And the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen ends with a final keynote, by Alenda Chang. She shifts our focus to gaming, as explored from an environmental media studies perspective. Media have become more than passive vessels through which we contemplate the world; they also act upon the world, much as we do.
Game worlds have plenty to tell us about ecological relations, and structure many of the environments that we encounter on our devices; they are also entwined with such environments through augmented reality and other new features. So, the bifurcation between the textual analysis of games and studies of the media industries that produce games is problematic and worth addressing from a perspective that foregrounds sustainability.
Central to this is the tenuous category of sustainable games: do such games have to be sustainably produced, for instance? Can they serve as environmentally communicative media? Standard practices of writing about games seem less and les tenable; we must focus more on ecological relations in games, as well as on the ecological conditions under which games are produced. We must make sure games are not de-futuring, and instead green the games industry.
An example of such an initiative is the IGDA Climate Special Interest Group, which seeks to improve environmental aspects in games, from game narratives through consumer practices to game development. It advocates from a place of shared values, and as part of this developed several work streams; one of these focussed on Sustainable Design Patterns – a vague term potentially meaning patterns in game development processes such as environmental realism, realism in game mechanics, energy procurement strategies, game delivery mechanisms to consumers, etc.
As a participant observer in this SIG, Alenda observed the shifting of its language about design patterns. Ultimately, design signals diverse forms of life and contrasting notions of sociability and the world, yet the language of Sustainable Design Patterns gradually shifted more towards a language of tactics and actions, and the work stream produced an Environmental Game Design Playbook encapsulating these.
Tactics here included design approaches to gameplay and narrative design that would encourage game players to develop greater environmental awareness, for instance – such as limited in-game resources. In this sense, sustainable games might encourage gamers encouraged to ‘play for the planet’, and not just to continue playing in order to sustain the games industry itself.
But games developers are not the only games designers: users who mod games, and indeed gamers who simply play the games, also co-design games. These should also be enrolled in sustainable games design. Indeed, ‘playing for the planet’ is also the name of a UN initiative, but this too engages only with the games industry, and not with gamers in general. This may be appropriate, though, since it may be unlikely that playing an environmentally conscious game would convince a gamer to embrace more sustainable practices within their overall life.
There is therefore a return to greater focus on the sustainability of the games industry itself. Claims by the industry about its carbon neutrality are sometimes mere greenwashing: its increasing use of AI technologies, for instance, also vastly increases its energy and resources consumption. On-board and networked resource use by games as they are being played also needs to be considered here, and could be substantially optimised.
Indeed, there is no need for quality games to require large amounts of data and RAM; low ecological impact games are possible, and can be as attractive as conventional games. Solar-powered games server experiments make this even more explicit, and have helped calculate the relative energy costs of specific practices in Minecraft, for example (flying is more energetically intensive than walking, for instance).
A Sustainable Games Standard (from games design and server infrastructure to marketing and hardware) has now been published in Europe, in collaboration with the Sustainable Games Alliance; similar initiatives exist elsewhere. Such initiatives might also encourage gamers themselves to consider the impact of their choices more deeply.
Stray Fawn Studio in Zürich developed the post-apocalyptic game Wandering Village, for instance, which is a city-builder game that takes place on the back of a moving creature, so that the player must also consider the creature itself, gaining its trust and caring for its needs. This plays as a kind of cross between a Tamagotchi, Sim City, and The Last of Us; it enables the player to explore various very diverse options for managing the situation.
Part of the solution here is the capacity for critical distance in games as well as games scholarship – a way to escape the flow state of gaming itself. No solution is going to solve the games industry’s, and the world’s, issues by itself, so we must explore many of these, collaboratively, to find possible combinations between the options available to us in order to create better conditions for sustainable human life. Design is creating ways of being, and when we design our world, our world designs us back.
