“How much more is left Do we need warnings? Science is clear, it is clear. ”
Author and researcher Ben Abraham Are upset. We are talking in April, a few days after IPCC release report but. It emphasized that in order to further heat up the Paris Agreement target is 1.5 degrees C humanity needs to cut emissions by 43% by 2030. Speaking to me via Zoom from his home in Sydney, Abraham wanted more direct action – protest, outright – but also people In the industry of inciting change, a different kind of base pressure applies. “This is the only game in town right now,” he said. “How do we prevent our planet from being boiled alive?”
For the video game industry — from indie developers, AAA studios, and hardware makers to the players themselves — Abraham’s new book, Digital games after climate change, got the answer. It provides a systematic, panoramic view of the entire industry, shedding light on the ways in which many people’s favorite hobby, often hiding from bad news, is in fact, exacerbating climate crisis. While writing the book’s introduction in 2019, Abraham thought about how he experienced this reality as a child while playing games in his parents’ loft in the scorching heat of Australia. Without air conditioning, the room is already stuffy, but with so many power-hungry devices on — a console, CRT TV, PC, and monitor — it becomes unbearable. These video games, powered by electricity generated from burning fossil fuels, exist in a feedback loop with the atmosphere itself.
Lack of leadership
According to Evan Mills, co-author of ground-breaking papers on this subject. Increased graphics intensity has seen power consumption increase, online multiplayer games require both the player’s devices and energy-intensive data centers, and today’s chips Modern panel’s smaller units require significantly more electricity due to the ultra-controlled conditions in which they’re re-manufactured (including air filtration and chemical treatment). Despite the overall improvements in energy efficiency of modern devices, Abraham writes that “overall, gaming is still a recreational activity — and it’s a relatively user-friendly activity now.” lots of carbon”
Abraham points out that the carbon commitments of the leading console makers and digital content producers, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, vary. Microsoft has a carbon-negative plan for 2030—“ambitious but achievable,” says Abraham. Sony, meanwhile, has previously only made a vague commitment to “zero footprint” by 2050, recently announced its revised 2040 carbon neutral target along with an effort to use 100% renewable energy in its own operations by 2030. (The company did not respond to a request for comment when contacted. )
Nintendo, meanwhile, makes no promises about carbon or environmental neutrality. Somewhat remarkable, Abraham points out difference in Nintendo’s report on renewable energy use, according to the 2019 CSR report, reaching 98%. In the next year’s CSR report, the figure that should have stayed the same in 2019 has changed to just 4.2%. Abraham blamed the combination of kWh and MWh, but he argued that the company hadn’t reported its numbers correctly (a criticism he also made). EA) is a sign of not taking the matter seriously. (When contacted, Nintendo declined to comment on reported discrepancies and instead pointed to CSR report which says its renewable energy usage is currently 44 percent.)
These diverse approaches reflect an industry that “lacks leadership,” the researcher says. The closest industry to this is Play for the Planet, a United Nations Environment program involving game companies such as Microsoft, Sony, and Ubisoft. Abraham says it’s important for an organization like this to exist to apply pressure and provide guidance, but its impact is ultimately limited. “We still need regulatory intervention, regulatory frameworks and energy efficiency standards,” he continued. As an example of this strategy, Abraham mentioned recent legislation in California that places a hard limit on the power consumption of electronic devices to the extent that Dell no more ships some Alienware gaming PCs drain its power to the state. The current law is “fairly broad,” he said, but has scope to strengthen it in the future, possibly as the climate crisis worsens.
What is eco-video games?
One of the ways game makers can hope to drive change is through games themselves. Titles such as Beyond the blue, Ecologicaland Enduring take climate and environmental themes as foreground as a means of education and persuasion, based on the writer Jane McGonigal’s the idea that games and their play systems can produce changes in thinking, behavior, and even the world.
However, Abraham remains unconvinced by the game’s potential to affect people to the extent that the climate crisis requires. “It makes perfect sense. If you are a game developer, you want to use your skills to solve problems,” he said. “But when I look at the challenges of convincing people around an ideological and controversial issue like climate, it doesn’t seem like a battle that can be won this way.”
