New game: Tipping Pigs 3

Malte Vogl | Feb 13, 2024 min read
Start screen of the Tipping Pigs game: pixel-art beach with two pigs, an intro text about protecting an island from a tipping point, and English and Deutsch language buttons.

Tipping Pigs 3 casts the player as guardian of a Polynesian island, balancing a pig herd against the health of its environment. Send pigs to neighboring islands, grow the herd, or cull it — but push the ecosystem too far and it crosses a tipping point, after which recovery becomes very hard. The game is a playable, bilingual (English/German) way into a concept central to Anthropocene research: that environmental systems do not degrade smoothly, but can flip abruptly once a threshold is crossed, echoing real-world cases like coral bleaching, forest dieback, and fishery collapse.

Play the game

  • Author: Malte Vogl, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology
  • Platform: HTML5, free to play in the browser
  • First released: February 13, 2024 (now at version 3)
  • Link: mvogl.itch.io/tipping-pigs-3