When a company tries to cut its carbon footprint, how far should it cast the net? Is it responsible for the choices of its customers? What if it sells something that doesn’t have a carbon footprint at all – until the second it’s used?
For some companies, flush with cash, the answer is easy enough. Microsoft, for instance, has committed to becoming carbon negative by 2030, and ultimately removing from the environment all the carbon it has ever emitted by 2050. In that accounting, it’s even accepting the cost of downstream use of its products: if you’ve powered an Xbox on a diesel generator, or charged a Zune using coal power, Microsoft will offset those emissions.
But for others, the decisions are trickier. The games industry, in some ways, faces the purest distillation of this question. It produces a leisure product, which exists almost entirely in software, and can, depending on decisions made by the developer, use as much electricity as boiling a kettle or as little as powering a wristwatch. So what does it mean to be a climate-conscious game developer?
This weekend, I spent some time at the WASD event in London, hoping to find an answer. Tamara Alliot, the chief executive of game developer Nerial – and a former sustainability manager before she moved into games – points out that there are lots of ways that a developer can tackle its footprint before even needing to pay attention to the trickier philosophical points.
“The impact of playing the games is one of the impacts of the industry, but it’s not the only thing,” she says. “I think we have to acknowledge that there is a video game supply chain, and a hardware lifecycle. The life of the hardware, the energy and the materials used to make the computers themselves – that’s something everybody needs to take some responsibility for.”
In traditional carbon accounting, the biggest expenditure for a small indie studio like Alliot’s is probably travel, according to Graeme Struthers, the co-founder of publisher Devolver, who will publish Nerial’s forthcoming Card Shark. “A lot of companies are going to be going through the process of trying to cut their emissions and finding the that, because they’re suddenly largely remote, they can’t – and they shouldn’t – be going into any employee’s life and saying ‘you need to put a jumper on! You need to turn down the heating!’ And so because of that, it’s travel to events like [WASD] that’s the biggest piece of the puzzle.”
Big fish, little fish, cardboard box
Some developers have made major changes in the areas that are under their control. Sports Interactive, the developer of Football Manager, decided two years ago to be the change it wants to see in the world, and stopped shipping the game in plastic boxes entirely. “We are replacing the plastic box that is typically used across the industry with a reinforced, 100% recycled gatefold cardboard sleeve, made with 100% recycled fibres,” the company’s chief executive, Miles Jacobson, said at the time. “We’ve changed the printing on the packaging to vegetable and water-based ink with a recycled paper manual inside and have managed to source recyclable shrink wrap to encase the packaging and keep it secure on its travels.”
Others have taken the approach that, as a cultural industry, the impact games can make on minds is likely to far outweigh any efficiency tweaks in office space. “As game developers, what we can do is work towards, with everybody else, to create an environment where change feels inevitable; where change feels like it’s a thing that should happen,” Tomas Rawlings, of Bristol-based Auroch Digital told the event, comparing the shift he hoped to engender to the change attitudes towards drink-driving a generation earlier.
But I was surprised, as I toured the event, by how few people had even thought of the question in the terms I was putting it. The back of the envelope maths that had taken me to the event felt stark: a top-of-the-line gaming PC, running a new game at the highest graphical fidelity possible, will draw around 1kW of power; around the same as a kettle. (That’s not counting the electricity required for the monitor, and let’s not even touch on the difficulties of estimating the power consumption of multiplayer components). By contrast, a Nintendo Switch draws just 10W, about the same as a dim light bulb, while playing a game like Breath of the Wild.
It’s actually about ethics in video games production
Talking about ethics and obligations in climate action is always difficult, and doubly so when discussing a leisure activity which, let’s be honest, no one needs to do at all. But I can’t think of many other activities where the carbon footprint can differ a hundred-fold with so little practical difference for the user.
If you play games, the revelation probably makes little difference to you. Unless you live a very, very strange life, the electricity used by your gaming machine of choice is a tiny fraction of your personal footprint. (And if you do live that strange life, then honestly, your decision to become a vegan shut-in who sits in a tiny house heated exclusively by the exhaust from your massive gaming rig is probably sort of ethically praiseworthy).
But if you make games, I’m not so sure the difference can be easily shrugged off. Take Elden Ring, the current star of the zeitgeist. According to analytics site SteamSpy, the PC version has between 10 and 20m owners, with an average total playtime of 77 hours, drawing (let’s say) 500W per player. That means the game has consumed, in its first six weeks on sale, between 385GWh and 770GWh of electricity. Just on the PC version: it’s also out on Xbox and PlayStation. For comparison, in the same period, Hornsea One, the largest offshore windfarm in the world, can output 1,200GWh of electricity – if the wind is blowing just right the whole time.
What decisions could the developers have made to reduce that power draw? Could they have locked the frame rate of the game, or limited the resolutions it can be played at? Could they even have changed the entire visual style of the game? Such changes may seem drastic, but even a small change, one that lessened the power draw of the game by a single percentage point, would almost certainly outweigh any conventional savings the studio could make if it scrapped all staff flights, switched to entirely renewable energy for its office heating, and shipped its games in cardboard boxes.
There would be more benefits than just the direct ones, too. A self-imposed moratorium on ever-more computationally intensive games would have the effect of extending the lifespan of gaming hardware, reducing the embedded emissions in every console and graphics card sold. It would lower the costs of development for everyone, freeing up the thousands of people who spend their professional lives perfectly simulating horse testicles and modelling rocks and trees. And it would finally stop bitcoin fans replying to every article I write about the energy intensive nature of their hobby with a snide “what about video games?”. Helping me win arguments on the internet? Can’t do better than that.
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