When we start analyzing sustainability and environmental issues, gaming is not exactly one of the first topics that pop into anyone’s mind. But, let us not disregard this form of entertainment so easily just yet. With its estimated market worth of $151.55 billion and projected growth to $256.97 billion by 2025 gaming industry is forced to be reckoned with. What’s even more important for the subject is that gaming consoles alone (the research excludes PCs, mobile phones, handhelds, etc.) consume approximately 16 billion kilowatt-hours of energy every year, which is an amount that can easily serve an average-sized US city. So, the room for making the gaming world more sustainable is more than plentiful. But is there such a thing as “sustainable gaming?” And if so, where is this movement heading? Let us try to find out.
Defining the Sustainable Gaming
Although the term “Green Gaming” has been floating on the web more and more in recent times, it is still very hard to tell are we simply talking about the cool-sounding coined phrase or a serious movement with clear agenda driving it forth.
At the moment, it looks more like the first example. Of course, that doesn’t mean the concrete actions using this umbrella term are missing out. For instance, all the way back in 2008 Walmart started a Green Gaming Summit with the representatives of three major console manufacturers (Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo) where the parties discussed packing the consoles with low-power or standby mode to cut the volume of power consumption.
But, since then, the similar efforts of creating a comprehensive, all-encompassing strategy for making the gaming industry more sustainable as a whole have been few and far between. So, when we use the term sustainable gaming we usually use it to describe individual efforts to address specific sustainability issues related to gaming.
These efforts can be largely rounded up into three major groups.
Ancillary industries
We are here referring to all industries that are related to gaming but not directly involved in the production of games or gaming hardware. Take, for instance, energy Nootropic drinks that have become very popular amongst professional gamers the last couple of years. The company uses low-weight cans to ship the beverages, thus lowering the used resources. The drinks also utilize all-natural ingredients and vitamins, so they are considered perfectly safe for use.
Some of the more obvious examples can be found in Steam, a video game distribution service, started by Valve in 2003, that has by now become a go-to platform for small third-party publishers. Offering their users the option to buy digital copies of their favorite games, services like Steam cut the number of physical copies floating around and reduce consumption of materials like plastic.
Manufacturers and publishers
The most significant efforts in making gaming industry, of course, are made on behalf of hardware manufacturers and game publishers. As we already stated, these efforts are usually individual and sporadic, but they indicate the entire industry is moving in the right direction.
For instance, the PS4 finally introduced the energy-saver mode that has been discussed with Wall-Mart a decade ago, Microsoft claims that the latest iteration of their Xbox One is as much as 90% more energy efficient than the first release of the product, while Hewlett-Packard seems fully committed to making every new release of their gaming laptops smaller and better optimized (HP FireBird runs on only 350 watts of power).
Similar trends can be observed even when we scale down to the very components. Most notably, Nvidia has been sprouting out a series of very capable graphic cards that have scored the consumption of 75 Watts or lower.
Last but not least, we would like to point out the efforts of game publishers. Juggernaut titles like World of Warcraft and PUBG constantly receive the updates that make the games more energy efficient.
Education through gaming
The third group of efforts made in what we like to call green gaming is the education of young users through gameplay content. Now, popular games like the Fallout series and Bioshock have always leaned into the topics of environmental issues, albeit in a very grim and dystopian way.
Some of the more recent titles, however, allow users to take a more proactive role in the whole matter and participate in the development of their own ecosystems. The popular Sims franchise has received an expansion pack called Eco Lifestyle that puts the players in a position where they have a direct impact on the environment they inhabit.
Similarly, Eco, developed by Strange Loop Games, allows players to build their own civilizations with limited resources and protect their newfound ecosystem through rational consumption. And there is the hugely popular Minecraft that teaches kids all essentials of sustainability from the earliest age.
As we can see, although these efforts are a bit disjointed, the gaming industry is definitely becoming aware of the environmental problems and makes steps in the right direction to mitigate them. This will have to be enough until we get some comprehensive agreed-upon Green Agenda that will guide the industry in the following decades.
