Green Games Guide Summary
The Green Games Guide is a short handbook for game industry professionals on how they can fight against climate change inside their industry. In this blog post, I highlight all of the info I found most interesting. Hopefully to inspire you to read the original document and think about the game industry’s role in fighting this, humanity’s greatest, challenge.
Download the PDF: https://ukie.org.uk/sustainability
This blog post is divided into 6 sections:
Explaining The Game Industry’s Emissions
Game Company Carbon Footprint Example
Improving Energy Efficiency on Consoles
Improving Game Packaging
Green Coding
Making an Environmental Impact With Games
Explaining The Game Industry’s Emissions
Emissions from the games industry can be divided into 3 different categories.
Direct emissions from owned or controlled sources including on-site electricity generation, heating, cooling, and owned vehicles
Indirect emissions from purchased energy for example
All other indirect emissions in a company’s value chain that it is indirectly responsible for, like business travel, employee commuting, virtual working, emissions from waste management, or upstream emissions from delivering or resulting from people playing its games
Things companies can do to mitigate these:
Reduce office energy use
Switch to a sustainable energy provider
Review your data storage policies (data storage needs energy, more data stored = more emissions)
Make your games as energy efficient as possible (green coding)
Use carbon offsets
Game Company Carbon Footprint Example
Space Ape is a 120 people London-based mobile games company. Their total carbon footprint for the year 2018 was 749,1 tonnes.
Space Ape focuses on four areas of its carbon footprint which have the highest impact:
1. Office energy: Electricity, gas-heating, water, & wastewater
2. Transport: Flights, hotel stays, employee commutes, deliveries, and purchases
3. Cloud Computing
4. Mobile device usage by their players
According to Space Ape, they offset 200% of their carbon footprint, have reduced their studio footprint by 25% in 2019, and committed to reducing it by a further 10% in 2020.
Improving Energy Efficiency on Consoles
In 2015, the Games Consoles Voluntary Agreement (VA) was recognized by the European Commission. The VA aims to continuously review and improve the energy and resource efficiency of games consoles. Sony Interactive Entertainment, Microsoft, and Nintendo are the three Signatories of the VA, which sets out requirements including:
Minimum time limits for automatic power-down (4 hours for media play, 1 hour for playing video games and other functions).
Maximum power caps for media and navigation modes.
Requirement for console manufacturers to publish the power consumptions of their console.
Commitment to provide out-of-warranty repair service and provide users information to help maintain their consoles.
Commitments to improve the recyclability of consoles
Improving Packaging
The plastic casing of video games can have a significant carbon footprint. Hence the physical version of Football Manager 2020 has a cardboard box:
The packaging consists of a box made from 100% recycled and recyclable cardboard, along with a 100% recycled and recyclable manual. All printing uses water and vegetable inks, apart from the disc, which is recyclable via specialists. The whole package is shrink-wrapped in 100% recyclable low-density polyethylene (LDPE). While this approach does come at an extra cost to SEGA Europe, this is in part offset by cheaper distribution – lighter packaging means lower fuel costs and cheaper destruction costs as the package can be fully recycled.
Green Coding
Making code efficient to reduce emissions is called green coding.
There is increasing evidence that how games are coded, digitally stored, and distributed can have an impact on the energy that is used when they are downloaded, streamed, or played. Essentially games’ coding will determine its audience’s device’s energy consumption, for data storage, processing, or network flows. This is an emerging area but there are lots of opportunities for games businesses to lead the thinking in this space. 8 things you can do:
Set up a green coding group to assess the impact changes to how you make your games can affect energy consumption
Reuse your assets from different versions of your games to avoid having multiple versions stored in different places.
Adapt your game’s specifications to your audience’s average set-up (for PC).
Don’t bundle up all your 4K assets as your default install.
Minimize the amount of processing power going into off-screen objects.
Avoid having objects updating on every frame that is, reduce calls on every frame whenever possible.
Determining the trade-offs between live calculations and value lookups can help to reduce processing time.
You can optimize the loading of game engine tools to load only what is necessary for the user’s needs, for example only artistic tools for an artist.
Making an Environmental Impact With Games
One of the most influential ways the games industry can positively affect the environment is by inspiring billions of people around the world to take action.
Games are now the single biggest entertainment medium on the planet. With over 2.5 billion people now regularly playing, the opportunity for games businesses to inspire huge audiences to consider the environment has never been greater.
Ustwo Games’ latest game Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is an exploration game about the importance of standing up for the environment, wildlife, local communities, and how small actions can make a big difference.
Whilst the game itself helps inspire players to think about the environment, to support Alba’s environmentally conscious message, ustwo games have committed to planting one tree for each copy of the game sold or downloaded, with the goal of planting one million trees. A goal they have achieved!
Ustwo Games has observed that players are responding very positively to the social impact side of Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, with reviews and social media posts describing that players were left feeling inspired after playing.
Thank you for reading! Feel free to share this blog or the original guide forward and take a small step forward in fighting climate change.
