{"id":916,"date":"2022-06-12T23:15:31","date_gmt":"2022-06-12T23:15:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/?p=916"},"modified":"2022-10-21T16:05:29","modified_gmt":"2022-10-21T16:05:29","slug":"episode-48-gaming-and-the-environment-with-paula-escuadra%ef%bf%bc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/?p=916","title":{"rendered":"Episode 48 &#8211; Gaming and the Environment (with Paula Escuadra)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[Release Date: August 5, 2022]&nbsp; Have you ever considered how gaming and game companies contribute to environmental problems like global climate change?&nbsp; We haven\u2019t!&nbsp; 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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border-radius:12px\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/4IoXYSVxmzWRdnd7qLuYtl?utm_source=generator&amp;theme=0\" width=\"100%\" height=\"232\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\" allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\"><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<p>SHOW TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>hello everybody paula&#8217;s cuadra has spent over 12 years elevating the power of games have to redefine a relationship with failure and create meaning uh she&#8217;s our guest today uh and we are here to hopefully deal with failure and create meaning well that&#8217;s actually not the only thing we&#8217;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&#8217;s climate special interest group which we got to get into today co-authoring its newly released environmental game design playbook she&#8217;s also on the cologne game labs advisory board with a focus on unlocking sustainability competencies in the next generation of game developers we&#8217;re here to talk environment as you can tell<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>paula is deeply deeply in this and finally she&#8217;s a very strong advocate for community care psychological safety and doug cuddling uh as a former self-care<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>so if you&#8217;re with your dog right now we highly recommend you uh you know uh<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>make yourself very very comfortable all right paula welcome to the show hey<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>thank you so much i&#8217;m so appreciative of the support for dog cuddling all right<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh and i just i want to take a second actually just to uh um say andy&#8217;s back<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh and he has been gone over the last two shows he&#8217;s been taking care of his mother being a wonderful son that he is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and andy i&#8217;m just really happy to have you back it&#8217;s just not the same doing this alone oh well thanks this is i&#8217;m<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>really really glad to be back and this one&#8217;s gonna be really fun and uh and i&#8217;m super excited to be here again all right<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um okay so uh paula tell us about the international game developers association climate special interest<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>group um what does a group do what do you guys do sure uh that&#8217;s a very good question uh so the igda climate sig<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>which is the way shorter and easier way to say it um is really a grassroots volunteer organization within the video<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>game industry that&#8217;s meant to make sustainability more accessible throughout uh<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you know the places that we work um and in order for us to make and play games<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>for the foreseeable future um we have to consider you know business<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>social environmental risks um and a lot of what we experience when we<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>talk about sustainability in general not just in the video game space i think a lot of us deal with a lot of paralysis<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh there&#8217;s so many things that we could be doing there&#8217;s so many options in front of us to act<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and it&#8217;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<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to be good parents to our kids and our dogs uh and cats um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and uh we often get stuck in that feeling of fight flight or freeze that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh we do nothing right like we burn out uh we turtle into ourselves and like focus on<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>what we&#8217;re able to handle in the day which is a totally valid response to that level of anxiety<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um and so to break out of that our hope is that we&#8217;re creating a safe space so that game developers can come out of the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>woodwork who are ready to engage with this topic are ready to find other people who can rally<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>towards creating a more sustainable industry uh i i want to add to that just the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you know uh to me climate change is uh i think pretty clearly the greatest<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>challenge uh of our time and the most complicated challenge um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>i think the complexity and size of of of this challenge can be so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>overwhelming and it&#8217;s really great when people are you know not immediately overwhelmed by<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>this and instead find practical ways uh for all of us to contribute to some sort of solution to the problem yeah that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>leadership is so important that leadership is the people who like you who are not overwhelmed who can show us<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>how to make forward progress out of our overwhelmed estates folks can&#8217;t see but i am definitely<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>laughing at the thought that i don&#8217;t look overwhelmed um but i think that&#8217;s really important<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and i think that um to reframe it a little bit it&#8217;s it&#8217;s not just about leadership as uh individuals it&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>leadership with us as a collective unit and i think that part of the challenge that comes with us being ready or not<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>in are not geared to face that problem there&#8217;s a whole talk we can probably get<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>into about how capitalism has disabled us from being able to recognize how these systems are deeply connected from<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>our values to how we use products to how we operate in a society it&#8217;s a very<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>complex problem well instead of talking about capitalism in the abstract let&#8217;s say uh you know i<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>mean i mean look um when i think about climate change and you know i&#8217;ve spent years talking about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>climate change with my students the last thing i think about is video games and yet<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>right uh obviously making operating games has an environmental impact uh not<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to mention you know just working in an office if you&#8217;re a part of a design team has an environmental impact um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>so either if you want to go down the capitalist route or any other route uh how do game companies and their games<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>impact the environment so let&#8217;s start with just general awareness of what the issue is yeah i mean if we think about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>just the potential reach of it games in today&#8217;s uh climate pun kind of intended<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh have a potential to reach three billion players all over the planet and so when we think about what games can do<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>for climate or are doing decline to climate um the environmental impact of that energy usage in itself is is big<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>enough of a topic to discuss um and uh our you know creation of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>devices our emphasis on making things more accessible to more people<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and thinking about cloud and thinking about mobile that has direct implications on the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>intensity of our carbon footprint and so um i think there was a berkeley national<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>study that had been done i think 2018 um by lawrence berkeley national lab<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um that validated that video games use more electricity than many home appliances<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there&#8217;s also i mean if we also take into account the carbon footprint of our supply chains and the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>minerals and petrochemicals that are used to create the platforms that our<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>players use to access our ever-increasing portfolio of content<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we can also think about how there is huge variability in how these<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>consoles are made which has huge variability in their energy consumption and so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>it makes it very difficult for us to have like a clear and accurate estimate of our global footprint<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but if we think about um the ways in which platforms can also be<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>used to access other types of media like video for instance<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>they&#8217;re also not run efficiently for those purposes there was a study<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>i believe it was by the university of surrey though i would have to verify apologies<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that um because consoles were primarily built and optimized for gameplay not things<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>like movies and youtube videos or twitch streams streaming videos on those devices can<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>run 10 to 25 more times of electricity than using streaming devices wow<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>wow so i would have never guessed that that would have been that much it&#8217;s a lot yeah i&#8217;m going to think about that given that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>i normally watch hbo through my xbox but i can watch it to my tv it is yeah and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>it&#8217;s in the stuff that we don&#8217;t often think about because for us as consumers in general like energy is energy like i<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but i think that&#8217;s that&#8217;s also one of the reasons why like xbox for example had implemented<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh the energy saver mode that recently came out this year and making that the default setting<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>enables consoles uh to consume 20 times less power than the standard mode which<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the standby mode does enable uh players to like more quickly turn on the console<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but it&#8217;s a difference of maybe five to ten seconds um and so small changes like that even if it feels<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>really simple actually have huge effects and so when we think about cloud gaming and the ability to run on a data center<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that is dominantly run with clean or carbon neutral energy that can play a massive role<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>in video games footprint overall um one last thing i&#8217;ll say and then i&#8217;ll stop talking at you um is that i think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the the cultural influence of that is actually also very important because there are a lot of eyeballs and a lot of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the games that we build are inherently lenses of what we consider viable um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>which is really great when you think about like the 90s and 2000s narratives that were dominantly about us and the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>apocalypse um and so in covid you&#8217;re seeing a transition towards more cozy games cooperative games non-competitive games<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>so yeah interesting okay so let me just recap there was a lot about consoles<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>themselves right the making of consoles the energy usage of consoles right both the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>making and the continuing usage uh data centers uh i would have thought would feature more right because i&#8217;m assuming<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>data centers are a huge huge uh uh consumer of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>of energy 100 yeah but i think that&#8217;s i think that&#8217;s one of the reasons why uh we have a lot<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>of questions that we need to answer when it comes to cloud streaming because we if we take into consideration like data<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>centers today um more often than not many of them have to make a transition<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to clean energy and if we think about hours of game play because of those<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>opportunities to be more efficient um uh there&#8217;s a threshold at which cloud<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>gaming itself still becomes more unsustainable than having a device directly in your home locally<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um but i think there is a university of sir uh uh there was a study from the university<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>of surrey that indicated that within eight hours of consistent game play it is more energy efficient um uh compared<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to standard console um but there&#8217;s still a lot to do and at the end of the day the fundamental<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>question is uh how are we powering our media and entertainment experiences<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>regardless of what platform you use i i remember uh hearing about uh<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>i think data centers uh that were gonna that were it in i think iceland<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that were uh powered by geothermal and cool down is you know as a way to kind<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>of make much more sustainable uh data centers is that the sort of uh the sort of direction that you have in mind<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>oh i mean it certainly depends on the region um i don&#8217;t know if california for<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>instance could run on geothermal because that would require mining into yosemite which i don&#8217;t think most of us want to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>do i got my yosemite cup right here all right and i think that&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>oh my god that was amazing um it certainly depends on the region and it depends on how your grids were set up<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>which is why you know public policy plays such a major role in our voting powers<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um but uh accessing solar accessing wind accessing geothermal um i think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um rallying towards an overall plan and commitment to go clean energy across the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>board regardless of the mechanism i think is important for us and our resiliency long term<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and so it&#8217;s not really so much about us as players choosing the right platform or choosing certain games over other<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>games is really about us like coming together and making it and having a voice<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to say hey we want our energy to be clean energy for whatever we&#8217;re using it for whether<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we&#8217;re whether we&#8217;re playing games or doing laundry or both at the same time though notice you&#8217;ve got two different<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>communities right you&#8217;re talking about one is the is the game companies right and this is where you&#8217;re worried this is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>where we get all these considerations about right xbox moving to more cloud gaming<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>is that good or bad for the environment right uh you know but then you&#8217;ve got those three billion people that you were<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>talking about and i i love that you really kind of uh<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>mentioned and i want to kind of i&#8217;m assuming we&#8217;re going to go deeper into it the impact that games themselves have<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>on our values on the way we see the world and how that could impact our views about the environment<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um how do you get let&#8217;s start with the gain companies part first and then so let&#8217;s deal with the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>kind of game game professionals first and then let&#8217;s talk about the uh the gamers<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>so how do you uh how do you get game companies um and game developers uh to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>i mean context for uh the climate special interest group in particular it&#8217;s a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>wonderful uh global community of people of i believe over 400 i counted it yesterday was like 476<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>game developers and researchers and climate scientists who love and play games and make games<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um who um have come together really first and foremost with the recognition<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that we can&#8217;t make or play games if our electricity grids no longer work um we can&#8217;t make or play games if our<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>offices and homes are on fire or flooded we can&#8217;t hire diverse talent to create<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>new narratives and new gameplay mechanics and innovate if they are in a situation where their base needs are not<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>met because they&#8217;re climate refugees and that applies not only to the global south<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>it applies to industrialized nations i have co-workers and anecdotes of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>people who&#8217;ve decided to move elsewhere outside of california because the fires are having impacts on their chronic<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>health conditions um and so when we think about um the visceral response that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>game developers have it really starts out with that fear and the recognition that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>make games i&#8217;m not saving the world i&#8217;m not curing cancer i&#8217;m not like in in the trenches<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>like creating these solar plants like what can i do um and we go back to the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>idea that like we have massive reach um even um like from from the moment you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>know the first game was ever built in the 1950s we have had an influence in our um like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>players and people&#8217;s perceptions of how we view the world and even though it feels like games are very small<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the thing that i try to tell them before even the business case of it is that what the sustainability movement<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>suffers from right now is that there are too many options that are too complex and not accessible<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and games are really interesting because we have the ability to directly interact<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>with world-breaking problems um and there&#8217;s research that indicates that non-interactive forms of media like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>books and film are more effective at getting people to suspend disbelief and consider other viewpoints than if a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>person were speaking to them directly um so you imagine a game where you are directly able to interact with something<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and that can be def like immeasurably powerful um and there&#8217;s some anecdotes that i can share if there&#8217;s of interest<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um but in terms of i would love that yeah definitely of interest though let&#8217;s finish the game companies first i was<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>gonna say you want the business case yeah yeah yeah let&#8217;s get the business case let and then let&#8217;s go because then<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>let&#8217;s spend most of our time on games oh you and your organizational powers i i like organization in terms of the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>business case um uh and a lot of this will be on uh the community website that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we have igdaclimatesig.org for anyone who&#8217;s interested<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but we&#8217;ve been gathering these talking points about the business cases that have proven to be effective to engage<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>different stakeholders at different parts of the organization i think first and foremost this is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>particularly relevant for indie companies is that future investment and viability in future investment is is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>increasingly a risk we have research and reports that financial institutions funders are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>increasingly expected to consider climate risk when examining investment opportunities and so failure to at first<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>identify your carbon footprint um and identify risks and mitigation strategies in the event we have an<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>energy crisis and extreme weather events um have an impact on investment trust<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um second is market expansion um as many folks know who are in the games industry we&#8217;re constantly thinking about more<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>eyeballs and like is it fun enough to build brand trust and get more people into subscriptions and things like that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um but games and platform success in new and existing markets is wholly dependent<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>upon whether or not we can meet players where they are and many emerging markets have different socioeconomic and technological<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>constraints that impact their purchasing power never mind their willingness to adopt new tech<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and so when we think about growth markets and growth countries that are increasingly mobile increasingly<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>connected to the internet and increasingly interested in the social connection and competitions that come<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>through gameplay among many other needs and motivations um we<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>limit our addressable market and we limit our audience reach if we&#8217;re not able to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>do things that can be of service to the broader ecosystem that is impacted by the climate crisis<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um i think i&#8217;ve already mentioned the ability to to find and retain diverse talent but i think one of the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>biggest factors we haven&#8217;t talked about yet is player trust especially when we think about new audiences<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there was a 2021 report by the un environmental program or sorry nations development<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>program and the university of oxford as well as playmob um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>where uh they they funded the like largest consumer survey on uh public opinion of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>climate change through mobile gamers and so uh their sample size was 1.2 million players wow<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>yeah shameless plug for gaming a lot of eyeballs for surveys yeah<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um and of that 1.2 million 64 strongly believe climate change is a global emergency<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and so if you consider that gen z is more<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>gen z and future generations more and more often are aligning themselves to brands not<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>because of existing brand value and brand identity but because of values alignment<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>our failure as an industry to meet those expectations and meet those<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>increasing expectations is only going to result in us reducing our player base over time<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>right love it okay um now uh let&#8217;s move on to what gay<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>companies can do so um let&#8217;s so let&#8217;s first start with what they can do and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>then let&#8217;s talk about the games that they can make right or that they have made right sure yeah um i mean i think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>first and foremost like people need to map their carbon footprint i think i know that sounds<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>like uh the odd first step to take because we&#8217;ve been talking about these big potentially<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>transformative things but first and foremost we need to establish a baseline of like how much energy we&#8217;re consuming<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>in the first place right um because that&#8217;s done how does a company actually do that i<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>have no idea how to measure my personal carbon footprint uh how do companies do this there are that&#8217;s a great question<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>because there are many more calculators than i can probably even go into um and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>every company um if it&#8217;s big enough tends to have their own which helps and doesn&#8217;t help to do<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>apples to apples comparisons of like where we actually are company to company um but there are calculators that are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>publicly accessible online a lot of it is figuring out like what like how much are you traveling um what is your power<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>consumption when you think about your buildings um the the computers or devices that you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>operate um how long you leave that equipment on for overnight when you&#8217;re compiling a build for instance<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um all of those factors play a role um and our transportation and commute to and from work um there&#8217;s many different<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>ways to calculate your carbon footprint um intensity seems like the easiest one<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>because you&#8217;re going to get a bill every month it tells you exactly how much you&#8217;re using exactly yes that&#8217;s definitely the first<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>step and there are depending on what resources you have the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>context of your business and what you are reasonably able to take on given most game developers have a lot of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>crunchy priorities we as an industry need to improve our work life balance it doesn&#8217;t make any of this existential<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>work easier right but there&#8217;s there&#8217;s ways to you know um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>being able to work from home more often which assuming your city and the place that you&#8217;re in is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>hopefully trending towards cleaner energy that will become more sustainable over time<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but it&#8217;s uh you know figuring out uh what you know power consumption uh<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>settings that you currently have like do all of your machines need to run at the top setting all of the time um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh calculating out like understanding where your materials come from um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>understanding what your recycling and composting practices are there&#8217;s many different ways to uh<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there&#8217;s many different levers from a business standpoint uh from a game development standpoint<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there&#8217;s a lot of nuance and a lot of politics around it because uh there&#8217;s still this<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>pre-existing assumption that if we talk about sustainability in games people assume it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>means not top graphical settings it means not 60 frames a second of 4k<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but the reality is you can make you know murderbot 9000 first person shooter<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>limited edition but just run it in a more energy efficient way um not all static menus<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and loading screens need to run at top uh like you know 60 plus frames a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>second right there are a lot of small things we can do to minimize the impact of of our builds<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um there&#8217;s also a fundamental question about um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the decisions the design decisions that we make in the concepting phase of the game when we&#8217;re determining like how a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>game looks and feels not every game requires hyperfidelity<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>so depending on the design intentions of the game it&#8217;s it&#8217;s good for us to also ask like how far does the field division<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to save energy um especially with features that players may not often notice um i&#8217;ll pause there that&#8217;s the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>energy efficiency side nice and even honestly as a as a game<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>developer i i would not it would i would not have guessed that that would<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>make that big of a difference like you know taking static screens and making and running them at 30 frames a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>second or even 15 frames a second yeah they&#8217;re not gonna be up that long how much energy i&#8217;m actually using that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>seems like it seems like just such small amounts like just drops in a bucket<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>multiplied by three billion but that&#8217;s it right that&#8217;s exactly it right multiply that by three billion and all<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>of a sudden you have three billion drops in a bucket it&#8217;s like oh yeah i&#8217;ve got a couple of buckets right it&#8217;s amazing it&#8217;s like when i think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>about yeah the numbers of people that we&#8217;re talking about just something that would again i i&#8217;m totally then i never<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>would have thought about this as one uh way of uh reducing carbon footprint<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but you you start looking at those numbers of players and it really adds up<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>yeah and you think about the potential benefits and risks we have when we factor in the importance of the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>metaverse in daily discourse right um there&#8217;s a lot of uh<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>unintentional blindness i&#8217;ll say and forgetting that snow crash and ready player one were about dystopias<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and so the more um the more we you know run into climate anxiety the less we think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>about hope and what we actually can do as individuals as part of a collective<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the more we run the risk of being in that future um and so i think that thinking about the small things that we<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>can do that if they add up actually make a huge impact is something for us to keep in mind<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>right and it seems like you know as developers too as as as technology has improved basically the focus of our<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>technology is to get us out of these um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>these limitations right like we had limit we had memory limitations and so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>our we increased the memory of our of our devices you know they double it every 18<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>months moore&#8217;s law right and so uh at some point we were limited by polygons<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we could show on screen and so we you know we boosted our technology that way now we&#8217;ve got more polygons we have<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>pixels so it doesn&#8217;t really matter anymore so we don&#8217;t have to worry about that we don&#8217;t have to worry about memory usage anymore because we have lots of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>memory memory is cheap and we&#8217;ve never really had to worry about electricity yeah which is very interesting because<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we should if you think about exactly if you think about mobile developers they actively have to think about this because uh<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>their their mobile games have direct energy draw unless you&#8217;re plugged in all the time<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but when you think about like temporal accessibility and like playing on the go playing for shorter sessions playing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>while you&#8217;re waiting for something else right energy consumption is a major factor and but at the same time our like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>our technological push is to make better batteries exactly right right and they get rid of that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>limitation and that&#8217;s not but what you&#8217;re saying is we need to do the opposite maybe as well i would say we need to do<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>both um yes i i think we need to do both because i think that regardless of where<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>a game developer or any of us sit on the fence of like do we act in service of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>climate or not which like you know more granular questions than that um but regardless of where we sit i<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>think the especially with the ipcc report and all of the anxiety with that it&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>clear that while we may not have a static temperature<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh threshold with which climate change is completely irreversible it&#8217;s clear that our way of life is going<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to change and it&#8217;s going to keep changing and if we think about future environmental threats that we may still<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>have to navigate even if we can still you know live on this planet assuming<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>our food systems don&#8217;t completely die in a fire literally um we have to make affordances and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>changes that can enable us to adapt to that um and so i think that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>thinking about performance across pc console mobile are things we&#8217;ve always thought about we&#8217;ve just<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>never paired performance with efficiency and that&#8217;s an interesting design challenge yeah by the way i&#8217;m just kind of curious<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>since mobile developers have to worry about energy consumption are there lessons to take from them to let&#8217;s say<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>console developers or pc developers uh i mean that&#8217;s a very good point i mean i think that uh i myself am not a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>mobile game developer so i probably won&#8217;t be able to provide any sort of engineering<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>efficiency without completely butchering it and having my tech directors be really mad at me um but i think that um the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>point about uh where you understanding where your players spend the most time in the game<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>understanding what implications that uh it may have if they&#8217;re they&#8217;re going to be spending more time in a menu because<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>they&#8217;re doing resource management and like while they&#8217;re waiting at a bus stop versus uh playing a game that is twitch<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>sensitive that requires a lot of fine motor control all of those have um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>peaks and valleys in terms of how much power you actually need and so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>while dynamic optimization of the power requirements of your game may not be something that is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>easily done i think for games that are really specifically geared towards<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>mobile that have a lot of static menus that have a lot of resource management<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and customization around that do have a lot of opportunities uh to innovate um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and create more efficiencies and we can translate that to a lot of games on other platforms<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>okay yeah for sure awesome all right let let&#8217;s now move on to this right i mean the game industry<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>is really in many ways uh a lot less culturally influential on social issues<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>like this than other media uh so you know i mean i&#8217;ve read uh lots of books uh you know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>about climate change uh that are out there the film industry has produced feature films series documentaries<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>encouraging uh us to be green help the environment fight global climate change what is the game industry done uh and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>what else can it do sure i mean i think cultural influence itself is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>dependent upon how we&#8217;re defining it and the time scale in which we&#8217;re defining it for sure i mean it&#8217;s younger than<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>film um and the difficult answer that um i have to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>wrestle with on a regular basis is that we really are still in our infancy um the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>igda climate sig had been born as a kind of grassroots affiliate to a broader<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>initiative called the playing for the planet alliance which was created through the un environmental program<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and they partnered with over 30 companies in 2017 onwards<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to pledge public commitments to basically say we as an industry consider this to be a priority<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh the major players including sony microsoft rovio uh um us two<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um all pledged public commitments to become carbon neutral um and so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um there&#8217;s a lot of work in an nda sense that is happening to reduce carbon<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>emissions to reduce more transparent uh reporting and accountability across organizations<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um and there are uh cases where individual games have mapped uh things<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>like gameplay behavior and purchases to uh real world climate projects uh which<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you can often be uh they can be called like green activations or green nudging um examples<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>for that uh include alba wildlife adventure by us two where<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>as part of the united nations green game jam a couple years ago they mapped their<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>game purchases to tree planting and they were able to plant over a million trees and there are multiple games that came<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there&#8217;s a long way to we have to go because a lot of it right now is um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>thinking about the the supply chain aspect of it um we think about the reductions for when<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we&#8217;re building devices and built and we&#8217;re starting to talk about how we&#8217;re building our games<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and there&#8217;s been a lot of research to indicate that games are a great vehicle for<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>longer term behavior change normalization of pro-environmental values but there&#8217;s still a long way to go um<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and it&#8217;s it&#8217;s definitely not at the level of like content<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh like breadth and coverage as film and we need to catch up i was thinking about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>like the way that you know on one hand like smoke like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>smoking right there in the 60s in television literally everybody smoked<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>right everybody smoked cigarettes they were smoking cigarettes all the time and in our real world here in the u.s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>everybody smoked uh you know i i was a first grader and i was making uh ashtrays for my mom in<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>ceramics right yeah you know everybody but now<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we like we cut we cut cigarette smoking out of our media we don&#8217;t really show that anymore unless it&#8217;s like it&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>unless some specific character thing now a lot of less people smoke<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>right so so what can we show people doing yes right<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>right and i think um and this is oh i could talk about this with you forever and i will be mindful of time<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but i think i think that uh i think i&#8217;ve already mentioned this earlier but when we think about sustainability there&#8217;s uh<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there&#8217;s there&#8217;s a lot of media there&#8217;s a lot of options there&#8217;s a lot of things that we can do at the same time the impacts of this<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>work aren&#8217;t isn&#8217;t salient uh it&#8217;s not immediate it&#8217;s longer term which means<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>our ability to have the resiliency to keep going when we don&#8217;t have immediate feedback is soul-crushing crushing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>games have this amazing opportunity to give you immediate feedback when you&#8217;re doing something right or wrong<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and that&#8217;s the type of feedback loop that we should ideally be having in the sustainability movement and unfortunately it&#8217;s really hard but i<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>think that i will say as well that um the research that the community has done<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to create the environmental game design playbook uh the primary author of which is a clayton whittle who&#8217;s amazing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we found a lot of research to indicate that there is actually a clear theory of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>action that we can think about to activate players and consumers in any context<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh towards climate conscious action towards pro-environmental behavior<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the acknowledgement that we have and not trying to uh you know talk poorly of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>film and other forms of media when when covering uh the climate crisis<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>is that the truth of knowing the solution and understanding it in the best possible way does not in itself create the actual<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>willingness to act right and an individual&#8217;s ability to apply that action and effectiveness<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>knowledge is directly dependent upon the attitude the intent and the accessibility of the options actually<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>presented and so one of the big challenges and opportunities that we have with thinking<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>about green activations with games be it direct purchases which make it as easy<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>as possible to translate that to funds for a real world project to more indirect activations that are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>much more nuanced the main thing that i hope to continue to work with<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>developers all over the world around is the idea that by creating opportunities for players to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>practice safely uh these these behaviors these difficult choices in a game<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>primes them to be more resilient when the real world opportunity presents itself<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and if we map a game if a game developer partners with a real world organization<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to do dedicated projects that map what happens in a game to something that can<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>happen in the real world and they make it really specific and local um or or globally accessible though that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>problem is much harder it is much more likely that we will be able to create that sense of hope<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to to pursue that action and and hope in itself is is not a it&#8217;s not<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>a feeling like that&#8217;s the thing that i&#8217;ve learned the hard way that thankfully clayton trevin hugo hard now<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>shout out to everybody in the sig who has you know collected this research and put this together in such a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>beautiful way is that hope itself is a cognitive construct it&#8217;s not<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>hope as a feeling it&#8217;s it&#8217;s not just emotional it&#8217;s a state of mind with<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>which we have the ability to see multiple paths of regression progression sorry<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>such that even if we run into challenges even if we run into failure multiple times<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the opportunity is worth it enough to us that we are willing to keep going and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>games have a great potential to enable us to safely do that such that when the real world pres uh opportunity presents<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>itself we&#8217;re ready yeah absolutely this is this is one of the strengths of games is to is to let us fail and fail and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>fail and fail and fail until we get until we succeed and then right i mean that&#8217;s what games that&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>what we do that&#8217;s how games work yes so so that that that whole feedback you know there&#8217;s so much of what you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>said paula that uh that i want to get into uh but i want to focus on two things if<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you can uh number one i&#8217;m really interested in the idea that um uh let&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>say um you know when we&#8217;re talking to us two tomorrow we&#8217;re gonna talk to them about being a b corp right and part of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>being a b chord right is that uh a part of your mission is doing good in the world right so one possibility connected<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to what you said is you know uh whatever is in our games marketplace we give you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>know let&#8217;s say we&#8217;re gonna donate 10 to you know some sort of climate initiative<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>right um that&#8217;s one way of course that a company can do but uh of course if a game allows<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>players to voluntarily do something like that uh donate money to the game are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there any games that actually do that and then the second thing i wanted to ask after that is can we talk about some<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>of some let&#8217;s say concrete examples uh of how games like here&#8217;s a game and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>here&#8217;s how this game might actually influence people through this uh ability to fail and learn and and model behavior<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>absolutely you&#8217;ve asked four questions where do you want to start uh let&#8217;s start<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>let&#8217;s start with are there are there games where you actually can uh<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you know literally make a difference right now by let&#8217;s say buying<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>buying something in the game that will go towards global climate change or solving global climate change rather<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>yeah i&#8217;ll say uh uh again alba wildlife adventure every purchase goes towards<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>tree planting uh june&#8217;s journey by wuga i believe is another example<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um and uh there are more that are coming out of the u.n green game jam i believe that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>also map to climate pledges which like are ambig i will say full transparency<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>are ambiguous in their impact but they do provide a vehicle um for players to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>say like i support this policy i am signing this pledge because i am committed to publicly stating my<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>intention to support this initiative which does give impact-based organizations<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>more visibility and viability to say like the consumers that we serve the people that we serve are in support of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>this across excellent number of countries um there are other behavioral<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh case studies of behavior change that are much smaller in scale and i can<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>talk about two in particular as examples for what we could do as as an overall industry<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um one is the work that was done with a non-profit<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>named glass lab that was uh unfortunately now no longer exists<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but in 2014 um we as a non-profit had gotten<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>access to the simcity code base like the commercial game and modified it for a classroom setting<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>so that middle school science and english teachers could understand how their kids were learning systems thinking<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>so we had four missions that of increasing complexity where you know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>middle school children would have to make investment decisions to know where they<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>wanted to place the bus stop so that their kids could get to school on time all the way to converting<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>their energy grids from uh dirty coal energy fossil fuels<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to clean energy without their citizens sacrificing power which would result in dissatisfied citizens job loss that kind<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>of thing we did a study with over 400 students<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>across the united states and found that those students with classroom instruction gained<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>statistically significant improvements in single and multivariate systems thinking as a result of gameplay<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um the i&#8217;ll say the personal anecdote i have is like in play testing that game<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh there was a young girl uh in the fifth grade who&#8217;d come up to one of our game designers who said you know so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there&#8217;s there&#8217;s a plant behind my house you&#8217;re telling me a person put that there which resulted in an interesting<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>conversation about how cities are built the decisions that get made what what it means to have public right-of-way what<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>it means to have zoning regulations and this kid got really mad and so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um it&#8217;s it&#8217;s small moments like that that paired with the ability to practice these skills the ability to negotiate in<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the context of gameplay and fail and try again until you succeed on your objectives<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>is something that&#8217;s really powerful one more example that i will also share<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>is one of a student named jack who<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>i played and his story is on twitter i wish i remembered his twitter handle uh he<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh had played firewatch uh which is a game where you were a person uh in a firewatch station and you have to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>explore the mysteries of what happened in that environment he was so captivated<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>by that experience in a game that he decided to spend his summers<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>going around with his dad on the east coast of the united states to visit firewatch stations um he became one of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the youngest members at the age of 12 of like the fire watch lookout association<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>he eventually went to university of massam massachusetts amherst for a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>i believe a degree in sustainable tourism and forest conservation and that and the one last thing that was<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>really interesting is that he also uh was able to establish<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>a clear understanding and empathy and and uh connection to the black lives<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>matter movement because he saw how people of color were treated in forest conservation and forestry<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh which is a dominantly white field um right and so it&#8217;s it&#8217;s little moments like that that are really transformative<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there&#8217;s also non-environmental examples where we have people with chronic illness or disease<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>or degenerative conditions that used to play a lot of games and used to be really active and then<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>suddenly couldn&#8217;t anymore um and being able to role play in those<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>different environments and fantasy environments where you can you know go into a survival game go into an action<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>adventure game and survive something traumatic and have full control over those decisions that is also something<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that is very restorative for mental health and so if we can scale that to three billion players in some way<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that could be really powerful it&#8217;s a big problem but it&#8217;s a big challenge right that&#8217;s amazing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you know it&#8217;s interesting i&#8217;m immediately thinking of um there&#8217;s a couple of directions i want to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>go you know some of the things that seem obvious to me and i&#8217;m sure you you know i&#8217;m saying this as someone who has not<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>looked into this but you have but obviously the stories we tell and where environmentalism fits in the stories and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>how important the uh you know the environment is in<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>right uh i was thinking earlier when you&#8217;re talking about uh simcity i was actually thinking about the sims for a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>moment i was thinking if i was playing the sims um would i be recycling<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>right uh and notice right if if a game assumes that i&#8217;m recycling<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>right i am practicing recycling right um if i&#8217;m playing the sims is it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>keeping track of my carbon footprint right if so right i&#8217;m getting used to thinking right<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>about the you know about my carbon footprint uh so it&#8217;s interesting right so many of these things uh where you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>know um you know am i you know in the game is there something<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>positive attached to the idea of let&#8217;s say planting a tree i was i was born in israel where planting trees has always<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>was something very very culturally important about planting trees right we turned our desert into like you know a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>thriving uh you know a thriving environment so does seem to me like like kind of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>easy i say easy i&#8217;m not a developer so you know it&#8217;s easy for me to say i&#8217;m i was<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>actually wondering about a specific uh about us besides this and i&#8217;m gonna ask i know i&#8217;m asking two questions in<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>in a sense but um um if there is a game that deals with the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>tragedy of the commons uh and climate change because to me this is because i&#8217;m coming<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>a climate change from you know in some sense i think games should focus on the easy stuff you know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you know get people to you know get people to recycle like get people to use like electricity get people to you know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>stop eating beef maybe stop eating me right there&#8217;s lots of stuff but as a as a philosopher<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>i&#8217;m super interested in the you know in the problem that we essentially are in this situation<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>where every country it&#8217;s in itself interest to use energy<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh while it&#8217;s in everybody&#8217;s self-interest that everybody not use more energy<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and um the tragedy of the commons is that every person in the world<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>essentially has every reason to use energy but if we all do it we&#8217;re all<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>crushing to admit is that most of our games historically already have that problem<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um if we think about final fantasy vii that is a small group of protagonists<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that are actively fighting against a major corporation that has extracted natural resources from their lived<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>planet um and that is essentially a major eco-narrative that activated a bunch of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>game developers like very early on in the process and without the language to articulate<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>exactly the implications of that work right if you think about other other other powerful things like princess<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>mononoke yes right and the huge environmental statement that it makes<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>yep and if we if we also think about even even uh even companies that don&#8217;t think they&#8217;re<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>making an eco narrative tend to uh if we take an extreme example like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the gears of war franchise it&#8217;s really it&#8217;s kind of a metaphor for fracking um it&#8217;s like we dug too deep<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>into a alien planet&#8217;s natural resources and the indigenous creatures are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>fighting back um and we&#8217;ve extracted too much to an extreme degree and so we just avatar yeah right right right so yeah<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>yeah yeah and so we we&#8217;ve we&#8217;ve already been aware of these choices for a very long time<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the difference is they haven&#8217;t been explicit um and and systems thinking is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>want to escape and i think that&#8217;s part of the fear that we have as a game development industry is that we&#8217;re not at that point of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>recognizing that games are inherently lenses of what we think are possible and there are more and more games that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>are coming out with these solar punk futures that like are trying to explore a world that is not completely ravaged<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>by apocalypse um because we&#8217;re recognizing that like we do want something else um but<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there are also there are a lot of portrayals that we have even like games like overwatch that you know don&#8217;t make<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that explicit that are based in a game world where we assume we have fixed the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>energy crisis problem and so we have the ability to make those assumptions more salient and go you want<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to get there next generation of game developers students players right there are many ways for us to get there<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>yeah that&#8217;s that&#8217;s interesting amazing because i mean yeah i i really didn&#8217;t think of so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you know i&#8217;m so used to thinking of the post-apocalyptic world as just a kind of uh<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you know just a nice trick for putting us in uh a particular type of story as opposed to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>also a message of hopelessness right right and we we really want to be a hero in<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that story because the world in day-to-day life sometimes feels really helpless and sometimes we have needs<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>that are unfulfilled in the real world so we escape to a place where we have more control<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the challenge i honestly have though is what if we were to imagine worlds in which the world hasn&#8217;t fallen apart what<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>would you do in that environment what are the different challenges that you would have and face to create a better future for everybody<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um like those are the those are the design questions that i&#8217;m very curious about yeah those are great so paula what do<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you want to leave our listeners with the idea that the world is not necessarily always falling apart and that you have<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>more power than you think you do i know that that feels really squishy i know that feels like it&#8217;s a platitude<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>but it&#8217;s not um we have you know a sweeping assessment through the ipcc by over like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>over 200 scientists that indicate we are in dire straits at the same time<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we are our influence of the environment is directly correlated to our ghg emissions<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>which we have the ability to control with collective effort there are many things that we can do at<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>an individual level as consumers as people who make games as people who love games<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>to make these small incremental gains so that you know by the time<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>the next major console releases by the time the next technological innovation happens<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>we&#8217;re still making progress over time um and all it requires is for you to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>find you know peers who can support you allies who can help advocate for you uh<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>allies who can help you know create a plan that makes<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>sense for your needs and can be contextualized to what you&#8217;re able to do um every small effort matters<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>um and it all adds up so that&#8217;s my hope all right three billion drops<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>all right yeah add to a whole lot paula you are wonderful i just gotta say i i&#8217;m so appreciating the work uh that you and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>uh your organization and others like it in the game world uh are doing for for the planet um why should we what should<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>our listeners read oh i mean the environmental game design playbook presented by the igda climate<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>especial interest group is definitely a good starting point if you have concerns questions doubts<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>curiosities related to climate conscious game design that is available on<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>igda igdaclimatesig.org which has a bunch of other resources as<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>well if you&#8217;re looking at game design talks energy efficiency like research studies and reports we&#8217;re<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>basically just making these resources easier to find great um other than that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>there&#8217;s also dr ben abraham&#8217;s book i believe it&#8217;s called digital games after climate change which is the first<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>comprehensive research study that maps are a carbon footprint end to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>end as an industry so highly recommend that um and there&#8217;s many other resources that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>and yep awesome all right guys uh paula uh thank you so much for for<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>coming on our show great podcast guys uh play nice everybody<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>you can subscribe and listen to all of our episodes wherever you listen to podcasts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Release Date: August 5, 2022]&nbsp; Have you ever considered how gaming and game companies contribute to environmental problems like global climate change?&nbsp; We haven\u2019t!&nbsp; 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