Doing Our Bit

Narrative game designer Inari Bourguenolle has been on an ecological journey ever since she first played Final Fantasy VII. Incidentally, our host Hugo Bille has recently obsessed quite a bit over the climate stories embedded in this classic game and especially its recent remake. Their conversation takes us to toxic masculinity, gender roles, individualism and the monomyth, and begins to grapple with how they all exacerbate the climate and environmental crises.

LINKS

Hugo's article, Those Who Fight Further: FF7 and the Climate Crisis, can be found on Gamasutra:

Inari mentioned The Forge which was a community for tabletop RPG design overseen by designer Ron Edwards. It was active from 1999 to 2012

Join the conversation in the IGDA Climate SIG. Hop in the discord:

We kick off the new year with a conversation with Dr Dargan Frierson, an actual climate scientist, director of the EarthGames program and total rockstar. When we're not singing and dancing, we ask ourselves how games can promote climate justice, how we know if it's working and how scientific climate models can make themselves useful inside of games.

Visit EarthGames and play all their games here:

Dargan mentions a "baby climate model" that you can tinker with in early prototype form here:

Join the conversation in the IGDA Climate SIG discord:

In the final episode of the year we come back to Dr Jackson Ryan and look more closely at his recent article researching the power use of our favorite Christmas presents, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series consoles. To do that we have enlisted the invaluable aid of Dr Ben Abraham! Together they begin to draw a portrait of how the gaming industry might move towards sustainability over the course of this generation.

LINKS:

Jackson mentioned a self-regulatory initiative between the console makers on energy efficiency. Read more about that here:

And a final Christmas treat: Ben briefly mentioned Joshua Aslan and whole-heartledly recommends his PhD thesis for anyone wanting to dive deeper into the power draw of gaming: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/853729/

As always, check out the Game Devs For Future discord to get acquainted with the IGDA Climate SIG and hopefully find your place in the fight for a livable future.

As a new generation of consoles begin their reign in the games industry, Hugo sits down with Jackson Ryan, science editor at CNET, to muse about the console cycle, its environmental impact and where we can go from here.

Jackson has just put out a new article on CNET where he tests the electricity use of the new machines. You can read all the juicy details here:

Some other articles mentioned in this episode:

"The Environmental Footprint of a PlayStation4" by Lewis Gordon:

"Xbox, PS5 and the climate crisis: Next-gen video games could be worse for the planet" by Jackson Ryan:

"The first battery-free Game Boy wants to power a gaming revolution" by Jackson Ryan:

And as always, please drop into the Game Devs For Future discord server to discuss the show and get involved with the IGDA Climate SIG:

In this first episode, Hugo sits down with Paula Escuadra, co-chair of the newly formed IGDA Climate Special Interest Group, who tells the story of how the warring giants of the games industry came together to fight the climate crisis and how, finally, we can all be a part of the effort. 

LINKS:

For more about the UN Playing For The Planet alliance, here's the website. 

And for the IGDA Climate SIG, here's that website.

If you want to connect with other games industry people who are passionate about fighting the planetary crises, don't miss the Game Devs For Future discord server, which is also home to much of the SIG's activities.

And for a great primer on the youth movements changing the face of climate politics in the past two years and honestly setting the stage for initiatives like all of the above, here's the appropriate episode from awesome climate action podcast How To Save A Planet: The Green Wave.