Doing Our Bit

Every job is a climate job, or at least can be transformed into one. Few people exemplify this better than Lisa Pak, who gradually transformed her role as user acquisition manager at mobile games giant Wooga until she was the head of operations at Playing for the Planet.

In this episode, Clayton talks to Lisa about her journey and how to empower all the passionate individuals working within large organizations that are still too often moving too slowly on climate and the environment. How do we build the alliances that accelerate change and move mountains?

Also stick around for an update on Playing for the Planet projects like the ongoing Green Game Jam and their new carbon calculator for games companies.

Learn more about Playing for the Planet here: https://www.playing4theplanet.org/

Subscribe to the P4P newsletter here: https://playing4theplanet.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=5f3611da422a19cc72e366960&id=f4c7c53e14

And as always, find the IGDA Climate SIG here: https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq

Professor A.R. Siders, Director of the Climate Change Science and Policy Hub at the University of Delaware, is the teacher of climate adaptation policy and climate fiction who this year found herself organizing a climate game jam.

Clayton called her up to discuss how games can help make the future concrete enough that we can plan for it, what it means to set up an academic game jam and how games can be judged not just on their reach and appeal, but how well they teach their subject matter.

Since this recording, the game jam winners have been announced and can be found here:

https://itch.io/jam/climate-change-game-jam

You can find more of A.R.'s research here:

https://www.udel.edu/faculty-staff/experts/ar-siders/

And as always, here is the IGDA Climate SIG:

https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq

Friend of the podcast Trevin York and his colleagues have interviewed dozens of game studios across the world grappling with a wide variety of climate-focused game designs. We grill him about the findings; what obstacles are we facing out there in the wild, how can we overcome them, and what seems to be working?

Read the full report, titled Gaming for Climate Action, here:

https://onebillionresilient.org/gaming-climate-action-strategy-guide/

Trevin also called out Yale and Unity's study on gamer environmental attitudes, which you can find here: https://blog.unity.com/games/what-do-gamers-think-about-global-warming

And as always, dive into the IGDA Climate SIG here: https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq

For more from Trevin, visit https://www.trevinyork.com/

Clayton sits down with Dr Patrick Prax of Uppsala University to soak up his deep critical thinking about the systemic causes of and solutions to unsustainable practices in the games industry. Why aren't things moving faster? Who (or WHAT) is pushing in the other direction? What does it take to affect change not just to a game, a player base, a company, but an entire industry?

LINKS:

The Story of Stuff: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@StoryofStuff⁠

IGDA Climate SIG: https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq

Clayton goes on a design deep dive with green game evangelist Andrew Brennwald, game director of up-and-coming foraging sim Out and About. Tracing the winding path that led him to that position, they explore a rewilding awakening, the exhilarating leap of starting up a green game studio, and the many joys and challenges of designing a game inspired by nature - one that can in turn inspire players to imagine a future worth fighting for.

References:

The Lakes with Simon Reeve: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16091378/

Yaldi Games: https://www.yaldigames.com

Out and About: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1671570/Out_and_About/

IGDA Climate SIG: https://discord.gg/KW5XXWzCHq

In the first episode of our new season, we discuss climate resilience and how games can help prepare the world for what's to come. Clayton is joined by Shayne Hayes: newly elected co-chair of the IGDA Climate SIG and Associate Director of the Video Game Initiative at the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock).

The Environmental Game Design Playbook can be found ⁠here⁠.

BONUS EPISODE: In this quick-fire episode, Hugo digests the adventure that was last week's Green Games Summit by UKIE and Playing for the Planet, alongside fellow summitgoers and IGDA Climate SIG members Mélanie Christin and Trevin York. What were our biggest takeaways from the summit, what did it accomplish and where do we go from here?

Apologies for the sound quality in the beginning, it gets better after a few minutes!

Ryan Boudinot is an author and technologist who has spent the COVID-19 pandemic diving deep into geospatial data and the ways it can be used to not just improve games, but to make game-playing improve the data, and the world itself. On this episode, he tells us all about this concept which he calls the World Integration Loop or WIL.

Ryan's startup website is here:

As always, join the conversation with IGDA Climate:

In this episode we catch up with leading ecocritic Alenda Chang to learn about how game worlds can be just as delightful and important as the action that takes place within them, and how deepening our simulation of worlds and ecosystems can help players reconnect with nature. After years of writing papers and books on how games portray ecology, last summer Alenda published an honest-to-goodness manifesto, and it is, well... rambunctious.

LINKS

Alenda co-edited this themed issue of Ecozon@ called Green Computer and Video Games which helped kickstart the study of environmental depictions in games. It's free online:

Read more of Alenda's excellent work in her book Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games or listen to her talk about it in this episode of Super Gamer Podcast:

The excellent interview with Frankie Myers of the Yurok Tribe on How to Save a Planet that I mentioned, can be found here:

Join the conversation, and help us build the design patterns database and other resources, in the IGDA Climate SIG discord:

In this special episode we get all of the spokespeople for the new IGDA Climate SIG workstreams together in a virtual room spanning three continents. Arnaud Fayolle tells us how we can get involved in crafting and promoting the actions that will shape future game design in the Design Patterns workstream, Mark Videon gives us the lowdown on how to monitor you studios' carbon footprints in the Industry Benchmarking workstream, while Paula Escuadra plots how we use all this to take over the games industry in the Climate Councils workstream. Are we ready to get this party started? Actually, it was ending it that turned out to be the problem.

LINKS

(sorry future listeners, I imagine that link might be a bit stale)