Digital Games After Climate Change

Citation

Abraham, Benjamin J. Digital Games After Climate Change. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. 9783030917043.

Abstract

“​This book presents the first sustained analysis of the digital game industry’s carbon footprint and its role in exacerbating global climate change. Identifying the ways videogames can actually help combat the climate crisis, it argues for the urgency of transitioning to a fully carbon neutral games industry, exploring the challenges and opportunities inherent in this undertaking. Beginning with an analysis of debates around the persuasive power of games, the book argues that real impact can only be achieved by focusing on the material conditions of game production – by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from making, selling, and playing games, as well as the hardware used to play them. Abraham makes a compelling argument that a sustainable games industry is possible, and outlines the actions that everyone can take to reduce the harms that digital games cause to people and planet.”

Annotations

Acknowledgments

“This book project started with the realization that if I was going to take climate change seriously I needed to do something about it” (vii)

Chapter 1: Why Games and Climate Change?

“Games and heat are inextricably linked” (1)

“The dilemma of what to do when it becomes too hot to play games, and the questions it raises about where to go, or what to do about the waste byproducts of games (like heat) informs the perspective this book takes on the increasingly pressing questions and multiple, interconnected dilemmas facing the global games industry within the context of our rapid heating world” (1)

“The growing ferocity and impact of extreme weather events begins to threaten to disrupt modern ways of living which depend on uninterrupted global supply chains, predictable patterns of energy demand, and weather conditions that are conducive to workers being able to simply go to work every day. All of the threats to these systems will eventually make their way home to the various spheres in which we make and play digital games” (1-3)

“There are deeply political, often deeply unjust, consequences to the fact that both the greatest number of people and those who are the most exposed to climate threats tend to be located in poorer, less developed nations” (2)

“In a future facing real resource and carbon constraints, how highly would we priorities the making and playing games?” (3)

“while it might seem trivial or perverse depending on where one is situated to be concerned with the fate of a leisure industry in the face of arguably more serious disruptions, this seems to me all the more reason to start the process now of thinking about what climate change means for games, and what they can be done about it before being forced to act by events outside our control” (3)

“Bringing the climate crisis ‘home’ to all of our lives, all of our workplaces, all of our hobbies, is the necessary first step in acting to reverse climate action” (3)

“Beginning with more traditional game studies theory and analysis (Chap. 2), including a close reading of games in the ‘survival-crafting’ genre (Chap. 3), the book moves beyond these to focus on how games get made, and the associated climate and environmental costs” (3)

“a diffuse and tangled network of harms” (3)

“It is clear that a conflict is brewing between the way the existing digital games industry is economically and politically organized and our goals for a livable planet” (4)

“an industry-wide commitment to carbon neutrality is utterly essential. Anything less than that is simply insufficient” (5)

“The games that we have been playing, for all the innocent pleasures they may bring, are profoundly entangled with the global processes that are fueling and deepening the climate crisis” (5)

“To know what sort of environment games and game players might face in the future-both in the sense of our physical-climactic environment and the political economic environment-it is necessary to understand the nature of the unfolding crisis as well” (6)

“Anthropogenic (human driven) climate change can be understood in any of a number of different ways. Most obviously, it is an ongoing process of increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere and dissolved in the oceans; it is the ‘greenhouse effect’ of trapping more solar radiation in the atmosphere, triggering rising temperatures and sea levels; it is an increase in the statistical ‘risk’ of extreme climate events from this greenhouse effect; it is the consequence of a loss of carbon sinks like rainforests due to land clearing for farming and development, further accentuating the effects of already high emissions levels, and so on” (7)

“Many of these formulations, however, merely describe the symptoms rather than the cause of the crisis itself. One can diagnose the problem of climate change in a way such that the analysis finishes at its proximate cause the release of carbon into the atmosphere-without ever really examining why it is occurring” (7)

“It is not immodest to recognize that the world (changed as it is) will almost certainly ‘go on without us’” (8)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Meillassoux and Likavcan

“Chris D. Thomas (2017) … Inheritors of the Earth” (8)

“the climate crisis reveals the profound democratic deficit in the global political order. We must also acknowledge the unmitigated, prolonged human suffering on a global scale that we would be unleashing should we accept a ‘business as usual’ approach” (8)

“Mike Davis (2002) … Late Victorian Holocausts” (8)

“Yusoff (2018)… A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None” (8)

“Geoffrey Parker (2017) … Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century” (8)

“climate action treated as only a lifestyle choice, the preside of the wealthy and well-to-do urban types, and the assumption that, whatever else happens, capitalism will surely at least ensure its own survival” (9)

“a much greater mobilization across all sectors of life is required to decarbonize the world and shift our economies” (9)

“starting this process with what we know, and with what is immediately before us-in our case, with games and the context they are made in, the people who make them, and the industry that makes them possible” (9)

“once we begin to think ecologically it becomes incredibly difficult to stop. Previously separate issues and distant locations, are suddenly revealed to be much more intimately connected than we thought” (10)

“Western philosophical and conceptual orientations towards the very question of what it means to be human, and what this conception implies about Nature-with an emphatic capital N. This idea of Nature is ‘out there’, it is ‘wilderness’, an untouched or untamed space free from human interference and always counterpoised to the realm of culture, industry, science, knowledge” (11)

“A form of Cartesian dualism, it assumes that if we just ‘add nature’ back to whatever our current ways of thinking are that we will achieve a sufficient understanding” (11)

“Moore’s analysis [in Capitalism and the Web of Life] however clarifies our understanding that ‘capitalism is not an economic system; it is not a social system; it is a way of organizing nature’ (Moore, 2015: 2)” (11)

Commentator’s Note: I would perhaps nuance this and say that economy and society *are nature, are nature organizing itself—no outside.*

“the entire world … all that exists” (12)

“it does not predispose us to a hatred of technology, or to endorse some form of climate primitivism” (12)

“This is not the way of climate asceticism, of visions of shrinking ourselves and our horizons, of always ‘doing less with less’. It has more in common with the expansive dream of socialist utopias, or the “Red Plenty” that Francis Spufford (2010) so effectively dramatizes in his book of the same name” (12)

“Country is a place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is lived in and lived with’ (Rose, 1996: 7)” (14)

“active, possessing a vitality or agency that is often absent from Western approachesapproaches that too often treat it as a static resource to be drawn upon, a place for soaking up ‘externalities’, with the atmosphere and the oceans ready to be used up by industrial emissions as private profit extracts from these living systems, from these nourishing terrains, more than they can sustain” (14)

“Rose (1996: 10) explains that ‘the interdependence of all life within country constitutes a hard but essential lesson - those who destroy their country ultimately destroy themselves’” (14)

“It is a kinship relationship, and like relations among kin, there are obligations of nurturance” (15)

“how can games help save the world?* (16)

“What makes a truly green game?” (17)

“a carbon neutral games industry must become an essential, non-negotiable part of its future” (18)

“0.04% of global emissions. This figure suggests the game industry is more emission intensive than the entire global film industry, emitting about as much as the country of Slovenia” (19)

“A democratically organized, developer driven climate movement, coordinating with civil society movements for climate action outside the games industry, stands the best chance of achieving the necessary changes” (21-22)

“It is becoming exceedingly clear all around the world that the powers of big capital and finance are not willing to make the requisite changes and investments in clean economies in the span of time we have. In order to forestall the worst of the climate catastrophe, we will need to make them” (22)

“it is important for us to start now here, wherever we find ourselves, and with whatever we can currently reach for” (22)

Chapter 2: How Can Games Save the World?

“what can games do to help?” (27)

“The desire to use our own skills and expertise to contribute to the biggest challenge of our time is a noble one” (27)

“Can we make games that convince players to take the climate issue more seriously? Can we use games for better urban planning to avoid heat island effects? Can we embed green themes and ideas into games? Can we design games to get players engaged in good habits, to act on sustainability, or take steps to lower their carbon emissions?” (27)

“There are two problems with this approach” (27)

“these sorts of questions assume a singular, homogenous and uncomplicated sort of player” (27)

“I examine the literature on games and their effects, particularly regarding the much-discussed potential for games to persuade, advocate for an issue, or create social change, arguing that there are several good reasons to temper our enthusiasm and pause rush to deploy games in this way” (27-28)

“Jane McGonigal … Reality is Broken” (28)

“it is largely a self-disciplinary, or self-help project” (28)

“the targets of McGonigal’s interventions are individuals and their perceptions” (28)

“This sort of brain hack approach to solutions is immediately inadequate when applied to anything more complex than simple chores” (28)

“for more tenacious, complicated problems with non-obvious, external or material causes involving a level of complexity beyond the scope of an undisciplined individual human, it is difficult to see how adding such an arrangement could possibly work” (29)

“Adding gold stars next to the names of people who reduce their carbon emissions is not a solution, it’s a distraction at best” (29)

“All of this complexity is steamrollered by the enthusiasm for games unmoored from the messy, complicated reality of living, breathing, thinking and feeling players” (29)

“Thinkers like James Paul Gee (2003) and Katie Salen Tekinbaş (2008) present important reminders to pay attention to the agency of players-even resistive or recalcitrant agency-and to not take them or the lived contexts we find them in for granted” (30)

“more important than ever to ask how might games perform ideological critique” (31)

“placing the player inside different material-ideological coordinates” (31)

“There is no shortage of work in this vein that couches its argument in terms of possibilities or potential-that games ‘might’ or ‘could’ do something” (33)

“the potential of games’ simulations to change or influence player beliefs about environmental policy” (33)

“Does a gaming-ready audience of public policy planners even exist?” (33)

“the argument offered by Kelly and Nardi (2014) for the potential of games to lead players through ‘imaginative visions of situational potentials and solutions to problems’” (34)

“considering what games can do often happens without reference to what they what [sic] actually do, extrapolating a universal power to act upon a largely faceless, largely homogenous, and always desubjectified ‘player’” (34)

“Thorny issues of unreliable reception, of user experience and design clarity, of clear communication of intentions, let alone getting the right games to the right people, all are kept out of the picture” (34)

“One of the precious few longitudinal studies to test the effectiveness of gamification approaches was recently completed by Raftopoulos (2020), showing significant drop-off in the applied use of gamification from early adopters” (35)

“in real world application, of an initial 23 organisations that were making use of gamification techniques, between 2014 and 2018 followup contact found that ‘60% of organisations reported that they no longer use gamification in their work’” (36)

“Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greg de Peuter (2009) … Games of Empire” (36)

“Most code neoliberal assumptions” (37)

“Alenda Chang, who was writing as early as 2011 that ‘games naively reproduce a whole range of instrumental [human-environment] relations that we must reimagine’ (Chang, [‘Games as Environmental Texts,’ 2011: 60)” (37)

“the hopelessly flawed nature/culture split” (37)

“Chang’s (2019) book Playing Nature directs us to Morton’s notion of a ‘dark ecology’ … a universe of waste, dirt, shit, and trash that does not disappear” (38)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Bourriaud, Jagoda.

“acknowledging these waste by-products is an important first step, this cannot simply be done representationally” (38)

“Chang (2019: 146) however is still interested in seeing games do better at ‘demonstrating the flow of energy and material through human and nonhuman systems, which would in turn underscore such core ecological premises as limitation and unpredictability’” (38)

“this sort of work tends to distract, and all too often syphons away effort and attention that could be better spent working on actual carbon emissions reduction” (38)

“In comparison to much of the work that wishes to use games to save the world through changing hearts and minds, cleaning up the waste and other material impacts of games is going to be so much easier” (39)

“The accidental effect of rhetorically closing the door to violence, at least as a simplistic ‘effect’ of games, was that it became hard to hold open the possibility of games many positive consequents. Because if they don’t cause violence, what do they do to players? (39)

“He asks, crucially, ‘what ensures that a person plays video games in a way that involves active and critical learning and thinking? Nothing, of course, can ensure such a thing’ (Gee, 2003: 46)” (40)

Commentator’s Note: My argument in “No Dice, No Masters”

“Gee’s (2003) perspective underscores the necessity of an individual’s active engagement and participation in the process-their willingness to engage with and interrogate ideas, assumptions and their own mental models—and points towards a little discussed gap between intentions and outcomes” (40)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator

“ideology itself, perhaps the quintessential challenge facing any game that seeks to persuade on the issues around climate change” (40)

“The Ecology of Games … Katie Salen Tekinbaş” (40)

“Their conclusions preclude simple answers about the ‘effects’ of games on their players, particularly in the now ubiquitous cultural context of constant adaption, remixing/ repurposing and the like” (41)

Commentator’s Note: In-game, in-room, in-world

“Apperley’s (2011) … ‘situated gaming’ [Gaming Rhythms]” (41)

“Bogost … treats ideology more like an engineering problem to be overcome than something involving unpredictable and irreducible human complexity” (43)

“Critiquing and unpacking ideology often touches on deeply held, intensely personal beliefs, and can take the form of a deep abiding struggle over questions of great personal significance” (43)

“Simulation fever … might encompass any resistance to the way a procedure operates” (43)

“understanding capitalist praxis makes visible the previously invisible ways that what we see and how we know is variously enabled or disabled, supported or resisted, helped and hindered by the different material, political and economic arrangements of the world around us” (45)

“This, in part, is why the rest of the chapters of this book focuses so heavily on the production of games, the material stuff that gets made, and the economic forces involved” (45)

“Eagleton argues that anyone attempting ideological critique should take note that ‘only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.’ (Eagleton, 1991: xiv)” (45)

“the ‘interaction paradigm’ of communication that has replaced earlier ‘information deficit’ approaches, going further than simply addressing a perceived lack of knowledge or information about the climate crisis to emphasise that we must ‘conceptualize sender and receiver as active participants in a process of co-creating meaning’ (Ballantyne, 2016: 339)” (46)

“Ballantyne (2016: 339) notes that,

According to [the interaction paradigm of communication], the way forward for climate change communication research could be (a continuous) exploration of how people constitute the reality of climate change. What does climate change mean to different audiences and why? What causes people to engage or disengage with climate change? How do climate change discourses contribute to the reproduction, maintenance, or transformation of the perceived reality of climate change?” (46)

“‘communication cannot be understood correctly unless acknowledged as a constitutive process’” (47)

“we need to understand all ‘communication as a social process that constitutes reality for the participants of that process’” (47)

“The multimillion-dollar projects of the Triple-A games industry seem particularly unsuited to embodying a challenge to ruling ideology and dominant social powers, though it may not be impossible” (47)

“I think it is fair to say that not many games, even the ones that wish to make some kind of ideological critique, currently are designed to take into account the diversity of player’s positions within dominant political, economic, material and ideological structures” (47)

“For climate activists and game designers wishing to use the tools they know best to change the world, the diversity of dispositions of players is an irreducible problem-possibly an insurmountable barrier that simply will not go away under the current arrangement of the games industry” (47-48)

“Horkheimer’s ‘current condition of human praxis’—just like subway trains and tenement houses, so too games are subject to and reflect the same forces” (48)

“the problem of players and their ideological resistances simply cannot be papered over by enthusiasm for what might be or could be possible through game-based activism” (48)

“If we want to argue for mainstream, transformative cultural change through games then we will need to pay attention to those games actually in the mainstream, and the conditions of their production that make them the way they are” (48)

“Is it possible for games to perform ideological critique?” (48)

“The aesthetic of the island of Altis [in ARMA 3] is dominated by the visible presence of renewable power generation” (49)

“Ziser and Sze (2007) … argue … that ‘environmental justice aesthetics ought to reject the sublime scale invoked by some [global climate change] narratives and instead remain focused on the human, ecological, and social justice dimensions of environmental change’” (49)

“sublime depictions of climate change can be paralysing” (49-50)

“I find an aesthetic engagement, the use of art style, visual design, and the use of near-future references that speak to climate solutions like the renewable technologies found in ARMA 3 results in a rather subtle and sophisticated engagement with the highly ideological issue of climate change” (51)

“not by the conventional attempts to persuade players in a didactic manner through mechanics, simulations, and the like” (51)

“accounts of games ‘powers for persuasion’ should speak of the … ‘willing player’” (52-53)

“This would at least tacitly acknowledge the equally unwilling player in the same moment” (53)

“how do you make someone care about the planet?” (53)

“Rancière … The Ignorant Schoolmaster” (53)

“the stultification of instruction” (53)

“in order to get players to care about the planet, they first have to want to care about the planet” (54)

Commentator’s Note: Rancière, attention not intelligence.

“This is what Horkheimer’s expansive phrase the ‘current condition of human praxis’ encompasses-the awareness that our desires don’t just spring unbidden from a hidden internal reservoir, they are formed by the very historical and material processes at work in the world around us, by ‘subways and tenement houses’ and these days as much as by the videogame industry and its political-economic consequences” (54)

“The emancipated player does not just pay attention to mechanics and rules, but the entire spectrum of possibilities of intellectual and aesthetic engagement with a game” (55)

“What we need is to change the world itself—the world that players inhabit; the world that ‘preforms’ their senses, that provides them with the situated context in which they live their lives” (55)

“Games do not perform the same function as social movements, political-economic revolutions, or even policy prescriptions—they are just games!” (56)

“None of these changes depend on a willing player subject, and none of them face the ideological barriers of the mystified player. Instead they take aim at the world these players exist in, both the willing and the recalcitrant, and aim to change them for the better, with or without them” (57)

Chapter 3: What Is an Ecological Game?

“shifting our focus onto the game object itself?” (61)

“Might there be something to be gained by games representing the environment for their own sake” (61)

“Is it possible, for instance, to embody specific environmental principles and ideals in a game” (61)

“These tendencies find perhaps their greatest expression in the genre loosely defined as survival-crafting games, with games like Minecraft (Mojang 2011) which have been widely regarded as possess mechanical and struc tural features that resemble or align them more closely to real environments” (62)

“their underlying logic resembles or reimposes most, if not all, of the same problems most in need of dismantling” (62)

“in crafting systems and mechanics we frequently see the reproduction of the ahistori cal trope of the ladder of technological progress, coupled with representa tions of human-environmental relationships that resemble and reproduce problematic narratives of mastery and domination of the natural world” (62)

Commentator’s Note: Starfield

“the truly ecological game must acknowledge and account for the harms it produces in the world” (62)

“This sense of surprise, of generativeness, and of a general indeterminacy coupled with players’ own expectations about the behavior of natural objects and systems—for instance, mimicking aspects of the world itself and its operation (“let water be water”)—is an attempt to reflect the world and reproduce our complex relation to its confounding qualities of both dynamism and predictability” (64)

“a whole complex of ideas around the repeatability and replicability of ‘natural’ events and behaviours” (64)

“realism in games discourse … Crisp (2015) and Shinkle (2020)” (64)

“what actually constitutes an environment in games? And in what sense is it possible for games to have an environment or for that matter to reproduce nature?” (66)

“Games in the genre often feature dynamic, even lush natural landscapes, as well as mechanics that emphasize the player’s precarious existence within and dependence upon the natural world” (68)

“This process of inscribing onto the world itself has been described as “ecocomposition” by Kyle Bohunicky (2014: 222) the writing of “shelter” or “home” onto the natural environment, constructed from the world itself: ‘rocks, trees, dirt, water and biological matter… provides a set of symbols with which they can write shelter, tools and media’” (70)

Commentator’s Note: Ecocomposition of Starfield

“these acts are almost always embedded within crafting and resource systems that re-inscribe particular sets of relations between the player and the environment-relationships worth interrogating and critiquing” (70)

“The in-game problem of spoilage tends to be solved with dynamics that mirror the imperfect solutions capitalist economics have generated for the same” (71)

Commentator’s Note: Or consider the eventual overcoming of fuel costs in Starfield

“Open any survival-crafting game in the genre and you will almost inevitably find a similar logic of crafting across the whole genre. Crafting involves the combination or refinement of crude or simple items or resources to form more useful, more valuable, or more complex ones” (71)

“the end goal being the most efficient or expressive tools that enable the player to leave behind or greatly minimize much of the drudge work of the initial period” (72)

“The crafting pattern established in Minecraft and followed by many others can be read as including similar linear assumptions about the nature of human advancement, accumulation and technology” (72)

“they almost all retain a sense of tiers or levels of advancement, with increasing utility and efficiency to higher tiers of tools” (72)

“It would be rare for the resource consumption of the player to become a ‘problem’ for the ecological carrying capacity of the planet in Subnautica as certain resources respawn, and there are always more areas to plunder” (73)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. every planet in Starfield

“There are real pleasures to accumulation, the satisfaction of having overcome scarcity, achieving comfort and security that developers have rightly identified and reproduced in many games like it” (73)

“the common shared features across almost all the games in the genre and the questions that we must ask about the kinds of pleasures and desires these games are tapping into” (74)

“the crafting dynamics of survival-crafting style games hew more closely to and prompt from users more thought and reflection about economic ideas and experiences than environmental ones” (75)

“they almost invariably end up replicating capitalist notions of return on investment and increasing rates of accumulation” (75)

“These dynamics of accumulation and reward structure the rhythms of play in these games, providing what many players find an enjoyable and rewarding pattern of effort and reward that is a classic feature of game design, reinstated here in a regime that centers itself on time and resources rather than, say, the traditional rewards of loot and XP” (75)

“‘games naively reproduce a whole range of instrumental relations that we must reimagine’ (Chang, 2011: 60) evidence of which there is still plenty of. Examination of the survivalcrafting genre seems to suggest that hopes for a greater sophistication in player-environmental interactions have yet to be fulfilled in a particularly meaningful way, at least in this genre” (76)

“What is, or would, a truly ecological or ecocritical game resemble?” (76)

“As Morton (2010 [The Ecological Thought]) reminds us, there is no “away” or “outside” for our waste, our carbon emissions, no place for them to be sent to simply disappear. Thinking ecologically isn’t like thinking about where your toilet waste goes. It is thinking about where your toilet waste goes’ (Morton, 2010: 9)” (76)

“Issues that might have previously been considered utterly disconnected from the pressing of a button on a controller, typically escaping attention in our analyses and close readings of games, are now front and center—unavoidably linked through chains of interactions that are material, logistical and above all ecological” (77)

“Games are not just culture, they are part of the world” (78)

“Apperley and Jayemane (2012) … ‘material turn’ in games studies” (78)

“games as consumer objects and commodities, (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009)” (78)

“technology and human bodies, (Ash, 2013; Keogh, 2018)” (78)

“gendered and racialized spaces (Chess, 2017; Gray, 2014, 2020)” (78)

“there might be something about the nature of interaction itself which seems in accord with ecological thinking” (80)

“But if tracing ‘interaction’ is at least like thinking ecologically, then an analysis of mechanical interactions and the meanings they create, as well as the ideologies and attitudes about nature that they embody remains a valid avenue of critique” (80)

“If we look at the ideas and ideologies embodied in interactions within games—in other words, the nature of relationships between player and world, player and objects, player and other things as foregrounded or backgrounded by design—then we are just as much doing ecological thinking” (80-81)

“To me, however, I see less importance in emphasizing distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ecological interactions in game worlds* (81)

“a virtual explosion on a screen powered by carbon-free energy, could be more ecologicallyoriented, and be doing materially less harm than a similar climate friendly story in a game that it is played on a machine powered by fossil fuel generation” (81)

“A social media post that went viral in gaming communities online in late 2019 managed to do just that, stating wryly that ‘lamps in videogames use real electricity’” (82)

“The ecological game is one that attends to its own material conditions, its development and production, its existence and even its afterlife, and takes an active role in mitigating the harms produced” (82)

“What a joy to be freed of the burden of what might other wise be an impossible task, having instead fixed ourselves on the very real possibility of changing the world instead” (82)

“the truly ecological game must be, first and foremost, a carbon neutral one” (82)

“With a few exceptions, analogue games like Monopoly, Scrabble, Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan, and so on can all be played without electric power provided one is furnished with a well-lit room, a bit of free time, and access to the necessary components” (83)

“Likewise, physical and sports games, at least in their adhoc, amateur forms can be played without electricity, and often are” (83)

“Digital games, however, do not have that luxury. Digital games cannot escape their tether to electrical energy, and some sort of computational hardware to run on” (83)

“From top to bottom, from the earliest stages of pre-production, from planning the next game and the next game consoles, from the distribution center to the data center, to the very last light of a device once it is superseded through obsolescence-at all points along the lifecycle of a game and gaming devices we must identify and neutralize greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible” (84)

“To address the climate crisis, all games will need to become ecological games. This will be a job that cannot be done solely in theory or books like this one, but will need to be taken up practically—by game makers, scholars, journalists and activists as well as game players themselves” (85)

Chapter 4: How Much Energy Does it Take to Make a Videogame

“Exactly how much energy does it takes to make a modern video game?” (89)

“The primary metric here is a figure of kWh’s of electrical energy used per annum, per employee a measure of power used over time* (91)

“From that, estimates of emissions intensity for the amount of power used can be made, based on the emissions factor of a particular region’s power generation” (91)

“The World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) have jointly developed the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (WBCSD, WRI, 2004) building on the work of Thomas et al. (2000) becoming the world’s most widely used GHG accounting standard” (91)

“The overall picture painted by the admittedly small initial results, however, is striking, showing an industry that remains (with a few notable exceptions) largely unaware or uncertain about the extent of its own carbon footprint” (94)

“The majority of this data was obtained from smaller studios, with disappointingly no data directly from companies in the 500+ category. It is telling that the two largest studios with responses to the survey, both of which were able to provide quite detailed data, are led by individuals keenly aware of the need to take climate action, as we shall see” (94)

“the argument I make in the rest of this book about the urgency of grid-scale decarbonization” (97)

“Games developers who wish to start thinking ecologically, make ecological games, and act on the recognition that their industry is not separate from the climate crisis—may need to act outside their immediate sphere of influence” (97-98)

“the UN Environment group, Playing for the Planet” (101)

“The elephant in the room in terms of sheer size, the mega studios of Triple-A game development is the gravitational center of much of game development today, and aside from the two studios above, did not meaningfully appear in the survey data” (101)

“Initially, very little data was contained in Electronic Arts’ (2019) CSR report, with the entire document covering barely two pages in the larger annual report and including no hard figures or evidence to support broad claims of environmental responsibility (EA, 2019: 5-6). In 2020, however, the company released a dedicated impact report that greatly increased the amount of information disclosed, including figures for companywide energy use and a number of actions being undertaken to reduce EA’s environmental impact. These include ‘reducing our carbon footprint in the delivery of games and services,’ increasing power and water use efficiency in data centers, and making ‘environmentally-conscious choices in our offices worldwide’ (EA, 2020: 29). In an infographic, the report claimed that in 2020 EA used 71.49 MWh (or 71,490 kWh) of energy in North America, 18.26 MWh (or 18,260 kWh) in Europe, and 3.56 MWh (or 3560 kWh) in the Asia-Pacific region-for a total of 93.31 MWh (or 93,310 kWh) of energy as part of its global operations. This is an extremely low figure given the stated count of 9800 employees and over 3000 square feet worth of facilities (EA, 2020: 32)—what I strongly suspect is that this is a typographic error. This impression is reinforced by the fact that the very next page of the report states the company has made reductions on the order of 829,000 kWh per annum (or 0.829 GWh) ‘from LED light retrofits, voltage harmonizer, and automated light sweeps’ (EA, 2020: 33) which would mean they reduced their overall power by eight times their total consumption, which seems improbable at best. Assuming the earlier totals should really be listed as gigawatt hours not megawatt hours (in other words, that they are 1000 times larger) makes everything in the report make a lot more sense, and puts their per employee per annum figure at least in the same order of magnitude as other companies” (104)

“Microsoft has also become a global leader in sustainability initiatives, publishing detailed emissions breakdowns for the entire global corporation for several years now, and has a number of top-level positive achievements and some pf the most ambitious climate goals. It purchases 100% renewable electricity, quite credibly claiming to be one of the largest purchasers of it in the United States, (Microsoft, 2020a: 33) its data centers and entire global operations are also made carbon neutral through offsetting mechanisms, (Microsoft, 2017: 2; c) it has a target of being carbon negative by 2030, and an ambitious target of removing all of the emissions generated by the company by 2050. As part of this detailed corporate reporting, Microsoft regularly discloses an impressive array of facts and figures about its environmental impact and progress towards targets. The 2020 Environmental Sustainability Report includes an appendix with Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions for the company, broken down into emissions sources like Scope 2 location-based emissions (4.1 m tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions) and even a host of Scope 3 emissions that includes employee commuting (317,000 tonnes), ‘use of sold products’ (3.025 m tonnes) and others. The total carbon footprint of the global corporation is tallied up to be around 11.164 m tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions (Microsoft, 2020d)” (110)

“Summarizing the company’s approach to carbon offsetting and neutrality, the report notes the following approaches, which are useful guidelines for anyone looking to do similarly:

Our approach to renewable energy has two core tenets: regional impact and additionality. We have focused on regional matching to operations, because where and how you buy matters - the closer the new wind or solar farm is to your datacentre, the more likely it is those zero carbon electrons are powering it. Microsoft, as a result, is sometimes a market driver, striking the first or the largest corporate [power purchase agreements] in a state or region that was not previously viewed as a good market for renewables. We also focus on additionality, using our capital to fund new projects that may not succeed without our investment. (Microsoft, 2020d: 18)” (110)

“Aphra Kerr (2017: 100) … Global Games” (114)

“I think we can be confident that at least half a million developers work in the games industry in or close enough to a traditional game development context, and for whom our estimated games industry per employee per annum figure is applicable, and perhaps even substantially more than that” (115-116)

“we might figure that a reasonable estimate of emissions is somewhere in the range of 1-5 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per employee per annum” (116)

“Starting with the conservative end of our estimate—this works out to be a range from 0.5 million to 2.5 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent” (116)

“This is the bare minimum emissions that the games industry is guaranteed to have produced and to be responsible for emitting into the atmosphere annually” (116)

“If we tentatively, and at the risk of introducing inaccuracy, count the global games industry closer to the 3-4 million figure (or even more), that shifts our figures to a range of 3-15 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions per annum” (116)

“This seems all within the realms of possibility, and far off other similar size industries. If this higher estimate is accurate, then that would put the game development industry, its workstations, server rooms, and everything else, at around the same emissions intensity as the total 2018 emissions for the European country of Slovenia, with a population of about 2 million people. If the games industry were its own country, it would be somewhere around the 130th most intense emitter in the worldan impressive if unwelcome feat” (116)

“a rough estimate of the global film industry’s carbon footprint would be somewhere around 4.4 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per annum. This would put global film emissions at the low end of our possible range of emissions from game production” (116-117)

“I feel confident claiming that the global games industry is almost unequivocally more emissions intense than the global film industry, and perhaps even by a substantial margin” (117)

“According to the 2020 Global Carbon budget, the world’s total emissions in 2020 were 34 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent. At the highest end of our emissions estimates, game development alone would therefore be responsible for about 0.04% of the entire world’s emissions” (117)

“whether it is 0.5 or 15 million tonnes of CO2, this is a lot of it to deal with, representing an offsetting cost of €25-750 million at today’s carbon price of €50 a ton. Preventing those emissions in the first place is going to be much, much cheaper than trying to offset them after the fact” (118)

“Government legislation and a whole of system approach to decarbonizing energy grids around the world are also going to be necessary” (119)

Chapter 5: The Carbon Footprint of Games Distribution

“A cartridge, a disc, some more or less stable digital storage media—each has to be made from a material substrate (magnetic tapes, ROM circuits, polycarbonate discs with a thin layer of reflective foil) and combined with inks, paper, printed cardboard cartons, plastic cases and shrink-wrapping” (123)

“Both digital and physical distribution methods have carbon emissions associated with them, and the goal here in this chapter is not so much to say which is necessarily ‘better’ exactly, but rather to evaluate the challenges that the industry faces in achieving carbon neutrality for both, and what that suggests for the near-to-medium term of the industry” (124)

“what should remain at the forefront of our analysis is where the greatest potential for emissions reductions lies as this is more important for climate advocates and achieving our goal of a carbon neutral games industry” (124-125)

“Games being sold in retail stores paved the way for the modern commercial games industry, coming to require exclusive access to distribution networks only afforded by a publisher” (125)

“Mayers et al. (2015) undertakes a detailed analysis of the carbon footprint of physical and digital distribution methods for PlayStation 3 games distributed within the United Kingdom in 2010” (126)

“Each BD is composed of a combination of polycarbonate, silver, and a protective resin. Mastering involves the transformation and projection of an encrypted and certified digital data file onto a silicon wafer. The BD mastering process happens only once per new game or film, from which thousands of replicated copies are made. The replicated discs are then transferred mechanically to the printing line for disc artwork and then transferred to the assembly packaging line. After the discs have been placed into a polypropylene molded box case with an inlay tray and a paper instruction booklet, they are packed into cardboard master cartons, stacked on wooden pallets, and secured with a polypropylene film wrap. Discs are then distributed by truck and shipped to a central warehouse in Northampton, UK and subsequently to retailers’ warehouses ready for distribution to outlets and sold to consumers. Subsequent to use, domestic recycling options do not exist for BDs, and so at EOL they are collected and sent to either landfill or incineration. (Mayers et al., 2015: 2)” (127)

“at the time ‘in 2010, 95% of games were distributed by disc’-a figure that has shifted greatly in the decade since, with digital sales approaching parity in 2020, and in some cases even surpassing, physical game sales (Ahmad, 2020)” (127)

“a total of 1.2 kg of CO2 equivalent emissions per disc in 2010” (127)

“over the lifetime of the PS3 console there were 346.1 million games sold in the European region over the lifespan of the console” (127)

“Distributing all of Europe’s PS3 discs over the lifetime of the console therefore emitted around the same as a small English city of around 75,000 people (like Guildford just outside of London) emitted in a whole year” (128)

“Joshua Aslan (2020) undertook a lifecycle analysis of PS4 games in a variety of scenarios for his doctoral research project … 0.27 kg for Disc Production, 0.00 for Disc Distribution, 2.04 for Disc Retail, and 0.18 for Disc Disposal, for a total of 2.49 kg of CO2 equivalent emissions-a doubling of Mayers et al.’s (2015) estimate from a decade earlier” (128)

“all the games shipped to and sold in Australia in 2020 may have an associated carbon footprint of around 800 tonnes of CO2 equivaTent emissions. This is, in all likelihood, an underestimation given just how much is left out of this very simplified calculation” (134)

“If our goal is a carbon neutral games industry, then we need to identify credible pathways to bringing this number down. Though we might be tempted to make a change to mode of transport, like avoiding shipping via air, surely the better option long term is to stop shipping these products all together and replace them with digital downloads” (135)

“the physical distribution of games is almost certainly incompatible with our goal of a carbon neutral games industry” (135)

“digital distribution … Very simple in principle, however in practice it involves a host of technologies, literal world-spanning infrastructure, dizzying arrays of different software and hardware configurations and standards, and multiple multinational companies potentially across more than one regulatory jurisdiction” (136)

“the carbon neutral games industry must not come at the expense of our collective control over our hardware and software. It is not a just transition if it comes at the expense of developers either, beholden to paying rents to platform owners and subject to their whims as they gatekeep access to markets and devices” (137)

“Downloading an 8GB PS3 game in 2010 therefore resulted in a range of 2.4 kg-8 kg of CO2 equivalent” (138)

“Summing these components gives a figure of 0.825 kg for a digital download of a PS4 game, using a (2020 appropriate) average file size of 39.3 GB” (138)

“Thus, even though game file sizes have more than tripled in the ten years since the earlier study, digital distribution emissions have reduced to at least one third, and potentially as much as a tenth of previous emissions” (138)

“As the proportion of global electricity generated through renewable technologies increases, the emissions associated with electrical energy and any given digital task—such as downloading a game over the PlayStation network—approaches zero” (139)

“There are also challenges in accurately measuring power usage inside data centers employed by digital distribution networks” (142)

“These locations are the energy intense heart of online activity, and deserve closer scrutiny” (142)

“Despite their relative modesty in the overall global emissions context, in an absolute sense these emissions cannot be ignored if we are committed to the carbon neutral games industry—as we must be. These are emissions the games industry and no one else is responsible for” (144)

Chapter 6: The Carbon Footprint of Playing Games

“Much of these ideas however face substantial unpopular trade-offs, or are predicated on a kind of climate ascetism which is unlikely to appeal to the wider game playing audience” (150)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. Huber and Phillips

“a focus on doing more with fewer hardware upgrades will almost certainly become a part of the games industry’s future given the resource intensity of this aspect of games” (150)

“Of the three categories of emissions discussed thus far (development emissions, distribution emissions, and play emissions) this last one represents the biggest portion of the emissions picture of the current games industry, but also a hard challenge for the industry itself to address” (150)

“Space Ape Games, as first raised in Chap. 4, have been the pioneers at this, and their methodology remains the closest thing to industry best practice. Their report on their player’s 2019’s emissions went to the trouble of calculating and then offsetting all of them for the year, one of only a few gaming companies that have done so* (152)

“Space Ape Games players in the UK emitted around 5 tonnes worth of CO2 through the power used by their phones playing their games” (154)

“when the same exercise is repeated across the rest of the world, the total was just over 181 tonnes” (154)

“a modest carbon offset worth about €3000-4000” (154)

“best-guess might be perhaps a new figure of 245 T of CO2-equivalent emissions vs the previous figure of 181 T” (156)

“With gaming consoles using up to 100 times more energy than a smartphone, this has a similar sized impact on emissions calculations” (157)

“That takes the offset amount for just the UK to over 300 T CO²e, and the world’s total to 10,860 T CO2e. The offsetting cost of this much CO2, even at the lower end of the EU carbon price (just €25 per tonne), becomes an intimidating €271,500” (157)

“lifetime cumulative electricity use of consoles in Europe…is estimated at 13 TWh” (158)

“When combined with average world emissions factor of 0.689697213 (again a crude estimate), this gives a total figure of 18.6 million tonnes of CO2e emissions for the entire European PS4 install base—or €372 million worth of carbon emissions” (158)

“A partial solution in the interim, then, until the realisation of fully fossil fuel free power worldwide may be a greater focus on efficiency” (159)

“If graphical fidelity is a large determinant of real-time computation intensity (and therefore, of energy consumption) then perhaps a productive focus ought to be on shifting away from this” (165)

“Perhaps we can consider a field of more or less acceptable intrusions on gameplay that might achieve some of this same ecological attendance to a games own harms in real time (as simplistic as these initial suggestion may be). These might range from the drastic, like dynamic resolution scaling with a more ‘pixelated’ vision when the energy mix features few renewables, unlocking higher fidelity imagery when there is more; to locking framerates at 30FPS when emissions are high so that GPUs are artificially constrained; to enabling or disabling certain ‘nice to have’ graphics features when emissions go above or below certain thresholds. Many of these sorts of approaches might still prove to be little more than gimmicks, but it is my hope that professional developers will be able to come up with much more meaningful, and more effective solutions. Once again, the vision of a 100% renewable energy grid renders such constraints almost redundant, instead offering us a vision of plenty which I think most will find more appealing. This is important to emphasize, as it is already clear that climate ascetism has a limited appeal to anyone besides true believers” (166-167)

Commentator’s Note: Yeah, this would be super annoying and alienating for most players.

“Perhaps though, rather than offsetting the emissions of manufacturing, we should ask ourselves whether a better, more comprehensive answer is to make existing game hardware last longer, and slow down (even stop!) the current upgrade cycle business model” (168)

“What if gaming after climate change necessarily means giving up the energy and resource intensity of the hardware upgrade cycle?” (169)

“What if we faced this generation as the last console generation, with consumers, developers, and climate leaders saying instead of ‘what are the specs of the next PlayStation going to be?’ rather wondering ‘who is going to do something revolutionary with what we’ve already got?’ What sort of games could be made if the industry came to its senses about the diminishing returns of pixel pushing?” (169)

Commentator’s Note: The problem with this is that it entails people keep buying PS5s and Sony keeps making them, unchanged. I think instead what we will see is a paradigm shift instead, no box, just screen and stream. The manufacturing costs will shift, and developers will find themselves too working within new constraints.

“The growing trend towards games as a service” (169)

Commentator’s Note: Indeed, this is the more likely future. Even greater capture of game playing markets by extractive cultural slurry.

“Perhaps the question to ask here is again, where, how, and why are the desires for certain types of games made? These are uncomfortable but necessary questions to ask. How much has the games industry cultivated this desire itself, and how much can be said to be ‘innate’ in the player themselves? Graeme Kirkpatrick’s (2015) analysis of the construction of the ‘gamer’ identity and culture through the formative period of 80s and 90s leads to some uncomfortable conclusions about the balance of responsibility” (170)

“I am reminded of David Kanaga’s wonderfully eclectic Oikospiel Book I: A Dog Opera in Five Acts which features a ‘box office’ store front with a ticket price that reduces as the buyer moves their mouse around on the screen, powering a virtual windfarm generating a miniscule discount (1c at a time!). The price of the game itself reduces to a minimum of $5 as the player “powers” the website with their hand motions. Despite not being connected to a real windfarm the image is an evocative one-drawing attention to material existence via enrolling the player in a time/cost calculation (how long are you willing to sit there and wave your hand around?) and the electrical power required for it. It also features as far as I know the only purchasing system with a slider for “household income”, and accounting for number of dependents (if you make over a 1.4 million dollars a year, Kanaga would like to price the game at $14,000 for you— which seems very fair). This focus on equity in pricing is deeply surprising and impressive, doing far more to account for the variety of subjectpositions of the player that I called for in Chap. 2, particularly their socioeconomic class, better than any other that I know of. These decisions are made all the more special by the fact that Kanaga is foregoing real money to make this point” (171)

“We could also project game making into a better future scenario—this time, a world of plenty* (171)

“The advantages that mobile phones have as a platform for gaming in a time of climate change are already substantial, with drastically lower power consumption. Mobile gaming is not without its downsides, of course, many of which are already evident: proprietary platforms controlled by Apple dominate the paid games marketplace and a much disliked F2P ecosystem exists across both Apple and Android, among other downsides like relatively limited input methods” (172)

Chapter 7: The Periodic Table of Torture

“Substantial attention, again quite rightly, has been directed at the harms caused by the mining and sale of minerals that facilitate wars and conflict, like coltan in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, (Nest, 2011) along with others members of the group of so-called ‘conflict-minerals’—tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold” (179)

“In this chapter I tell a series of connected stories about the environmental burden of manufacturing the PlayStation 4 APU (standing for the ‘advanced processing unit’-a single chip that combines both CPU and GPU functions). I do so by following its elementary constituents back to their origins and the processes involved in digging them out of the earth’s crust. For each of the seventeen different atomic elements detected in the chip in substantial quantities, I outline connections between the metals in the device, the environmental harms associated with its mining, refining, transport, and manufacture. Most importantly of all, I attempt some educated guesses and informed speculation in the search for explanations about why each of these metals and metalloids might be present, and what they are doing in the device” (180)

“Friedrich Kittler’s (1995) provocative essay ‘There is no software’ makes a strong argument for attending to hardware—circuits, logic gates, transistors and other components under the hood of digital devices—as the essential level of computation” (180)

“Rayford Guins (2014: 5) … Game After” (182)

“Bratton pointedly directs our attention towards the mineralogical, noting that ‘there is no planetary-scale computation without a planet, and no computational infrastructure without the transformation of matter into energy and energy into information’ (Bratton, 2016: 75)” (183)

“‘The equivalent of 89 kilograms of carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere with the production and transportation of every PlayStation 4’” (184)

“There are 54 different elements detected, having tested for at least 78 different isotopes” (187)

“Listed according to their atomic order, the elements detected were: boron, sodium, magnesium, aluminium, titanium, vanadium, chromium, manganese, iron, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, gallium, germanium, arsenic, selenium, bromine, krypton, rubidium, strontium, yttrium, zirconium, niobium, molybdenum, ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, silver, cadmium, indium, tin, antinomy, tellurium, iodine, xenon, cesium, barium, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, samarium, europium, dysprosium, hafnium, tantalum, tungsten, iridium, gold, mercury, lead, bismuth, and thorium” (189)

“Norgate et al. (2007)” (190)

“I adopt some common acronyms drawn from Norgate et al. (2007) with their paper offering estimates for both the ‘gross energy requirement’ (GER) for the production of a ton of a given metal, and its ‘global warming potential’ (GWP)” (190)

Periodic Table of Torture (191-238):

• Magnesium
• Aluminium
• Titanium
• Chromium
• Nickel
• Copper
• Zinc
• Gallium
• Palladium
• Silver
• Cadmium
• Indium
• Tin
• Barium
• Gold
• Lead
• Bismuth

“When we think ecologically we often find the bounds of our analysis exceeds our initial focus on just one element or object, encountering other potent greenhouse gases and other environmental burdens in the process” (194)

“This reinforces the importance of taking an ecological perspective rather than a singular focus on, for instance, the toxicity of various elements and processes. Examined in isolation, titanium mining appears non-toxic and to have a lesser impact, but if the by-products of titanium are disposed of in ways that smother aquatic life, or that require transportation powered by fossil fuels—the non-toxicity of the byproducts of titanium mining does not give a free pass” (198)

“how they are transformed into raw material feedstock for modern semiconductor manufacturing, paying attention to the energy used, the nature and scale of mining impacts, touching on elements of the industrial process as diverse as lithographic nanometer scale circuit construction and solid-waste burdens from rock removal at sites all around the world” (229)

“The periodic table of torture shows that there are no innocent devices, though some may be more or less harmful, and the challenges of producing a hardware device like a new gaming console—the eventual PlayStation 6 or the next Xbox—are substantial, and the efforts to decarbonize, and reduce their harms to the planet is urgent” (229)

“even neutralizing and offsetting carbon emissions for the manufacture of these devices is unlikely to be adequate to the task of addressing all current and future harms associated with the materials that have gone into the device” (230)

“our enjoyment, our ‘homes’ in the glittering city of gaming, rests upon a mountain of e-waste, on tons of carbon dioxide and other noxious emissions, on the transformation of the very earth itself into intricate devices, and the devastating exacerbation of the hot-house effect on the planet’s atmosphere” (230)

Chapter 8: Where to from Here?

“a carbon neutral games industry is not just desirable, but that it is both possible and absolutely essential” (237)

“The games industry has a moral responsibility to change itself before it tries to change others” (237)

“It is not enough, cannot seriously be considered ecological, if with one hand games promote sustainability and positive environmental concern while with the other rely on the same energy and resource intensive patterns, the same fossil fuel driven systems and extractive logics of capitalism for its own existence” (237)

Actions:

• For Game Developers (240-242)
• For Hardware Manufacturers, Publishers, and Platform Holders (242-244)
• For Players and Everyone Else (244-245)