[Release Date: August 5, 2022] Have you ever considered how gaming and game companies contribute to environmental problems like global climate change? We haven’t! At least not until we spoke and were inspired by our guest Paula Escuadra to think about the many ways that game companies and design can help bring about a greener world!
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
hello everybody paula’s cuadra has spent over 12 years elevating the power of games have to redefine a relationship with failure and create meaning uh she’s our guest today uh and we are here to hopefully deal with failure and create meaning well that’s actually not the only thing we’re here for uh but uh why not uh she leads uh research for xbox game studios cloud publishing uh helping developers make great games that foster meaningful communities uh she co-founded the igda’s climate special interest group which we got to get into today co-authoring its newly released environmental game design playbook she’s also on the cologne game labs advisory board with a focus on unlocking sustainability competencies in the next generation of game developers we’re here to talk environment as you can tell
paula is deeply deeply in this and finally she’s a very strong advocate for community care psychological safety and doug cuddling uh as a former self-care
so if you’re with your dog right now we highly recommend you uh you know uh
make yourself very very comfortable all right paula welcome to the show hey
thank you so much i’m so appreciative of the support for dog cuddling all right
uh and i just i want to take a second actually just to uh um say andy’s back
uh and he has been gone over the last two shows he’s been taking care of his mother being a wonderful son that he is
and andy i’m just really happy to have you back it’s just not the same doing this alone oh well thanks this is i’m
really really glad to be back and this one’s gonna be really fun and uh and i’m super excited to be here again all right
um okay so uh paula tell us about the international game developers association climate special interest
group um what does a group do what do you guys do sure uh that’s a very good question uh so the igda climate sig
which is the way shorter and easier way to say it um is really a grassroots volunteer organization within the video
game industry that’s meant to make sustainability more accessible throughout uh
you know the places that we work um and in order for us to make and play games
for the foreseeable future um we have to consider you know business
social environmental risks um and a lot of what we experience when we
talk about sustainability in general not just in the video game space i think a lot of us deal with a lot of paralysis
uh there’s so many things that we could be doing there’s so many options in front of us to act
and it’s a major existential threat that all of us have to face on top of our day jobs or need to pay the bills the need
to be good parents to our kids and our dogs uh and cats um
and uh we often get stuck in that feeling of fight flight or freeze that
uh we do nothing right like we burn out uh we turtle into ourselves and like focus on
what we’re able to handle in the day which is a totally valid response to that level of anxiety
um and so to break out of that our hope is that we’re creating a safe space so that game developers can come out of the
woodwork who are ready to engage with this topic are ready to find other people who can rally
towards creating a more sustainable industry uh i i want to add to that just the
you know uh to me climate change is uh i think pretty clearly the greatest
challenge uh of our time and the most complicated challenge um
i think the complexity and size of of of this challenge can be so
overwhelming and it’s really great when people are you know not immediately overwhelmed by
this and instead find practical ways uh for all of us to contribute to some sort of solution to the problem yeah that
leadership is so important that leadership is the people who like you who are not overwhelmed who can show us
how to make forward progress out of our overwhelmed estates folks can’t see but i am definitely
laughing at the thought that i don’t look overwhelmed um but i think that’s really important
and i think that um to reframe it a little bit it’s it’s not just about leadership as uh individuals it’s
leadership with us as a collective unit and i think that part of the challenge that comes with us being ready or not
ready to engage in the complex topic of the climate crisis is that a lot of the systems that we exist in that we operate
in are not geared to face that problem there’s a whole talk we can probably get
into about how capitalism has disabled us from being able to recognize how these systems are deeply connected from
our values to how we use products to how we operate in a society it’s a very
complex problem well instead of talking about capitalism in the abstract let’s say uh you know i
mean i mean look um when i think about climate change and you know i’ve spent years talking about
climate change with my students the last thing i think about is video games and yet
right uh obviously making operating games has an environmental impact uh not
to mention you know just working in an office if you’re a part of a design team has an environmental impact um
so either if you want to go down the capitalist route or any other route uh how do game companies and their games
impact the environment so let’s start with just general awareness of what the issue is yeah i mean if we think about
just the potential reach of it games in today’s uh climate pun kind of intended
uh have a potential to reach three billion players all over the planet and so when we think about what games can do
for climate or are doing decline to climate um the environmental impact of that energy usage in itself is is big
enough of a topic to discuss um and uh our you know creation of
devices our emphasis on making things more accessible to more people
and thinking about cloud and thinking about mobile that has direct implications on the
intensity of our carbon footprint and so um i think there was a berkeley national
study that had been done i think 2018 um by lawrence berkeley national lab
um that validated that video games use more electricity than many home appliances
there’s also i mean if we also take into account the carbon footprint of our supply chains and the
minerals and petrochemicals that are used to create the platforms that our
players use to access our ever-increasing portfolio of content
we can also think about how there is huge variability in how these
consoles are made which has huge variability in their energy consumption and so
it makes it very difficult for us to have like a clear and accurate estimate of our global footprint
but if we think about um the ways in which platforms can also be
used to access other types of media like video for instance
they’re also not run efficiently for those purposes there was a study
i believe it was by the university of surrey though i would have to verify apologies
that um because consoles were primarily built and optimized for gameplay not things
like movies and youtube videos or twitch streams streaming videos on those devices can
run 10 to 25 more times of electricity than using streaming devices wow
wow so i would have never guessed that that would have been that much it’s a lot yeah i’m going to think about that given that
i normally watch hbo through my xbox but i can watch it to my tv it is yeah and
it’s in the stuff that we don’t often think about because for us as consumers in general like energy is energy like i
want it to be quick i want it to be efficient i want it to be fast i want to be able to get to exactly what i want
but i think that’s that’s also one of the reasons why like xbox for example had implemented
uh the energy saver mode that recently came out this year and making that the default setting
enables consoles uh to consume 20 times less power than the standard mode which
the standby mode does enable uh players to like more quickly turn on the console
but it’s a difference of maybe five to ten seconds um and so small changes like that even if it feels
really simple actually have huge effects and so when we think about cloud gaming and the ability to run on a data center
that is dominantly run with clean or carbon neutral energy that can play a massive role
in video games footprint overall um one last thing i’ll say and then i’ll stop talking at you um is that i think
the the cultural influence of that is actually also very important because there are a lot of eyeballs and a lot of
the games that we build are inherently lenses of what we consider viable um
which is really great when you think about like the 90s and 2000s narratives that were dominantly about us and the
apocalypse um and so in covid you’re seeing a transition towards more cozy games cooperative games non-competitive games
so yeah interesting okay so let me just recap there was a lot about consoles
themselves right the making of consoles the energy usage of consoles right both the
making and the continuing usage uh data centers uh i would have thought would feature more right because i’m assuming
data centers are a huge huge uh uh consumer of
of energy 100 yeah but i think that’s i think that’s one of the reasons why uh we have a lot
of questions that we need to answer when it comes to cloud streaming because we if we take into consideration like data
centers today um more often than not many of them have to make a transition
to clean energy and if we think about hours of game play because of those
opportunities to be more efficient um uh there’s a threshold at which cloud
gaming itself still becomes more unsustainable than having a device directly in your home locally
um but i think there is a university of sir uh uh there was a study from the university
of surrey that indicated that within eight hours of consistent game play it is more energy efficient um uh compared
to standard console um but there’s still a lot to do and at the end of the day the fundamental
question is uh how are we powering our media and entertainment experiences
regardless of what platform you use i i remember uh hearing about uh
i think data centers uh that were gonna that were it in i think iceland
that were uh powered by geothermal and cool down is you know as a way to kind
of make much more sustainable uh data centers is that the sort of uh the sort of direction that you have in mind
oh i mean it certainly depends on the region um i don’t know if california for
instance could run on geothermal because that would require mining into yosemite which i don’t think most of us want to
do i got my yosemite cup right here all right and i think that’s
oh my god that was amazing um it certainly depends on the region and it depends on how your grids were set up
which is why you know public policy plays such a major role in our voting powers
um but uh accessing solar accessing wind accessing geothermal um i think
um rallying towards an overall plan and commitment to go clean energy across the
board regardless of the mechanism i think is important for us and our resiliency long term
and so it’s not really so much about us as players choosing the right platform or choosing certain games over other
games is really about us like coming together and making it and having a voice
to say hey we want our energy to be clean energy for whatever we’re using it for whether
we’re whether we’re playing games or doing laundry or both at the same time though notice you’ve got two different
communities right you’re talking about one is the is the game companies right and this is where you’re worried this is
where we get all these considerations about right xbox moving to more cloud gaming
is that good or bad for the environment right uh you know but then you’ve got those three billion people that you were
talking about and i i love that you really kind of uh
mentioned and i want to kind of i’m assuming we’re going to go deeper into it the impact that games themselves have
on our values on the way we see the world and how that could impact our views about the environment
um how do you get let’s start with the gain companies part first and then so let’s deal with the
kind of game game professionals first and then let’s talk about the uh the gamers
so how do you uh how do you get game companies um and game developers uh to
care about the environment to do something about the environment yeah um that is a very good question that i get asked about on a daily basis uh so
i mean context for uh the climate special interest group in particular it’s a
wonderful uh global community of people of i believe over 400 i counted it yesterday was like 476
game developers and researchers and climate scientists who love and play games and make games
um who um have come together really first and foremost with the recognition
that we can’t make or play games if our electricity grids no longer work um we can’t make or play games if our
offices and homes are on fire or flooded we can’t hire diverse talent to create
new narratives and new gameplay mechanics and innovate if they are in a situation where their base needs are not
met because they’re climate refugees and that applies not only to the global south
it applies to industrialized nations i have co-workers and anecdotes of
people who’ve decided to move elsewhere outside of california because the fires are having impacts on their chronic
health conditions um and so when we think about um the visceral response that
game developers have it really starts out with that fear and the recognition that
we have to do something um and the bias that people often have when they come in is the thought that like i just i just
make games i’m not saving the world i’m not curing cancer i’m not like in in the trenches
like creating these solar plants like what can i do um and we go back to the
idea that like we have massive reach um even um like from from the moment you
know the first game was ever built in the 1950s we have had an influence in our um like
players and people’s perceptions of how we view the world and even though it feels like games are very small
the thing that i try to tell them before even the business case of it is that what the sustainability movement
suffers from right now is that there are too many options that are too complex and not accessible
and games are really interesting because we have the ability to directly interact
with world-breaking problems um and there’s research that indicates that non-interactive forms of media like
books and film are more effective at getting people to suspend disbelief and consider other viewpoints than if a
person were speaking to them directly um so you imagine a game where you are directly able to interact with something
and that can be def like immeasurably powerful um and there’s some anecdotes that i can share if there’s of interest
um but in terms of i would love that yeah definitely of interest though let’s finish the game companies first i was
gonna say you want the business case yeah yeah yeah let’s get the business case let and then let’s go because then
let’s spend most of our time on games oh you and your organizational powers i i like organization in terms of the
business case um uh and a lot of this will be on uh the community website that
we have igdaclimatesig.org for anyone who’s interested
but we’ve been gathering these talking points about the business cases that have proven to be effective to engage
different stakeholders at different parts of the organization i think first and foremost this is
particularly relevant for indie companies is that future investment and viability in future investment is is
increasingly a risk we have research and reports that financial institutions funders are
increasingly expected to consider climate risk when examining investment opportunities and so failure to at first
identify your carbon footprint um and identify risks and mitigation strategies in the event we have an
energy crisis and extreme weather events um have an impact on investment trust
um second is market expansion um as many folks know who are in the games industry we’re constantly thinking about more
eyeballs and like is it fun enough to build brand trust and get more people into subscriptions and things like that
um but games and platform success in new and existing markets is wholly dependent
upon whether or not we can meet players where they are and many emerging markets have different socioeconomic and technological
constraints that impact their purchasing power never mind their willingness to adopt new tech
and so when we think about growth markets and growth countries that are increasingly mobile increasingly
connected to the internet and increasingly interested in the social connection and competitions that come
through gameplay among many other needs and motivations um we
limit our addressable market and we limit our audience reach if we’re not able to
do things that can be of service to the broader ecosystem that is impacted by the climate crisis
um i think i’ve already mentioned the ability to to find and retain diverse talent but i think one of the
biggest factors we haven’t talked about yet is player trust especially when we think about new audiences
there was a 2021 report by the un environmental program or sorry nations development
program and the university of oxford as well as playmob um
where uh they they funded the like largest consumer survey on uh public opinion of
climate change through mobile gamers and so uh their sample size was 1.2 million players wow
yeah shameless plug for gaming a lot of eyeballs for surveys yeah
um and of that 1.2 million 64 strongly believe climate change is a global emergency
and so if you consider that gen z is more
gen z and future generations more and more often are aligning themselves to brands not
because of existing brand value and brand identity but because of values alignment
our failure as an industry to meet those expectations and meet those
increasing expectations is only going to result in us reducing our player base over time
right love it okay um now uh let’s move on to what gay
companies can do so um let’s so let’s first start with what they can do and
then let’s talk about the games that they can make right or that they have made right sure yeah um i mean i think
first and foremost like people need to map their carbon footprint i think i know that sounds
like uh the odd first step to take because we’ve been talking about these big potentially
transformative things but first and foremost we need to establish a baseline of like how much energy we’re consuming
in the first place right um because that’s done how does a company actually do that i
have no idea how to measure my personal carbon footprint uh how do companies do this there are that’s a great question
because there are many more calculators than i can probably even go into um and
every company um if it’s big enough tends to have their own which helps and doesn’t help to do
apples to apples comparisons of like where we actually are company to company um but there are calculators that are
publicly accessible online a lot of it is figuring out like what like how much are you traveling um what is your power
consumption when you think about your buildings um the the computers or devices that you
operate um how long you leave that equipment on for overnight when you’re compiling a build for instance
um all of those factors play a role um and our transportation and commute to and from work um there’s many different
ways to calculate your carbon footprint um intensity seems like the easiest one
because you’re going to get a bill every month it tells you exactly how much you’re using exactly yes that’s definitely the first
step and there are depending on what resources you have the
context of your business and what you are reasonably able to take on given most game developers have a lot of
crunchy priorities we as an industry need to improve our work life balance it doesn’t make any of this existential
work easier right but there’s there’s ways to you know um
being able to work from home more often which assuming your city and the place that you’re in is
hopefully trending towards cleaner energy that will become more sustainable over time
but it’s uh you know figuring out uh what you know power consumption uh
settings that you currently have like do all of your machines need to run at the top setting all of the time um
uh calculating out like understanding where your materials come from um
understanding what your recycling and composting practices are there’s many different ways to uh
there’s many different levers from a business standpoint uh from a game development standpoint
there’s a lot of nuance and a lot of politics around it because uh there’s still this
pre-existing assumption that if we talk about sustainability in games people assume it
means not top graphical settings it means not 60 frames a second of 4k
but the reality is you can make you know murderbot 9000 first person shooter
limited edition but just run it in a more energy efficient way um not all static menus
and loading screens need to run at top uh like you know 60 plus frames a
second right there are a lot of small things we can do to minimize the impact of of our builds
um there’s also a fundamental question about um
the decisions the design decisions that we make in the concepting phase of the game when we’re determining like how a
game looks and feels not every game requires hyperfidelity
so depending on the design intentions of the game it’s it’s good for us to also ask like how far does the field division
have to be what are players reasonably going to notice and what are the design goals of the game and like are there ways for us
to save energy um especially with features that players may not often notice um i’ll pause there that’s the
energy efficiency side nice and even honestly as a as a game
developer i i would not it would i would not have guessed that that would
make that big of a difference like you know taking static screens and making and running them at 30 frames a
second or even 15 frames a second yeah they’re not gonna be up that long how much energy i’m actually using that
seems like it seems like just such small amounts like just drops in a bucket
multiplied by three billion but that’s it right that’s exactly it right multiply that by three billion and all
of a sudden you have three billion drops in a bucket it’s like oh yeah i’ve got a couple of buckets right it’s amazing it’s like when i think
about yeah the numbers of people that we’re talking about just something that would again i i’m totally then i never
would have thought about this as one uh way of uh reducing carbon footprint
but you you start looking at those numbers of players and it really adds up
yeah and you think about the potential benefits and risks we have when we factor in the importance of the
metaverse in daily discourse right um there’s a lot of uh
unintentional blindness i’ll say and forgetting that snow crash and ready player one were about dystopias
and so the more um the more we you know run into climate anxiety the less we think
about hope and what we actually can do as individuals as part of a collective
the more we run the risk of being in that future um and so i think that thinking about the small things that we
can do that if they add up actually make a huge impact is something for us to keep in mind
right and it seems like you know as developers too as as as technology has improved basically the focus of our
technology is to get us out of these um
these limitations right like we had limit we had memory limitations and so
our we increased the memory of our of our devices you know they double it every 18
months moore’s law right and so uh at some point we were limited by polygons
we could show on screen and so we you know we boosted our technology that way now we’ve got more polygons we have
pixels so it doesn’t really matter anymore so we don’t have to worry about that we don’t have to worry about memory usage anymore because we have lots of
memory memory is cheap and we’ve never really had to worry about electricity yeah which is very interesting because
we should if you think about exactly if you think about mobile developers they actively have to think about this because uh
their their mobile games have direct energy draw unless you’re plugged in all the time
but when you think about like temporal accessibility and like playing on the go playing for shorter sessions playing
while you’re waiting for something else right energy consumption is a major factor and but at the same time our like
our technological push is to make better batteries exactly right right and they get rid of that
limitation and that’s not but what you’re saying is we need to do the opposite maybe as well i would say we need to do
both um yes i i think we need to do both because i think that regardless of where
a game developer or any of us sit on the fence of like do we act in service of
climate or not which like you know more granular questions than that um but regardless of where we sit i
think the especially with the ipcc report and all of the anxiety with that it’s
clear that while we may not have a static temperature
uh threshold with which climate change is completely irreversible it’s clear that our way of life is going
to change and it’s going to keep changing and if we think about future environmental threats that we may still
have to navigate even if we can still you know live on this planet assuming
our food systems don’t completely die in a fire literally um we have to make affordances and
changes that can enable us to adapt to that um and so i think that
thinking about performance across pc console mobile are things we’ve always thought about we’ve just
never paired performance with efficiency and that’s an interesting design challenge yeah by the way i’m just kind of curious
since mobile developers have to worry about energy consumption are there lessons to take from them to let’s say
console developers or pc developers uh i mean that’s a very good point i mean i think that uh i myself am not a
mobile game developer so i probably won’t be able to provide any sort of engineering
efficiency without completely butchering it and having my tech directors be really mad at me um but i think that um the
point about uh where you understanding where your players spend the most time in the game
understanding what implications that uh it may have if they’re they’re going to be spending more time in a menu because
they’re doing resource management and like while they’re waiting at a bus stop versus uh playing a game that is twitch
sensitive that requires a lot of fine motor control all of those have um
peaks and valleys in terms of how much power you actually need and so
while dynamic optimization of the power requirements of your game may not be something that is
easily done i think for games that are really specifically geared towards
mobile that have a lot of static menus that have a lot of resource management
and customization around that do have a lot of opportunities uh to innovate um
and create more efficiencies and we can translate that to a lot of games on other platforms
okay yeah for sure awesome all right let let’s now move on to this right i mean the game industry
is really in many ways uh a lot less culturally influential on social issues
like this than other media uh so you know i mean i’ve read uh lots of books uh you know
about climate change uh that are out there the film industry has produced feature films series documentaries
encouraging uh us to be green help the environment fight global climate change what is the game industry done uh and
what else can it do sure i mean i think cultural influence itself is
dependent upon how we’re defining it and the time scale in which we’re defining it for sure i mean it’s younger than
film um and the difficult answer that um i have to
wrestle with on a regular basis is that we really are still in our infancy um the
igda climate sig had been born as a kind of grassroots affiliate to a broader
initiative called the playing for the planet alliance which was created through the un environmental program
and they partnered with over 30 companies in 2017 onwards
to pledge public commitments to basically say we as an industry consider this to be a priority
uh the major players including sony microsoft rovio uh um us two
um all pledged public commitments to become carbon neutral um and so
um there’s a lot of work in an nda sense that is happening to reduce carbon
emissions to reduce more transparent uh reporting and accountability across organizations
um and there are uh cases where individual games have mapped uh things
like gameplay behavior and purchases to uh real world climate projects uh which
you can often be uh they can be called like green activations or green nudging um examples
for that uh include alba wildlife adventure by us two where
as part of the united nations green game jam a couple years ago they mapped their
game purchases to tree planting and they were able to plant over a million trees and there are multiple games that came
out of the woodwork in the game jam that have done similar projects um and so we are starting to make an effort um but
there’s a long way to we have to go because a lot of it right now is um
thinking about the the supply chain aspect of it um we think about the reductions for when
we’re building devices and built and we’re starting to talk about how we’re building our games
and there’s been a lot of research to indicate that games are a great vehicle for
longer term behavior change normalization of pro-environmental values but there’s still a long way to go um
and it’s it’s definitely not at the level of like content
uh like breadth and coverage as film and we need to catch up i was thinking about
like the way that you know on one hand like smoke like
smoking right there in the 60s in television literally everybody smoked
right everybody smoked cigarettes they were smoking cigarettes all the time and in our real world here in the u.s
everybody smoked uh you know i i was a first grader and i was making uh ashtrays for my mom in
ceramics right yeah you know everybody but now
we like we cut we cut cigarette smoking out of our media we don’t really show that anymore unless it’s like it’s
unless some specific character thing now a lot of less people smoke
right so so what can we show people doing yes right
right and i think um and this is oh i could talk about this with you forever and i will be mindful of time
but i think i think that uh i think i’ve already mentioned this earlier but when we think about sustainability there’s uh
there’s there’s a lot of media there’s a lot of options there’s a lot of things that we can do at the same time the impacts of this
work aren’t isn’t salient uh it’s not immediate it’s longer term which means
our ability to have the resiliency to keep going when we don’t have immediate feedback is soul-crushing crushing
games have this amazing opportunity to give you immediate feedback when you’re doing something right or wrong
and that’s the type of feedback loop that we should ideally be having in the sustainability movement and unfortunately it’s really hard but i
think that i will say as well that um the research that the community has done
to create the environmental game design playbook uh the primary author of which is a clayton whittle who’s amazing
we found a lot of research to indicate that there is actually a clear theory of
action that we can think about to activate players and consumers in any context
uh towards climate conscious action towards pro-environmental behavior
the acknowledgement that we have and not trying to uh you know talk poorly of
film and other forms of media when when covering uh the climate crisis
is that the truth of knowing the solution and understanding it in the best possible way does not in itself create the actual
willingness to act right and an individual’s ability to apply that action and effectiveness
knowledge is directly dependent upon the attitude the intent and the accessibility of the options actually
presented and so one of the big challenges and opportunities that we have with thinking
about green activations with games be it direct purchases which make it as easy
as possible to translate that to funds for a real world project to more indirect activations that are
much more nuanced the main thing that i hope to continue to work with
developers all over the world around is the idea that by creating opportunities for players to
practice safely uh these these behaviors these difficult choices in a game
primes them to be more resilient when the real world opportunity presents itself
and if we map a game if a game developer partners with a real world organization
to do dedicated projects that map what happens in a game to something that can
happen in the real world and they make it really specific and local um or or globally accessible though that
problem is much harder it is much more likely that we will be able to create that sense of hope
to to pursue that action and and hope in itself is is not a it’s not
a feeling like that’s the thing that i’ve learned the hard way that thankfully clayton trevin hugo hard now
shout out to everybody in the sig who has you know collected this research and put this together in such a
beautiful way is that hope itself is a cognitive construct it’s not
hope as a feeling it’s it’s not just emotional it’s a state of mind with
which we have the ability to see multiple paths of regression progression sorry
such that even if we run into challenges even if we run into failure multiple times
the opportunity is worth it enough to us that we are willing to keep going and
games have a great potential to enable us to safely do that such that when the real world pres uh opportunity presents
itself we’re ready yeah absolutely this is this is one of the strengths of games is to is to let us fail and fail and
fail and fail and fail until we get until we succeed and then right i mean that’s what games that’s
what we do that’s how games work yes so so that that that whole feedback you know there’s so much of what you
said paula that uh that i want to get into uh but i want to focus on two things if
you can uh number one i’m really interested in the idea that um uh let’s
say um you know when we’re talking to us two tomorrow we’re gonna talk to them about being a b corp right and part of
being a b chord right is that uh a part of your mission is doing good in the world right so one possibility connected
to what you said is you know uh whatever is in our games marketplace we give you
know let’s say we’re gonna donate 10 to you know some sort of climate initiative
right um that’s one way of course that a company can do but uh of course if a game allows
players to voluntarily do something like that uh donate money to the game are
there any games that actually do that and then the second thing i wanted to ask after that is can we talk about some
of some let’s say concrete examples uh of how games like here’s a game and
here’s how this game might actually influence people through this uh ability to fail and learn and and model behavior
absolutely you’ve asked four questions where do you want to start uh let’s start
let’s start with are there are there games where you actually can uh
you know literally make a difference right now by let’s say buying
buying something in the game that will go towards global climate change or solving global climate change rather
yeah i’ll say uh uh again alba wildlife adventure every purchase goes towards
tree planting uh june’s journey by wuga i believe is another example
um and uh there are more that are coming out of the u.n green game jam i believe that
also map to climate pledges which like are ambig i will say full transparency
are ambiguous in their impact but they do provide a vehicle um for players to
say like i support this policy i am signing this pledge because i am committed to publicly stating my
intention to support this initiative which does give impact-based organizations
more visibility and viability to say like the consumers that we serve the people that we serve are in support of
this across excellent number of countries um there are other behavioral
uh case studies of behavior change that are much smaller in scale and i can
talk about two in particular as examples for what we could do as as an overall industry
um one is the work that was done with a non-profit
named glass lab that was uh unfortunately now no longer exists
but in 2014 um we as a non-profit had gotten
access to the simcity code base like the commercial game and modified it for a classroom setting
so that middle school science and english teachers could understand how their kids were learning systems thinking
so we had four missions that of increasing complexity where you know
middle school children would have to make investment decisions to know where they
wanted to place the bus stop so that their kids could get to school on time all the way to converting
their energy grids from uh dirty coal energy fossil fuels
to clean energy without their citizens sacrificing power which would result in dissatisfied citizens job loss that kind
of thing we did a study with over 400 students
across the united states and found that those students with classroom instruction gained
statistically significant improvements in single and multivariate systems thinking as a result of gameplay
um the i’ll say the personal anecdote i have is like in play testing that game
uh there was a young girl uh in the fifth grade who’d come up to one of our game designers who said you know so
there’s there’s a plant behind my house you’re telling me a person put that there which resulted in an interesting
conversation about how cities are built the decisions that get made what what it means to have public right-of-way what
it means to have zoning regulations and this kid got really mad and so
um it’s it’s small moments like that that paired with the ability to practice these skills the ability to negotiate in
the context of gameplay and fail and try again until you succeed on your objectives
is something that’s really powerful one more example that i will also share
is one of a student named jack who
i played and his story is on twitter i wish i remembered his twitter handle uh he
uh had played firewatch uh which is a game where you were a person uh in a firewatch station and you have to
explore the mysteries of what happened in that environment he was so captivated
by that experience in a game that he decided to spend his summers
going around with his dad on the east coast of the united states to visit firewatch stations um he became one of
the youngest members at the age of 12 of like the fire watch lookout association
he eventually went to university of massam massachusetts amherst for a
i believe a degree in sustainable tourism and forest conservation and that and the one last thing that was
really interesting is that he also uh was able to establish
a clear understanding and empathy and and uh connection to the black lives
matter movement because he saw how people of color were treated in forest conservation and forestry
uh which is a dominantly white field um right and so it’s it’s little moments like that that are really transformative
there’s also non-environmental examples where we have people with chronic illness or disease
or degenerative conditions that used to play a lot of games and used to be really active and then
suddenly couldn’t anymore um and being able to role play in those
different environments and fantasy environments where you can you know go into a survival game go into an action
adventure game and survive something traumatic and have full control over those decisions that is also something
that is very restorative for mental health and so if we can scale that to three billion players in some way
that could be really powerful it’s a big problem but it’s a big challenge right that’s amazing
you know it’s interesting i’m immediately thinking of um there’s a couple of directions i want to
go you know some of the things that seem obvious to me and i’m sure you you know i’m saying this as someone who has not
looked into this but you have but obviously the stories we tell and where environmentalism fits in the stories and
how important the uh you know the environment is in
all those stories as as a value seems to be a really really big deal i mean this is just part of the worlds we play in
right uh i was thinking earlier when you’re talking about uh simcity i was actually thinking about the sims for a
moment i was thinking if i was playing the sims um would i be recycling
right uh and notice right if if a game assumes that i’m recycling
right i am practicing recycling right um if i’m playing the sims is it
keeping track of my carbon footprint right if so right i’m getting used to thinking right
about the you know about my carbon footprint uh so it’s interesting right so many of these things uh where you
know um you know am i you know in the game is there something
positive attached to the idea of let’s say planting a tree i was i was born in israel where planting trees has always
been like a really really big deal so as a kid we would go to the forest the entire class and plant trees and there
was something very very culturally important about planting trees right we turned our desert into like you know a
thriving uh you know a thriving environment so does seem to me like like kind of
easy i say easy i’m not a developer so you know it’s easy for me to say i’m i was
actually wondering about a specific uh about us besides this and i’m gonna ask i know i’m asking two questions in
in a sense but um um if there is a game that deals with the
tragedy of the commons uh and climate change because to me this is because i’m coming
a climate change from you know in some sense i think games should focus on the easy stuff you know
you know get people to you know get people to recycle like get people to use like electricity get people to you know
stop eating beef maybe stop eating me right there’s lots of stuff but as a as a philosopher
i’m super interested in the you know in the problem that we essentially are in this situation
where every country it’s in itself interest to use energy
uh while it’s in everybody’s self-interest that everybody not use more energy
and um the tragedy of the commons is that every person in the world
essentially has every reason to use energy but if we all do it we’re all
um and it seems like the kind of thing that could really fit well into a game somehow i mean the thing that is soul
crushing to admit is that most of our games historically already have that problem
um if we think about final fantasy vii that is a small group of protagonists
that are actively fighting against a major corporation that has extracted natural resources from their lived
planet um and that is essentially a major eco-narrative that activated a bunch of
game developers like very early on in the process and without the language to articulate
exactly the implications of that work right if you think about other other other powerful things like princess
mononoke yes right and the huge environmental statement that it makes
yep and if we if we also think about even even uh even companies that don’t think they’re
making an eco narrative tend to uh if we take an extreme example like
the gears of war franchise it’s really it’s kind of a metaphor for fracking um it’s like we dug too deep
into a alien planet’s natural resources and the indigenous creatures are
fighting back um and we’ve extracted too much to an extreme degree and so we just avatar yeah right right right so yeah
yeah yeah and so we we’ve we’ve already been aware of these choices for a very long time
the difference is they haven’t been explicit um and and systems thinking is
a really hard thing for us to do when there are so many things that we have to factor into our day-to-day that we just
want to escape and i think that’s part of the fear that we have as a game development industry is that we’re not at that point of
recognizing that games are inherently lenses of what we think are possible and there are more and more games that
are coming out with these solar punk futures that like are trying to explore a world that is not completely ravaged
by apocalypse um because we’re recognizing that like we do want something else um but
there are also there are a lot of portrayals that we have even like games like overwatch that you know don’t make
that explicit that are based in a game world where we assume we have fixed the
energy crisis problem and so we have the ability to make those assumptions more salient and go you want
to get there next generation of game developers students players right there are many ways for us to get there
yeah that’s that’s interesting amazing because i mean yeah i i really didn’t think of so
you know i’m so used to thinking of the post-apocalyptic world as just a kind of uh
you know just a nice trick for putting us in uh a particular type of story as opposed to
also a message of hopelessness right right and we we really want to be a hero in
that story because the world in day-to-day life sometimes feels really helpless and sometimes we have needs
that are unfulfilled in the real world so we escape to a place where we have more control
the challenge i honestly have though is what if we were to imagine worlds in which the world hasn’t fallen apart what
would you do in that environment what are the different challenges that you would have and face to create a better future for everybody
um like those are the those are the design questions that i’m very curious about yeah those are great so paula what do
you want to leave our listeners with the idea that the world is not necessarily always falling apart and that you have
more power than you think you do i know that that feels really squishy i know that feels like it’s a platitude
but it’s not um we have you know a sweeping assessment through the ipcc by over like
over 200 scientists that indicate we are in dire straits at the same time
we are our influence of the environment is directly correlated to our ghg emissions
which we have the ability to control with collective effort there are many things that we can do at
an individual level as consumers as people who make games as people who love games
to make these small incremental gains so that you know by the time
the next major console releases by the time the next technological innovation happens
we’re still making progress over time um and all it requires is for you to
find you know peers who can support you allies who can help advocate for you uh
allies who can help you know create a plan that makes
sense for your needs and can be contextualized to what you’re able to do um every small effort matters
um and it all adds up so that’s my hope all right three billion drops
all right yeah add to a whole lot paula you are wonderful i just gotta say i i’m so appreciating the work uh that you and
uh your organization and others like it in the game world uh are doing for for the planet um why should we what should
our listeners read oh i mean the environmental game design playbook presented by the igda climate
especial interest group is definitely a good starting point if you have concerns questions doubts
curiosities related to climate conscious game design that is available on
igda igdaclimatesig.org which has a bunch of other resources as
well if you’re looking at game design talks energy efficiency like research studies and reports we’re
basically just making these resources easier to find great um other than that
there’s also dr ben abraham’s book i believe it’s called digital games after climate change which is the first
comprehensive research study that maps are a carbon footprint end to
end as an industry so highly recommend that um and there’s many other resources that
i would provide but it is all on the website on the website we can go to the we can go to igda climate s-i-g
and yep awesome all right guys uh paula uh thank you so much for for
coming on our show great podcast guys uh play nice everybody
you can subscribe and listen to all of our episodes wherever you listen to podcasts
