business man present in this video, Emmet and Wyldestyle are there to remind us that we can't hole up in our caves and retreat from the world's problems. We need to be aware that everything awesome doesn't last and awesome stuff needs attention and care to continue being awesome.
I'd like to think that The LEGO Movie itself shares this sense of moderation in a way. I left the theater thinking the dad was a moron for clinging to his LEGO sets so dedicatedly and spending hundreds of dollars on them instead of awakening his inner child and enjoying the toy bricks with his son.
The message in Greenpeace's video seems cruelly dark, especially in its use of imagery and the childlike wonder culture surrounding LEGO at the moment. Still, I'm thankful that an organization like Greenpeace and others like it exist because God knows we can't all look out for planet Earth by ourselves.
